Dear IRR News subscriber,

As we document in our calendar of racism and resistance, the last few weeks have been momentous for campaigners; with dedicated work achieving significant gains. Not only has the government announced that Campsfield House immigration removal centre in Oxfordshire will close down, but an inquiry into the Gangs Matrix carried out by the Information Commissioner has resulted in an enforcement notice, for breaches of data protection, against the Metropolitan police. Campaigners on both issues have vowed to continue, to end all immigration detention, on the one hand, and to ensure that the racially discriminatory Gangs Matrix, is scrapped, on the other.

It was the pioneering work of law centres and other advice groups up and down the country that laid the basis for the Guardian’s investigations into the Windrush scandal and the gradual shaming of the Home Office into establishing a Windrush taskforce and compensation scheme. In the week in which the government has been forced to admit that more of the Windrush generation died as a result of deportation than it had originally acknowledged, with some of the deportees ‘wrongly classified as criminals’, the IRR publishes The embedding of state hostility: a background paper on the Windrush scandal by IRR vice-chair, Frances Webber. This timely paper takes apart the government’s distinction between ‘good immigrants’ and ‘bad immigrants’, showing how the injustice meted out to the Windrush generation is not an anomaly but the logical result of an immigration system that, over decades, has weaponised the idea of the ‘illegal immigrant’.

Finally, in the run-up to Christmas, the IRR is reducing the prices on A. Sivanandan’s Catching History on the Wing: race, culture and globalisation (£10.99) as well as our DVDs including Struggles of Black Communities (£11) and Catching History on the Wing: a conversation with A. Sivanandan (£7).

 

IRR News Team