IRR News 17 February – 2 March 2023 Since our last newsletter in which we reported on the eruption of violence in Knowsley, Merseyside, we have seen the spreading of a relentless campaign targeting hotels accommodating asylum seekers across England, with protests in Rotherham, Skegness, Newquay, Long Eaton and Dunstable in the past weeks. All
Sophia Siddiqui investigates what is underpinning the violent targeting of accommodation housing asylum seekers in Ireland and across the UK and how feminists, anti-racists, migrant solidarity and trade union groups are fighting back to resist the weaponising of gender-based violence. The eruption of violence in Knowsley, Merseyside – where supporters of the far Right
As rallies take place across Europe to mark the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and calls for a peace process to end the conflict grow, Liz Fekete, a leading expert on European racism, pinpoints the need to examine how new geopolitics, changing imperialisms and the entrenching of a racism built on
Policing workers As more and more people – nurses, transport workers and other key public sector workers whose jobs can’t be automated (yet) – rediscover the power of collective responses to plummeting real wages, among them many BME workers, hit hardest by the accelerating cost of living crisis, the government is again cracking down. A
Policing protest In the government’s list of internal enemies or risks to public order and tranquillity, environmental and climate activists have for some time been up there with Black communities, Muslims, anti-racists and anti-fascists. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act was bulldozed through to Royal Assent in April despite the Lords’ tenacity in repeatedly
Policing migration Unlike the policing of racialised minorities, the war on migrants and asylum seekers has been at the centre of government rhetoric as well as policy, used as an emblem of post-Brexit sovereignty and a reminder of Britain’s imperial heritage. When net migration statistics rose in the autumn, the government showed it was ‘taking
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Find these stories and all others since 2014 on our searchable database, the Register of Racism and Resistance. ASYLUM | MIGRATION | BORDERS | CITIZENSHIP Asylum and migrant rights 30 January: Denmark’s Refugee Appeal Board, following the Swedish
IRR News 2 – 16 February 2023 Just two days after William Shawcross, reviewer of the government’s Prevent Programme, criticised its ‘expansive approach’ towards the ‘extreme right’, it was supporters of the far Right, some armed with hammers, that orchestrated a riot, hurling lit fireworks at the Suites Hotel, Knowsley, Merseyside, which housed asylum seekers
As abolitionist ideas spread through communities and movements at the sharp end of policing, the police state is already here in neighbourhoods housing Black and Muslim communities in particular – working-class or inner-city areas: massive and increasingly violent policing on the streets, with Violence Suppression Units working ‘microbeats’ where ‘gangs, drugs and violence have
As the economy unravels, we are seeing an increasingly aggressive government squaring up to an expanding list of enemies, heedless of legal and moral restraints and of the impact on country and people, argues Frances Webber. ‘Move fast and break things’ used to be the mantra of tech whizz-kid entrepreneurs. It seems to have
