A report on the UK Border Agency’s management of foreign national offenders bears little relation to the press’ coverage. ‘The 5,000 crooks we can’t deport’: was the Sun headline which was repeated, with more or less polite variations, across Britain’s press on 27 October, from the Express to the Guardian, the message all the papers
News Service
Total disaster
Bernard Hogan-Howe’s recent talk on ‘total policing’ at the LSE didn’t go down too well. ‘Total policing’ is how the Metropolitan Police chief, Bernard Hogan-Howe, describes the criminal justice strategy he is importing into London. And part of this strategy, he says, is regularly communicating with the public. At a talk at the London School
Two deaths in three weeks in Spain’s notorious detention centres
Allegations of institutional neglect surround the deaths of two migrants within weeks of a report calling for the centres’ closure. In the early hours of 5 January, a 21-year-old man from Guinea-Conraky, died in Barcelona’s immigration detention centre after complaining of chest pains or (according to another report) breathing problems. The age of the deceased,
Unsafe return
A new report on returns to the DRC challenges the government’s assertion that refused asylum seekers are not at risk. In Unsafe return: refoulement of Congolese asylum seekers, Catherine Ramos examines the experiences of seventeen Congolese refused asylum seekers returned to Democratic Republic of the Congo and finds that most of them were subjected to
Twit or tweet
The furore about Diane Abbott’s tweet reveals a wilful inability to distinguish between state racism and personal prejudice. It is quite clear to anyone with an ounce of politics, that MP Diane Abbotts’s ‘whites divide and rule’ tweet would not have made newspaper headlines had it not been for the critical verdict in the Lawrence
Germany’s Stephen Lawrence
How can lessons from the Lawrence case be applied to that of Oury Jalloh, who was burned to death in a German police cell seven years ago? Last Tuesday, here in the UK, two men were found guilty of the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence. This verdict, eighteen years in the making, gave the nation
‘Veto nationalism’: populism, nationalism and the Tories
An examination of the Euroscepticism, nationalism and patriotism being established by politicians and the media in the UK. ‘It takes a rare party leader to reach beyond the arid debates of the political elite and touch the passions of the people. David Cameron has proved himself that kind of leader with his use of Britain’s
96 murders since Stephen Lawrence’s
The convictions of Gary Dobson and David Norris will be bitter-sweet vindication for the family of Stephen Lawrence who have fought an 18-year campaign for justice. NO family has campaigned as this one – taking their own evidence to the police, bringing a private prosecution against the alleged killers, demanding and getting a public inquiry which
96 murders since Stephen Lawrence’s
The convictions of Gary Dobson and David Norris will be bitter-sweet vindication for the family of Stephen Lawrence who have fought an 18-year campaign for justice. No family has campaigned as this one – taking their own evidence to the police, bringing a private prosecution against the alleged killers, demanding and getting a public inquiry
Professor John Rex 1925-2011
A tribute from A. Sivanandan, director Institute of Race Relations. John Rex was one of the first sociologists in Britain to bring class to the study of ‘race’ – as his pioneering study (with Robert Moore) of housing in Sparkbrook (Race, community and conflict, IRR, 1969) showed so starkly. And that insight he brought into