Do anti-racists need new perspectives in the present fight for asylum rights? Writer and activist A. Sivanandan presents an overview and analysis. The distinction between political refugees and economic migrants is a bogus one – susceptible to different interpretations by different interests at different times. The West is quite happy to take in economic migrants
News Service
Behind closed doors: racism in prisons and detention centres
While the existence of institutional racism may have been accepted theoretically by the authorities in the criminal justice system, those individuals who choose to stand up to daily racism, in either prisons, detention centres or asylum hostels do so at the risk of even more serious maltreatment. That was the picture which emerged at a
Asylum, popular racism and the local elections
Anti-racism has been largely an urban tradition, associated with towns and cities with settled black communities. But as William Hague, backed by the Tory press, targets seasides and shires, the need to address racism there is more urgent than ever. It was on 15 March that the editor of the Sun gave ‘timid’ William a
Lessons in resistance
Whereas during the 1970s and 1980s the British black and anti-racist movements provided perspectives which were emulated in the rest of Europe, today the roles are reversed. Now that the most pressing anti-racist issues involve asylum refusal, deportation, incarceration, dispersal and social exclusion, we in the UK have everything to learn from Europe. Not only
Europe’s asylum-prison complex
It’s the beginning of March and 100 people have gathered in Cambridge’s central marketplace to oppose the opening of Britain’s latest detention centre at a former military barracks in Oakington, north-west of Cambridge. On 20 March, activists from Cambridgeshire Against Refugee Detention gather again, this time outside the detention centre itself as the first disoriented
Stop this bogus tabloid nationalism
Over the last two years, tabloid attacks on asylum-seekers have grown in frequency and ferocity, spreading from the open hatred of local newspapers in Dover to national press ‘exposés’ of spurious refugee crime waves. In March this year, with the government’s asylum-seeker dispersal plans set to take effect and with this year’s round of council
Race investigations: the families’ perspective
On the face of it, it looks as though a lot has changed. More people appear to be reporting racial attacks, cases like that of Howard and Jason McGowan get on to the front pages of the national press, the new Racial and Violent Crimes Task Force has had a major success in the conviction
Macpherson and after
‘We taught Macpherson and Macpherson taught the world’ was how a black activist, who had given evidence to the Commission Inquiry, greeted its findings. For her, it was not just the Report’s conclusions that mattered – ordinary black people, who had borne the brunt of institutional racism in the police force and other public bodies,
Dispersal and the new racism
When the UK government proposed to institutionalise forced dispersal and no-choice accommodation for asylum-seekers, CARF predicted that asylum-seekers would be dumped in slum areas and would become sitting targets for racist campaigns and attacks. Up and down the country, that’s what’s happening. Reports indicate that as predicted asylum-seekers are being dumped in the worst run-down
The politics of stop and search
Much of the recent debate in the press over stop-and-search is more to do with a campaign to re-establish its political legitimacy as a policing tactic than reforming its use. And, if the prime minister’s public endorsement of greater use of stop-and-search is anything to go by, it is a campaign in which the least