It took 50 or so years of struggle against racism in Britain to get the fact of institutional racism accepted. In that sense the Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence was a milestone – for it vindicated the repeated claims of racism that black people had made against the police and the criminal
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Hope or hijack? Racism and the Human Rights Act
The government parades it as an emblem of its own enlightenment. The Right sees it as yet another stick for criminals, asylum-seeking scroungers and their politically-correct allies to beat the liberal establishment with. How profoundly will the Human Rights Act change things in Britain, and more particularly, will it help the fight against racism? The
When they came in the morning
An asylum seeker from Tanzania (who has asked to remain anonymous) delivered this speech in Manchester in October 2000, as part of the Civil Rights Caravan tour. On Wednesday 2 February 2000, I was arrested in my house in Salford, Manchester, and detained. I was deemed to have contravened the laws of the land and
The dispersal of xenophobia – a new report from the IRR
According to research by the Institute of Race Relations’ European Race Audit the policy of dispersing asylum seekers, now being introduced into the UK and Ireland, but already practised in other European countries for some years, effectively means the dispersal of xenophobia. The outcry by residents of Over Stowey, Somerset, against a proposed asylum hostel
Refugees from globalism
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
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