We reproduce here a response that the Daily Express refused to publish after it had carried a series of articles attacking asylum seekers in Britain. Dear Sir, The stream of aggressive stories about asylum seekers appearing in this paper in recent days is of serious concern to all of us who work with and support people fleeing persecution. Your
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week, a general election in Sweden saw big gains for the far-right Sweden Democrats, which now have forty-nine seats in parliament. Fascism is emerging as a European-wide problem. But what we certainly don’t need, argues Liz Fekete in a review of an American NGO’s report on a fact-finding mission to
A new report by Human Rights First on fascism in Hungary and Greece raises important questions. But its orientation towards US national interests smacks of Cold War thinking. When we think of the leaders of Europe’s far- and extreme-Right parties today, it is easy to ridicule them as fossils, nostalgic for days of Empire and
A resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key news stories in the UK and Europe over the past fortnight. Asylum seekers & refugees 5 September: Migrants and activists rally in Calais for human rights and an end to police violence, as Sauvons Calais announce they will rally on 7 September to ‘say no to
A tribute to an IRR supporter. The Institute of Race Relations has lost one of its best friends. Val Allport was not just a supporter, she was a friend – there at every turn. Funnily enough I don’t know that much about her, just that she was there – for some forty-five years. Her first
Dear IRR News subscriber, If anti-racism means anything, it means daily engagement in community life, hard-graft at a street level, to win people over from the politics of division and populist scapegoating. This week on IRR News we focus on several European initiatives that put ‘whiteness’ under the microscope. In two IRR Briefing Papers published
A new Open Society Foundations research project on Europe’s white working class provides a welcome corrective to those who champion the class as a victim of immigration while colluding in the abandonment of working-class areas. In his classic text examining production processes Labor and Monopoly Capital, published in 1974, Harry Braverman showed how ‘poverty and
A calendar of stories from the last week. Asylum seekers & refugees 27 August 2014: Medical Justice has published a report: Biased and Unjust: The Immigration Detention Complaints Process, you can download it here (pdf file, 6.4mb). 29 August: 44-year-old Wadih Chourey, who has Down’s syndrome, faces deportation to Lebanon after the Home Office refused
The Swedish model of countering far-right extremism is deeply flawed and should not be followed by other EU countries. The European Commission has recommended that EU member states set up special programmes for those at risk of radicalisation and the Swedish Ministry of Justice is already working to export its model of countering far-right extremism
In a timely report published today, the IRR cautions against the importation to the UK of Scandinavian-style Exit programmes for dealing with far-right extremists. It was one of the big news stories of October 2013 and something of a coup for ‘counter-radicalisation’, when Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll quit the EDL – and think-tank Quilliam
