The latest broadcast of Race & Class radio is now available to download. In the latest Race & Class radio show, focusing on the July-September 2014 issue, Harmit Athwal and Jon Burnett discuss the IRR’s recent report Investigated or ignored? on race-related deaths since the Macpherson Report. Their findings show that racial motivation is often still ignored, downplayed or not acknowledged by
News Service
The rehabilitation of a ‘race martyr’
A resurgent media fixation with the 1980s Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford has created a space for New Right ideas about cultural deficit within BME communities to resurface. ‘Whatever you thought of him, he was certainly ahead of his time.’ That, in sum, is what it took Aasmah Mir twenty-eight minutes to say in her recent
Charities criticise Daily Express hostility toward asylum seekers
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
IRR News 5-18 September 2014
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
Protecting European democracy or reviving the Cold War?
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
Calendar of Racism and Resistance (5 – 18 September 2014)
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
Valerie Allport 1945-2014
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
IRR News 29 August – 4 September 2014
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
When class becomes a commodity
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
Calendar of racism & resistance (27 August – 4 September 2014)
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