14 – 28 October 2025
As predicted, the toxic atmosphere unleashed by far-right mischief makers on social media, extremists on the streets and their appeasement via a Dutch auction between Labour and Tories as to which can ‘reduce numbers’ the fastest and the most, has led to unprecedented levels of racial harassment and attack. In this week’s calendar, among incidents of racist abuse in a mosque and the beating of a 60-year-old Afghan man who suffered a broken foot, we document the horrific attack on an Asian woman in Walsall.
But we also draw attention to the fact that the racist climate, like an oil slick, is spreading out to affect a whole host of organisations. For, as Sivanandan said some years ago, ‘People will inevitably not distinguish between a black settler, an “illegal immigrant” and a refugee. We all wear our passports on our faces.’
The Association of Fostering Providers is having to organise nationally to meet the racism that young people from BAME backgrounds and their foster parents are now facing.
When Prostate Cancer UK published research showing that Black men were at higher risk of developing prostate cancer than White men, it not only faced wide racist commentary, but then found supporters cancelling their direct debits.
The Royal College of Nursing reveals that racist incidents at work have increased 55 per cent in three years and called on the government ‘to end the use of anti-migrant rhetoric’ which emboldens racist behaviour. And pharmacists, one half of whom are of Black or Asian heritage, are now having to debate their safety in the workplace.
But anti-racism is not just about looking out for people’s safety, it is also about confounding the racists’ narratives and providing another lens through which to view the world. Mukhtar Dar, community activist and artist, takes the fight to MP Robert Jenrick by providing, in Handsworth: the colour Jenrick couldn’t see, a vivid account of the depth of Handsworth’s working-class culture. His riposte shows up the superficiality of Jenrick-style notions of integration, pointing to the fact that belonging is something organic, constantly being remade.
The October 2025 issue of Race & Class, leading with ‘Ireland and Palestine: the roots of resonance’ by Bill Rolston, is also published this week.