24 June -9 July 2025

For the IRR team of staff and volunteers who put together our regular Calendar of Racism and Resistance, summer 2025 has proved as harrowing as summer 2024. In June, in orchestrated racist attacks in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, the PSNI say a ‘pogrom’ was only narrowly averted. And, in the latest horror story from a village in County Tyrone, Loyalists preparing for the annual commemoration of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, when bonfires are lit, placed an effigy of a migrant vessel and about a dozen life-size mannequins with lifejackets on top of pallets, with placards stating ‘Stop the boats’ and ‘Veterans Before Refugees’. Meanwhile, pressure from the Labour government has resulted in the French border police using tear gas and pepper spray against vulnerable people on the move, including families with young children, even resorting to slashing small boats in shallow waters, which is currently illegal, to prevent departures.

Whatever the source of violence, we urgently need to stem it, and at root. Foremost in our minds must be the traumatising and potentially lethal impact on children. In Northern Ireland, children who were victims of racist violence now sit in classrooms alongside children who may have participated in the violence, even attempting to burn down their classmates’ homes. The French charity Project Play, which provides play services and other support to children on the move around Calais and Dunkirk, has warned politicians that the aggressive tactics they advocate have left the children they work with traumatised by police using knives, rubber bullets and tear gas.

It’s clear that trades unions, particularly those representing teachers, have an important role to play in addressing the structural roots of far-right violence, pushing back against the racism which blames migrants for a lack of opportunities. The National Education Union (NEU) is one of many unions concerned about the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on children from poor backgrounds. It is pushing back with advocacy strategies, one of them being the ‘Free School Meals for All’ campaign. The IRR’s deputy director, Riz Hussain, spoke on a panel on ‘universalism as an antidote to populism’ at the NEU’s recent ‘No Child Left Behind’ conference. As Riz explains this week on IRR News, we cannot fight for universal principles in welfare in an abstract, colour-blind way. We cannot ignore the fact that it is the politics of scarcity, resentment and division that has allowed the dismantling of universal principles in welfare and health care in the first place.