On 18 April, a celebration event of the work of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and its Director Emeritus, Sivanandan, turned into a serious discussion on how to unite and strengthen struggles at a time of globalisation and austerity. Divided into three sessions – past, present, future – the packed afternoon covered a conspectus
My conversation with Colin was recorded in 2011. But I have been given the chance to update some of those ideas for this event on 18 April 2015. Neoliberalism is not working. All that stuff, about wealth trickling down, no society only individuals, the market as the regulator of everything, is shown to be false
The April 2015 issue of Race & Class argues that Northern Ireland’s BAME communities have been living the peace process in reverse. In 1971 British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling suggested that the situation in Northern Ireland amounted to ‘an acceptable level of violence’. During ‘the Troubles’, this became the de facto security policy of successive British governments
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Extreme-Right politics 29 March: In the second round of French local elections, the Front National wins 22 per cent of the vote, securing 62 council seats. (In 2011, it won just one.) However it failed to take control
The social landscape in which we practise our freedoms is highly volatile. Can we afford to be reckless? After the massacres in 2011 by the racist terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, ‘we’ were all, briefly, Norwegian. It was a gesture of sympathy for the blameless casualties and solidarity for those suffering their loss. As with many
Campaigners have welcomed signs of movement around immigration detention – but celebration may be premature. In March 2015, the All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) on Refugees and Migration produced a strong report whose main recommendation, that immigration detention be severely curtailed and strictly time-limited, echoed the demands made for decades by detainee groups, campaigners and international
A new film of A. Sivanandan, in conversation with Colin Prescod, entitled Catching History on the Wing will have its premiere at an event on 18 April and copies are now available for sale. A. Sivanandan is best known as a key thinker, writer and activist on racism and imperialism, the founder editor of Race
The IRR publishes a disturbing new report, Unwanted, unnoticed: an audit of 160 asylum and immigration-related deaths in Europe, revealing the extent of Europe’s departure from its vaunted humanitarian ideals. The deaths over the last five years, in the detention and reception centres, the streets and the squats of Europe, are a product of the rightlessness
On Monday 23 March 2015, the Institute of Race Relations published Dying for Justice which gives the background on 509 people (an average of twenty-two per year) from BAME, refugee and migrant communities who have died between 1991-2014 in suspicious circumstances in which the police, prison authorities or immigration detention officers have been implicated. It concludes
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 3 March: Serco suspends two staff members from Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre after the showing of a Channel 4 film, made undercover, on the treatment of detainees which revealed what the shadow home secretary called
