This week the Home Office announced a new pilot scheme, lorries with ads, to encourage people in the UK illegally to ‘go home or face arrest’. The one-week £10,000 advertising campaign will involve vans driving around six London boroughs (Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Hounslow and Redbridge) carrying ads asking ‘In the UK illegally?’,
Issue: Books, pamphlets & multimedia
Nothing about us without us
Below we reproduce a call from the Edge Fund for people to join its Advisory Group to help make it truly representative. The Edge Fund was initiated by a group of philanthropists and activists in early 2012 to explore how funds could be distributed so as to devolve the power of donors and create real
G4S confronted
Last week, campaigners from numerous organisations brought their grievances about the human rights abuses of G4S directly to their annual general meeting. A lively protest took place outside Salter’s Hall in the city. As shareholders arrived, they were met with a mock barricade and prison cell and over seventy activists shouting anti-G4S slogans. Inside the
Fighting Europe’s racisms
A collection of essays on varieties of European racism contains valuable insights and useful lessons. A minister cuts a cake. The cake is in the shape of a black woman, and the cut exposes her pink genitals, as a performance artist screams. The event, an ill-conceived critique of female genital mutilation, backfires, as the white,
Cuts, crime and racialisation
In the April 2013 issue of Race & Class leading UK thinkers, in a special section on Cuts, crime and racialisation, examine how neoliberalism, at a time of austerity, changes the very nature of racism and criminal justice. The young unemployed, often excluded from every institution and avenue, are unwanted. The dragnet of Joint Enterprise,
The new wasteland
It is poverty not migration that is changing the nature of Britain’s towns and cities. If you want to feel and smell austerity, go to Hatfield – in leafy Hertfordshire, with the rolling hills that EM Forster loved. It provides a microcosm of the changing social geography of Britain today.[1] Hatfield was, until the 1990s,
‘Integration, integration, integration’
Does Eric Pickles’ integration speech last week foretell an emphasis on a new patriotism? Communities secretary Eric Pickles gave his first speech on integration last week, at an event hosted by the think-tanks British Future and Policy Exchange. Arguing that language was the cornerstone of Conservative integration strategy, he vowed to tackle the ‘statist’ policies which,
Capita wrongly telling people to leave the UK
Outsourcing of enforcement role causes confusion and distress as many are wrongly targeted. In the second and third weeks of December 2012, as businesses wound down for Christmas and MPs went home, thousands of migrants, including students, workers and investors, received text messages or emails telling them they had no lawful leave to be in
Miliband’s progress?
A. Sivanandan, known for his trenchant critiques of government ‘race’ policies, has broadly welcomed what Ed Miliband had to say last week. IRR News asks him why. What’s new about the Miliband speech? It seems to carry many of the same old themes – need to curtail immigration, need to integrate and so on. It
‘Super-selectivity’ and its effects
The policy of commercialisation of migration leads inexorably to neglect and ill-treatment of the most vulnerable. At a recent conference organised by the Detention Advice Service (DAS), Rob Whiteman, the UK Border Agency’s (UKBA) chief executive, was unapologetic. ‘We implement the government’s policy of super-selectivity’, he said. ‘That means we want only the brightest and