News

The price of PR?

Recent Freedom of Information requests have revealed that the Home Office has paid over quarter of a million pounds to the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph in 2014, for sponsored articles, advertorials and digital advertising.  Last year, a number of advertorials were published in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph which were sponsored by

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Review

Fighting for the soul of the voluntary sector

Everyone should read a recent report by the National Coalition of Independent Action (NCIA) on the ways in which neoliberal policies are destroying the purpose and politics of voluntary groups. From time to time IRR News has commented on the ways in which privatisation, subcontracting and marketisation are infiltrating voluntary groups in the race and

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News

Archaic Operation Shield?

Below we reproduce a letter to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, by the Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association Campaign (JENGbA) on his new Operation Shield proposals which have been likened to the doctrine of joint enterprise. Dear Mr Johnson, Joint Enterprise: Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA) is a grassroots campaign currently supporting over 500 prisoners

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News

Met introduces collective punishment measures

Community activists respond to Boris Johnson’s Operation Shield proposals – a ‘tough new gang intervention pilot’. The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) has announced that Operation Shield, a new pilot to tackle ‘gang’ crime, ‘will see members of some of the most active gangs in London collectively punished for the criminal actions of individual

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Comment

The Great British Values Disaster – education, security and vitriolic hate

Educationalists Bill Bolloten and Robin Richardson discuss the impacts of the ‘fundamental British values’ (FBV) agenda.  The time is late January 2015. The place is a university campus somewhere in England. ‘Kill Islam,’ says a piece of graffiti scrawled in big red letters on one of the university’s buildings, ‘before it kills you’. ‘How do I feel?’

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News

Calendar of racism and resistance (16 – 29 January 2015)

A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 15 January: The Independent recounts the story behind the death of Pawel Koseda, a homeless Polish migrant, who was found dead impaled on the railings of a church in Kensington in October 2014. (Independent, 15

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News

Recent news on deaths in custody

An overview of news on recent deaths in custody, upcoming inquests and a failed prosecution. Adrian McDonald: first black taser victim On 22 December 2014, 34-year-old Adrian McDonald died after being tasered by police officers in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. According to the IPCC, which investigates deaths in police custody: ‘Police attended an incident at a flat

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Comment

Farewell Magna Carta: the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

The Bill currently going through Parliament, with virtually no opposition, impinges on basic freedoms and seems calculated to entrench the treatment of British Muslims as non-citizens. The Bill is being rushed through parliament with no pre-legislative scrutiny or public consultation on most of its provisions – a speed justified by the increased terror threat posed

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Comment

Anti-racist witchcraft

The question of loyalty to British traditions was already under attack thirty years ago in relation to the work of the Institute of Race Relations. As Britain reels from the fallout from the the Paris killings, the question of British values – who belongs to the nation and how that should be expressed – have been placed centre-stage.[1] Those

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News

Mike Marqusee 1953-2015

The movement has lost a unique and inspiring campaigner for justice. We have, over the years, had to note the passing of many fighters and of many writers; but it is rare to find a writer who fights or a fighter who writes, rarer still to find someone taking on popular culture and politicising it,

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