Eliane Edmond-Pettitt describes how the situation in Calais has changed for volunteers on the ground since the Jungle came down in 2016. In October 2016 bulldozers entered the Calais ‘Jungle’, a shanty town built on an asbestos field on the edge of Calais near the port. The event gained a lot of media attention and
Dear IRR News subscriber, Against the backcloth of austerity, and amidst warnings that universal credit and deep cuts to the welfare budget will massively increase poverty and reliance on food banks, it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that the use of force by police is rising. In the Metropolitan Police, such force – handcuffing, stun
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 25 September: A court in Boulogne finds 21-year-old Loan Torondel, a worker for L’Auberge des Migrants, guilty of criminal libel for an ironic tweet about police harassment of migrants, a conviction described by Human Rights
The October 2018 issue of Race & Class brings together pieces on racialising domestic violence, #Grime4Corybyn, the rebranding of C.L.R. James for a neoliberal era and memorial tributes to A. Sivanandan. Jessica Perera, who is currently assisting research at the Institute of Race Relations, explores how Grime artists in the 2017 UK general election came
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week, Anya Edmond-Pettitt digs deep into the IRR’s Black History Collection, a unique archive of posters, newspaper cuttings, pamphlets and campaign materials from black community and grassroots groups from 1950s to 1980s. Read her article, ‘Empire Windrush, Notting hill and the importance of archives’ here. Questioning how the west London community
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 6 September: The Spanish Congress of Deputies reinstalls access to healthcare for undocumented migrants, regardless of status. (ECRE, 14 September 2018) 12 September: Despite the efforts of British Conservative MEPs, the European parliament votes to
How labels serve to justify and normalise the worst of the EU’s migration practices. The expansive catalogue of terminologies – refugees, displaced, migrants, asylum seekers, expelled, stateless, repatriated, returned, illegal, unauthorised, undocumented, irregular – has not, according to Tazreena Sajjad at the Global Governance, Politics and Security Program at the American University in Washington, DC,
The coordinator of the IRR’s Black History Collection digs deep into the archive and shows how public opinion is constructed For reasons that are deeply contradictory, the Caribbean community in Britain has been at the forefront in media and parliamentary debate this summer. Its contribution to British society was rightly highlighted and praised in the
Dear IRR News subscriber, ‘Racism impacts on different communities at different times in different ways. But anti-racism, the fight against injustice, cannot be differential, exclusive or sectional’, said IRR’s vice-chair and human rights lawyer Frances Webber, speaking at a meeting on ‘Confronting racism: a return to collective principles’ this week. We republish her speech which
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Asylum and migration 21, 28 August: Three volunteers with the Emergency Response Center International (ECRI), including German-based Syrian refugee Sarah Mardini, are arrested on Lesbos and in Athens on charges of facilitating illegal entry for profit, having advance
