News

Calendar of racism and resistance (24 April – 7 May 2015)

A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Policing and criminal justice 27 April: A Labour government would look again at the law of Joint Enterprise, Ed Miliband writes in a letter to a constituent. (The Justice Gap, 27 April 2015) 2 May: More than 3,000 police officers are

Read More…


Comment

The ongoing fiasco of privatised court interpreting services

Three years after Capita took on a Ministry of Justice contract to provide interpreting services in courts and tribunals, recent cases and an independent review have demonstrated that it is still failing, with serious consequences. Court translation On average, 700 requests are made to the courts in England and Wales every day for the use

Read More…


Comment

Why we should listen when the UN condemns the UK’s ‘extremist media’

Below we reproduce an article by author Matt Carr from his blog, Infernal Machine, on the current situation in the Mediterranean. British tabloid editors have never struck me as a particularly reflective and thoughtful breed of humanity, so I doubt they will be plunged into a mood of remorseful self-analysis by the very strongly-worded suggestion from the

Read More…


News

Calendar of racism and resistance (10 – 23 April 2015)

A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe. Violence and harassment 12 April: Four severed pigs’ heads are found on the doorstep of a community centre in Birmingham which is reportedly being used as a mosque. The incident comes a day after the windows of the building

Read More…


IRR News 10 – 23 April 2015

Dear IRR News subscriber, In the week that the European Union woke up to its complicity in the horrific drowning of thousands of desperate would-be refugees in the Mediterranean, it was very fitting that the IRR launched in a public debate on ‘Why do we count deaths’ its two recent reports on lives which seemingly

Read More…


News

Living to tell the tale

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

Read More…


News

33-year-old Pakistani man dies at Yarl’s Wood

On Monday 20 April, a man died at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre (IRC) in Bedford, the third person to die there since it opened in November 2001.[1] The Guardian reported that the man died from a heart attack while being held in the family unit at Yarl’s Wood. Named as Pinakin Patel, the 33-year-old

Read More…


Review

Licence to Kill

A recent community campaigning book from France on deaths in police custody shows just how alarmingly similar the French experience is to that in Britain. On 21 August 2014, Abdelhak Goradia (51), an Algerian undocumented migrant, died in a police van on his way to Roissy airport, near Paris, to be deported. A police spokesperson

Read More…


Comment

‘The time is here to be seized’

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

Read More…


News

Immigration Act 2014 and the slow dismantling of the NHS

A group of activists are creatively protesting against the effects of the Immigration Act 2014 on migrants’ access to NHS services. On 6 April 2015, new immigration health surcharges came into force under the Immigration Act 2014. These surcharges affect non-European Economic Area (EEA) nationals who come to the UK to work, study, or visit their

Read More…