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
Dear IRR News subscriber, This week, the IRR News Service considers policies and practices at the hard-end of the criminal justice and immigration systems, from the policing of ‘gangs’ to the harsh conditions within immigration removal centres and the death of refugees during deportation attempts. It’s now four years since Mark Duggan was shot dead
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
An Iraqi man, who collapsed and died in Sweden following a deportation attempt, is the seventeenth deportee to die in Europe since 1991. Questions are mounting about the death of a 45-year-old man, who had worked for the US military in Iraq and lived in Sweden for eight years. The man, who is named in
Lee Bridges, Professor Emeritus (School of Law, University of Warwick), examines the ethnic composition of the Metropolitan police’s gangs database. In October 2014, the Met police disclosed information[1] on the ethnic composition of its ‘Gangs Matrix’ or database, showing that no fewer than 78.2 per cent of 3,422 persons then included were classified as black
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
Last week the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report into the death of Mark Duggan exonerated the officers involved – and was immediately condemned by the family as a ‘whitewash’. IRR News analyses previously unreleased internal documents that shed new light on the IPCC’s investigation in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Documents released under
Dear IRR News subscriber, In a week where tens of thousands marched worldwide to mark UN anti-racism day, it is fitting that two reports published by the Institute of Race Relations unearth the most brutal side of state racism in the UK and in Europe – that which results in death. In 1991, the IRR’s
