A collection of summaries of and links to Race & Class articles (1975-2025) on racism, class, criminal justice, related urban and ‘race’ policies, and key moments of resistance to state/institutional racism.
In addition to the archive, an accompanying Race & Class UK Criminal Justice timeline provides information by year (1958-2025) on key pieces of legislation, local and national policies, narratives and moments of resistance that have been covered in the journal.
All of the Race & Class articles hyperlinked in this resource are available to access on the Sage website. Whilst most of the articles are behind a paywall, and need to be accessed via an academic institution, many of the recent articles are published open access and available to read/download for free.
Volume 16, no 4, 1975
‘The Ministry of Internal Security’: British Urban Social Policy, 1968-74
Lee Bridges
A major review of urban policy undertaken by the Conservative Government in 1973 gave the Home Office, the department whose primary function is the maintenance of ‘law and order’, more control of urban social policy and a ‘buffering function’. According to Bridges, a lecturer in judicial administration, what these developments imply is an attempt by policy makers to treat urban social policy as an ‘integral part of a coordinated and centralized programme of internal control and repression’.
Bridges analyses the powers and functions of a beefed-up Home Office. He starts with the Urban Aid Programme introduced in 1968 in response to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in Birmingham and charts the process whereby the Home Office gradually gained control over social planning and management, through the Urban Deprivation Unit and Comprehensive Community Programmes. In the process, Bridges makes reference to the White Paper on Police/Immigrant Relations in England and Wales (1973); a seminal speech made in November 1973 by the home secretary Robert Carr (for the first time making clear the inter-connections between the various branches of the Home Office); and the emergence of the ‘culture of poverty’ school of thought, exemplified by a study initiated by Sir Keith Joseph (Department of Health and Social Security) into ‘transmitted deprivation; which led to his infamous 1974 speech on the threat to British civilization posed by high birth rates amongst the working classes.
Volume 17, No 1, 1975
UK Commentary
The Caprino Case
The Race & Class team examine the first case using the power of deportation under the 1971 Immigration Act, allowing for deportation on the grounds of presence not conducive to the public good. It was brought against Franco Caprino, an Italian worker active organising workers in the catering industry. JCWI took up his case and he was eventually released. The article concludes this ‘is only the beginning. The fight is now to remove the Immigration Act 1971 from the statute books’.
Volume 17, no 4, 1976
Race, class and the state: the black experience in Britain
A. Sivanandan
Sivanandan, the editor of Race & Class and director of the Institute of Race Relations, starts with a discussion of the government’s White Paper 1975, in the context of successive immigration acts, and examines the creation of a race relations industry and a ‘class of collaborators’ within a model of domestic neocolonialism. He pinpoints as important, in that it reveals the ‘racist anxieties of the state’, the White Paper on Racial Discrimination 1975. The Race Relations Act (1965), the first, albeit half-hearted, attempt to outlaw discrimination, is also analysed with particular focus on its incitement to racial hatred’ clause which led to the prosecution of Black activists.
Volume 18, no 1, 1976
UK Commentary
Written by the IRR team, it starts with a quote from the journalist Paul Foot. ‘Race hate and race violence does not rise and fall according to the number of immigrants coming to Britain. It rises and falls to the extent to which people’s prejudices are inflamed and made respectable by the press’. Refers to the media whipping up of prejudices against Asians, with reference to stories that a homeless Asian family expelled from Malawi were being housed by the taxpayer in a 4-star hotel at the British taxpayers’ expense. Looks at impact of Enoch Powell on the press and racist violence and criticises the CPS for a failure to prosecute the violence of the National Front (NF) citing a lack of evidence. An editorial in the same issue refers to the rise of the NF.
Volume 18, no 4, 1977
UK Commentary – the Race Relations Act 1976
Excerpts from the forthcoming book ‘Race Relations: the New Law’ by Ian Macdonald.
While the analysis by a lawyer documents the various anti-discrimination provisions of the law, it also argues that the Race Relations Act 1976 (which entirely replaces the Race Relations Act of 1965 and 1968) was implemented in order to prevent the kind of civil disorders seen in the USA, namely the Watts, Newark and Detroit rebellions. Just as the 1968 Act was undoubtedly seen as a way of heading off the growing Black Power movement in Britain, similar considerations influenced the new laws of 1976, particularly the need to contain industrial action of Asian workers and to deal with the ‘problem’ of second-generation black youth.
Volume 20, no 4, 1979
Notes and Documents
Police Against Black People
The introduction to the IRR’s evidence to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (subsequently published as Police Against Black People) is republished in the notes and documents section of Race & Class. The evidence focuses on the Asian and West Indian experience of policing from the 1960s onwards.
Volume 23, nos 2/3 1981-1982
From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain
A.Sivanandan
In the context of examining resistances at different times since the second world war and up to 1982 by Black (as in Afro-Caribbean and Asian) communities against popular and state racism, Sivanandan pinpoints key incidents of necessary self-defence against street racists and fascists and accounts of resistance to harassment by the police and state agencies. These include: fight backs by communities in 1958 in Nottingham and Notting Hill to fascist attacks; organising after the murder of Kelso Cochrane (1959); the report by the West Indian Standing Conference of ‘Nigger-hunting in England’ (1965); prosecution of Black militants including members of the Racial Action Adjustment Society (RAAS) under the incitement to hatred provisions of the Race Relations Act ; a Black Power rally against ‘organised police brutality’ (1969); discussion of the Mangrove trial and other cases of resistance against police harassment and the operation of the Special Patrol Group (1970-1976); the formation of Asian youth movements following racist attacks such as the killing of Gurdip Singh Chaggar in Southall (1976) and the exoneration in court of right extremist Kingsley Read on a charge of incitement to racial hatred for saying ‘One down, one million to go’; the police swamping of Southall in 1979 to protect an NF election meeting and the SPG’s killing of Blair Peach; the formation of Blacks Against State Harassment; the Black People’s Day of Action march following the New Cross Fire (1981); the uprisings of 1981. Those involved were described by Sivanandan, ‘They are not the unemployed, but the never employed. They have not, like their parents, had jobs and lost them …Theirs is a different hunger …to retain the freedom, the life-style, the dignity which they have carved out from the stone of their lives.’
The police against the people
Tony Bunyan
Bunyan, a member of State Research, traces the development of police methods and philosophy and the increasing militarisation of policing through fire brigade policing – introduced by Met commissioner Sir Robert Mark, leading to the strengthening of the Special Patrol Group, which played a dual role as anti-crime and paramilitary unit, then leading to formation of Police Support Units for use in public order situations. Examines the relationship between paramilitary policing and community policing. Accompanied by a R&C editorial that states ‘The hatred of the police is a hatred both of the culture of racism they personify and the blunt force with which the culture is maintained’.
Keeping the lid on: British urban social policy, 1975-81.
Lee Bridges
Through the prism of the ‘riots’, and referencing Lord Heseltine’s investigation into the Toxteth riots, Bridges, a lecturer in judicial administration, argues that the ‘riots’ should be seen as a ‘repudiation of all that has gone on over the past fifteen years in the name of British urban social policy, where the trend has been towards central control over inner cities’. He reviews Home Office urban policy since the 1960s onwards, taking in the Labour government’s Urban Aid programme (1968), the govt White Paper Policy for the Inner Cities (1976), the role of the Department of the Environment, cuts under Conservative govts to local authority spending, the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980, creation of Urban Development Corporations, and concludes with a discussion as to how community policing will fit in the Conservatives social programmes directed at the black community, looking in particular at a model developed in the Lozells (Handsworth) area of Birmingham under the Inner City Partnership programme. Concludes that ‘community policing merges at the local level the coercive and consensual functions of government, enabling the police to wield a frightening mixture of repressive powers, on the one hand, and programmes of social intervention, on the other, as mutually reinforcing tools in their efforts to control and contain the political struggle of the black and working -class communities’.
The ’riots’
Notes and Documents
A complete documentation by the Race & Class team of the ‘riots’ based on press coverage. Several documents circulated by defence campaigns are republished, including: The Brixton Defence Campaigns says Boycott the Scarman Inquiry’; ‘Liverpool 8 Defence Committee, Why Oxford must go’; Hackney Legal Defence Committee, ‘Defend our Youth’; Bradford July 11th Action Committee defence statement, (extracts).
Starts with the ‘riots’ in April 1980, in the St Pauls area of Bristol, following a raid on the Black and White café. Brixton, April 1981, the police launch ‘Swamp 81’, a special operation to combat ‘muggings’ and ‘street crime, with disorder breaking out several days later. Lord Scarman appointed to carry out an investigation into the events and causes of the Brixton ‘riots’. In July, further ‘riots’ starting in Southall after a coachload of skinheads arrived for a concert at the Hambrough Tavern, and the community came out in force. Four nights of ‘rioting’ followed in Toxteth, Liverpool, and Scarman is asked to extend his inquiry to include Toxteth and Liverpool. Just after Margaret Thatcher gives a party-political broadcast saying that nothing can justify the violence, 1,000 black and white youth storm Moss side police station in Manchester and by the weekend of 10-12 July ‘riots’ were taking place in over thirty towns and cities. The home secretary announces two inquiries into the use of CS gas cartridges in Toxteth, and the other (an internal police inquiry) following a large raid on eleven premises in Brixton on 15 July. Disorder erupts again on 28 July, when the police tactic of driving vans at high speed at rioters leads to the death of David Moore, a disabled white youth, with the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee saying, ‘We regard this action as murder and hold Oxford [the Chief Constable of Merseyside] responsible’.
Race & Class, Volume 25, no 2, 1983
Special issue. British racism: the road to 1984
This piece, a revised version of a talk by the director of IRR in March 1983 to the Greater London Council consultation on challenging racism, distinguishes between ethnic policies and anti-racism, explains how racism does not stand still and urges the need when organising to turn cases into issues so as to form a basis of mutual support and joint action. The speech includes reference to the notorious John Fernandes case (a teacher at the Met’s police cadet training school at Hendon, Fernandes was sacked for exposing the extent of racism in cadets’ essays as well as teaching). Sivanandan critiques police community consultative committees post-Scarman and calls for the collation of one-off local campaigns such as around Bradford 12, Colin Roach, Blair Peach, Newham 8 to build unity and alliances, if not a mass movement.
Capital, ‘black youth’ and crime
Cecil Gutzmore
As part of an interrogation of the construction by the British state of the special social category of ‘black youth’, Gutzmore, a black political activist and researcher, analyses the period from the 1960s to the early 1980s and the urban uprisings of 1981. He first provides an overview of legislative changes, particularly those that limit the right to jury trial, citing the Criminal Law Act 1977 (which drastically cut the rights of defendants to peremptory challenge of jurors), and the Scottish Criminal Justice Act 1980. He cites Lord Denning’s libellous outbursts against black jurors who served in the trial that followed the Bristol uprising of 1981. Utilising the work of Stuart Hall et al, he goes on to examine the construction by the press and the courts of the crime of ‘mugging’, a term imported from the US. The Met police’s manipulation of crime statistics, and the use of a ‘race code’ in Met criminal records is also discussed. Bogus statistics, influenced by the tenure of Sir Robert Mark, were used to ‘persuade the public that “mugging” was increasing massively, that black youth were principally involved and that the victims were mainly elderly white women’, with Gutzmore concluding that statistical manipulation is the base upon which the criminalisation of the black community rests. The Met’s release of crime figures for areas known to contain large concentrations of black people were then sensationalised in the media, particularly after the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, with the relationship between press and police racism then influencing sentencing policy – the media’s championing of Judge Gwyn Morris, handing down excessive sentences on black youth, is mentioned. Home Office studies and the role played by academics, particularly Jock Young and John Lea, in legitimising the ‘mugging category’ are examined.
Of the urban uprisings of 1981, Gutzmore writes: ‘Nowhere can it be truly said to have been mindless or pointless violence… Everywhere it has been of a defensive nature, being prompted and produced by the aggression of the state as expressed largely through lawless policing practices.’
Policing the Urban Wasteland
Lee Bridges
Examines the fundamental changes to urban policy implemented after the ‘riots’, and Lord Scarman’s report, with a particular focus on the Police Bill (subsequently, Police & Criminal Evidence Act 1984) which establishes for the first time, on a national basis, powers to forcibly stop and search people and vehicles, greater powers of detention and interrogation, etc. Situates the greater powers accrued to the police within changes brought in in London by Sir Robert Mark, and subsequently by Sir Kenneth Newman, whose career, in Palestine and Northern Ireland, for instance, spans the ‘authoritarian tradition of British policing’. From the 1970s onwards, successful police chiefs, sought to ‘influence more directly the content of the law’. Cites in this respect, the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (1978) and bodies such as the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Police Federation. Takes apart the cultural stereotypes generated by the Scarman report, as well as its legitimisation of militarised policing, to argue that while it was Scarman who laid the ground for the police’s renewed political assertiveness, and the marrying up of community policing (surveillance) with fire brigade policing, it was Sir Kenneth Newman who implemented it via the Newman plan 1983, with the setting up of local authority consultative committees against the backcloth of a wider attack on the legitimacy of police monitoring groups and other attempts to secure police accountability.
Teachers in Uniform
Frances Webber
The relationship between police and schools intensified from the mid-1970s onwards, writes lawyer Frances Webber. A Home Office Conference on Juveniles in 1978 led to a joint circular by the Home Office, the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Health and Social Security emphasising the importance of inter-agency cooperation. A 1979 community policing experiment, the Lozells Project, in Birmingham, Handsworth, put the police in control of youth and community services, and was a foretaste of thing to come. After the 1981 uprisings, the Scarman report recommendations led to a rapid escalation of all forms of police involvement in schools. This led to a backlash from some (but not all) teachers, and in July 1982 Hackney NUT declared that it would continue its policy of non-cooperation with police, adopted in 1979 after the murder of teacher Blair Peach in Southall. Lambeth NUT followed suit. In 1983, youth and community workers in Moss Side, Manchester, launched a successful campaign to prevent police taking over play schemes for young people. The NUT and the National Association of Head Teachers were opposed to a non-cooperation approach.
Volume 27, no. 1, 1985
Victims, the ‘urban jungle’ and the new racism
Lee Bridges and Liz Fekete
Financial support by the Greater London Police Committee allows the authors, both researchers at IRR, to explore the racialisation of crime statistics and the upsurge in victim-oriented research following the 1981 urban rebellions. These developments happened in tandem with the Conservative government’s efforts to re-arm and re-train the police and extend their powers and influence over the community through, for example, introducing Neighbourhood Watch schemes, Victim Support and Racial Harassment Incident Panels. A fascination with the victims of crime is used to mobilise popular support for new programmes of state intervention and control. Examines the roots of the (pseudo) science of victimology, the work of criminologists Jock Young and John Lee (the new realism) and the sociology of deviance, with its focus on the ‘penal couple’ of victim and criminal’ and the impact of the first ever British Crime Survey (1982). Turns to the recommendations of the Scarman inquiry and the Home Office departmental investigation into racial violence which accused the Asian community of forming organisations in response to racist violence that stoked ‘up the temperature in order to justify their existence’. Racial incidents sheets were introduced by police which from now on were used to reclassify racist attacks as an aspect of inter-racial crime where different groups had different victimisation rates and any those engaged in self- defence are equated with the perpetrators of violence. This policing framework, which gradually incorporated sections of the left into corporate policing strategy, sits alongside intelligence gathering exercises, on ‘criminal and activist’ elements, as epitomised by the formation of a Central Intelligence Unit at Scotland Yard with a ‘district network of officers and informants to gather information on political protest and tension in the community’. The article ends with a scathing attack on Left local authorities for acquiescing to the media and government depiction of inner cities as ‘urban jungles’ and through embracing ‘the new realism’, jettisoning the cause of police accountability.
Volume 27, no 3, 1986
UK Commentary. Britain’s Gulags.
A. Sivanandan
Provides context to the urban uprisings in Handsworth, Tottenham and Brixton, and the shooting dead of Cherry Groce and the death of Cynthia Jarrett. Identifies the failures of the urban aid programme in Handsworth that failed to ‘trickle down’ to the community, the community policing scheme of 1979 and the Lozells Project. Scarman-style policies of patch up and make do embraced by Labour are criticised, as are his recommendations, particularly the formation of police consultative committees. Concludes that ‘What has happened in Handsworth and Brixton and Tottenham are no more riots than the uprisings of the unemployed in London a century ago – only now it is the never-employed black under-class, interned in the working-class gulags of Britain, who have taken up that tradition of protest’. This article is followed by a second commentary by Nancy Murray which examines the media’s reporting of the ‘riots’.
Vol 27, no 4, 1986
Labour and policing after the 1985 rebellions
Lee Bridges
Examines the variety of new policing and public order measures introduced after the 1985 rebellions in Handsworth, Brixton and Tottenham, including the introduction of a central store of plastic bullets and CS gas. (Met Commissioner Sir Kenneth Newman had put London on notice that he would not hesitate to use these weapons in future). Looks also at the rejection of a Scarman-style inquiry into the causes of the ‘riots’ in favour of internal reports by the police, which were countered by independent community inquiries such as which took place in Handsworth.
New powers granted under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE, 1984) are examined alongside the Public Order Bill [subsequently Public Order Act 1986) that gave police extensive new powers to control public assemblies and demonstrations, new statutory offences of riot and affray (replacing common-law offences), and new offences of ‘violent disorder’ and ‘threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour’.
Examines the Labour party’s acquiescence to ‘corporate policing’, which requires a selective deployment of public order measures combined with more sophisticated surveillance and intelligence-gathering on inner city communities, the introduction of various collaborative programmes of police-community cooperation, and a deliberate policy of news management by police. Sees the policing of the miners’ strike as key to the subsequent militarisation of policing in black communities, as the specialist military style units deployed outside London to police the strike, then returned triumphant to their urban bases.
Volume 28, no. 4, 1987
UK Commentary: Police (1): The cover up
Liz Fekete
The author, a researcher at IRR, documents the deaths following police contact of John Mikkelson (Hounslow, 1985), Anthony Lemard (west London, 1986), and Colin Roach (Stoke Newington police station, 1983), whose case is discussed in relation to that of Trevor Monerville, who suffered a brain tumour after being arrested on New Year’s Day 1987 and taken to Stoke Newington police station. The power of the police to ensure that their version of the truth becomes the dominant one in the media is discussed. In the case of black Hell’s Angel, John Mikkelson, who died after being hit on the head by a police truncheon, the Police Federation took out an injunction against Thames Television, in order to stop the broadcasting of a documentary that attempted to piece together the last minutes of his life. The DPP says the programme would be in ‘contempt’ of an internal police inquiry.
Police (2): the image makers
Liz Fekete
The author, a researcher at IRR, looks at police attempts, following the uprisings of 1981 and 1985, to regain control of Asian communities and marginalise their organised response to the far Right by isolating and marginalising self-defence and monitoring groups. One way the Metropolitan police attempted to do this was through the largest ethnic minority recruitment drive ever, which was linked with a much-publicised crusade to crack down on racist attacks, the first such campaign in the history of the Met. Newham in east London was a site for the recruitment drive, significant because of the success of campaigns such as the Newham 8 (September 1982), as well as the eviction of the McDonnell family, the first family ever evicted from council housing in England for harassing their black neighbours. The author concludes that ‘the presence of more black police officers in Newham, far from countering racism, can only serve to strengthen the processes of surveillance and information-gathering on the black community – by making that process less visible, more surreptitious and hence harder to fight.’
Volume 29, no. 1, 1987
Broadwater Farm: a ‘criminal estate’? An interview with Dolly Kiffin
Les Levidow
An interview by Levidow with Jamaican-born dressmaker, Dolly Kiffin, one of the founders, in 1981, of the Broadwater Farm Youth Association, in which Kiffin discusses relations between the estate, Haringey Borough Council, and a wide range of government and non-governmental organisations. The interview also touches on policing on the estate since the October 1985 uprising. It briefly covers: the trial of 6 people for the murder of PC Blakelock, the acquittal of three defendants, all juveniles, following evidence of improper police conduct in obtaining confessions; the police siege at Broadwater Farm that followed (arrests of hundreds of residents and criminal charges against 167 persons), and the attempts to set up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme on the estate, in the face of successful community-controlled crime prevention efforts that seemingly must be controlled.
Volume 29, no. 2, 1987
UK Commentary: Racial harassment, housing and community action.
Unmesh Desai
A revised and updated version of a talk given at the LAG/IRR Conference on Legal Remedies to Racial Harassment on 26 June 1987 by Unmesh Desai of the Newham Monitoring Project t(NMP). At a time when racist attacks are rising, Desai examines legal remedies to racial harassment from a community perspective, using the London Borough of Newham as a case study in the police and local authority housing departments responses to racist attacks. In terms of housing, the eviction of the McDonnell family in 1984, the first family ever to be evicted from council property for racially harassing their neighbours, is foregrounded. The formation within the Met of racial harassment squads (the first of which was set up in Newham and Tower Hamlets – Area 2 of the Met) is discussed, as well as multi-agency panels to deal with racial harassment which have served to marginalise groups like NMP.
Volume 31, no. 3, 1990
UK commentary
The Guildford Four: English justice and the Irish community: an interview with Gareth Peirce
The Guildford Four – Patrick Armstrong, Gerald Conlon, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson – wrongly convicted and given life sentences for IRA pub bombings in Guildford and Woolwich – were released from prison by the Court of Appeal in October 1989. Race & Class spoke to the solicitor for Gerald Conlon and other Irish prisoners. Gareth Peirce addresses the failures of the criminal justice system (including the suppression of evidence by the DPP) which led to their wrongful conviction and the wider issue of the policing of the Irish community in Britain
The Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) which was introduced as an emergency, one year-measure in the wake of the Guildford and Woolwich bombings in November 1974, and then renewed annually, had huge implications for Irish detainees (allowing for long periods of interrogation) and also effects the Irish community as a whole. Through stops at points of entry into the UK, an entire community in transit has been turned into ‘suspects’, with no other section of the British population experiencing fear of travel in this way, she asserts. The use of exclusion orders under the PTA, where, without ever being told why, and by executive decision, the Irish could be excluded from travel either from England to Northern Ireland, or from England and Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, is discussed. Brutal treatment in prison and practices such as repeated moves from prison to prison, excessive use of solitary confinement and repeated strip search, leaving women vulnerable to hysterectomy due to trauma, is touched upon. She ends by drawing parallels between the Guildford 4 and the Tottenham 3, three black men, convicted in 1986 for the murder of PC Blakelock.
Volume 32, no. 1, 1990
Europe for the Europeans: East End for the East Enders
Liz Fekete
The common cry that unites the disparate fascist groups of Europe is ‘Europe for the Europeans. Foreigners Out’. Having set out the parameters for the growth of fascism in Europe, the author turns her attention to the East End of London, where the British National Party has established a ‘Rights for Whites’ campaign. A case study of Tower Hamlets is provided which not only critiques the local Lib Dems’ ‘sons and daughters’ council housing letting policies, but touches on the criminalisation of self-defence, the policing of the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets where the first ever community police station was established in Brick Lane, ostensibly to promote a greater sense of security for the Asian community, but only serving to alienate them still further, with claims that the police act like an ‘army of occupation’ to which one had constantly to furnish documentary proof of the right to residence.
Volume 33, No 1, 1991
Deadly Silence
A.Sivanandan
The journal reproduces the introduction to the IRR’s report Deadly Silence: black deaths in custody, where IRR director A. Sivanandan famously coined the aphorism ‘One death is a death too many’. A total of 76 deaths (overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean, and only one resulting in prosecution) in the custody of the police, prisons and special hospitals, are recorded. Sivanandan describes a closed and biased system which makes racist assumptions about black criminality and racist diagnoses about mental health. He criticises the inquest system, as the ‘coroner’s court is not an adversarial court where you have an equal chance to challenge the authorised version of the facts’ but one in which the coroner, ‘aided by the police, is both judge and advocate, and controls the proceedings of the court’.
Volume 34, no. 4, 1993
The Racial Harassment Bill: a missed opportunity
Lee Bridges, of the Public Law Project, says that while there have long been weaknesses in the use of the law to combat racist attacks, the Racial Harassment Bill, introduced as a private members measure, is badly drafted and at the very least should be re-drafted and its underlying legal and political objectives rethought. Rather than attempting to make racial harassment subject to special laws and treatment within the legal system, a whole array of existing legislation could have been amended so as to make them more effective tools in combating racial harassment.
Volume 36, no. 4, 1995
UK commentary
Kicking racism out of football: a supporters’ view
Paul Thomas
Paul Thomas, a member of Leeds United Against Racism and Fascism, discusses the Commission for Racial Equality and the Professional Footballers’ Associations anti-racist campaign ‘Let’s kick racism out of football’. In the process he points out that while racist chanting at football matches was outlawed in 1991 (Football Offences Act (Racial Chanting), as recommended by the Taylor Inquiry into the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster of 1989, clubs already had powers to ban racist chanting under the ground regulations.
Volume 43, no 2, 2001
The emergence of xeno-racism
Liz Fekete
This is principally a discussion of the new xeno-racism (a term coined by Sivanandan, see his introduction to the special issue) that has emerged out of the European-wide attack on the right to asylum, as embraced by New Labour in 1998. In the process, Fekete, the principal researcher on the IRR’s European Race Audit, presents the creation of a separate prison regime for asylum seekers an example of the new xeno-racism. She concludes that what has finally set the seal on xeno-racism is the Terrorism Act 2000, the first permanent anti-terrorist law in twenty-five years, that directly targets refugee communities and exile organisation, and, as such mirrors the anti-Irish racism of the earlier period of PTA emergency powers.
Race, law and the state
Lee Bridges
Many of the measures initiated following the Macpherson report (1999) into the murder of Stephen Lawrence have compounded the ‘disadvantage’ and ‘disproportionate impact’ of government policies on the black community, the author, legal expert Lee Bridges, argues. The article comprises a case study of state racism, principally focusing around stop and search, with two Home Office Police Research studies (Joel Miller, Nick Bland and Paul Quinton, the impact of Stops and Searches on Crime and the Community, and MVA and Joel Miller ‘Profiling Populations Available for Stop and Searches’) dissected. From here, the author turns his attention to the second Labour Blair government’s Crime Plan (Criminal Justice: the way forward, 2001), particularly its focus on ‘persistent offenders’, and its underlying law and order rhetoric, which will further disadvantage black people. New Labour’s attack on the right to jury trial, endorsed by the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in 1993, is also discussed. The impact of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 on the policing of racially motivated offences, legislation that Bridges considers as never having more than a ‘symbolic political purposes’, is analysed. The article concludes with the recommendation that government ministers should have a duty to issue ‘racial impact statements’, acknowledging what impact new sentencing legislation and guidelines or other criminal justice reforms, would have on black communities. This would be ‘a first step in holding government ministers and policymakers’… ‘to account for widening racial inequalities’.
The Human Rights Act: a weapon against racism?
Frances Webber
Analyses the purposes and effects of the Human Rights Act (HRA, 1998), hailed by New Labour for its incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. It looks first at Britain’s historical reluctance to allow access to European human rights institutions for ‘colonial troublemakers’, initially by denying individuals’ right of petition and then by multiple derogations from rights to liberty; it then analyses pre-HRA groundbreaking judgments against the UK such as Ireland v UK, on forces’ use of torture techniques in Northern Ireland, and East African Asians v UK, on the blatant race discrimination in denial of entry rights for British subjects of Asian origin through the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. It shows the impact of the Convention on states’ criminal justice policies, from banning the death penalty to demanding due process and equality of arms in criminal trials, and on immigration policies, in circumscribing states’ ability to send anyone to states where they faced a real risk of torture, and demanding respect for rights to family and private life in deporting foreigners. The author concludes that the Labour government’s introduction of exclusionary and deterrent asylum and welfare policies along with draconian anti-terrorism measures demonstrated that the HRA’s purpose was not to enlarge human rights for racialised and marginalised communities but to impose a ceiling on them.
From Oldham to Bradford: the violence of the violated
Arun Kundnani
Kundnani, who works at IRR and is a member of the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, contextualises the 2001 riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the social and economic history of the northern mill towns. The riots were prompted by racist gangs attacking Asian communities and compounded by mass arrests and heavy-handed policing of Asian youth, mainly young Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from second and third generation backgrounds. Examines the history of racial segregation in housing and education, the growth of social exclusion that followed the collapse of the textile industry, the failures of community leadership as well as police’s failure to protect Asian communities from racist violence, epitomised by the Oldham chief superintendents use of crime figures to claim that Asians were responsible for the majority of racially motivated incidents. Traces the development from prime minister Blair’s characterisation of the riots as ‘thuggery’ to a popular discourse around the ‘self-segregation’ inherent to Islamic culture. On the nature of the riots, Kundnani believes that the violence ‘was no longer the organised community self-defence of 1981’, but ‘ad hoc, improvised and haphazard. The ‘fires were lit by the youths of communities falling apart from within, as well as from without; youths whose violence was, therefore, all the more desperate… It was the violence of hopelessness. It was the violence of the violated.’
The Terrorism Act 2000: an interview with Gareth Peirce
Liz Fekete
The historical and political context of the Terrorism Act 2000, which brought in a Proscribed Organisations list, banning 21 organisations, is discussed with civil rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, who has defended those accused of terrorist offences for over two decades. She sees the Act as a direct assault on refugee communities in the UK who have been placed in a ‘straightjacket of fear’ and links insertions into the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1995 and a new Act brought in in 1998 (which made it a criminal offence to be in possession of items for use in terrorism abroad, and to conspire to commit an offence abroad) to the Terrorism Act 2000, which she considers the ‘most far-reaching criminal legislation’ that the UK has ever seen. Peirce goes on to dissect the various provisions of the Act, singling out the implications for Kurds, of the proscription of the PKK, as well as the banning of the Tamil Tigers, and also highlights a previous case, which went to the House of Lords, brought under the old Prevention of Terrorism Act of three Algerians, a prosecution which lawyers argued contravened the Human Rights Act.
The racism that kills
Harmit Athwal
Following the death of Stephen Lawrence, and despite the recommendations of the Macpherson inquiry indifference or hostility from the agencies of the justice system following racist attacks, including murder continues, as does violence at the hands of the state, both directly and indirectly in relation to racial violence. Case studies are contrasted to specific Macpherson recommendations, including those covering family liaison, treatment of victims and witnesses, disclosure of information to families at inquests, the duty of the CPS to consult with families and to recognise racist motives in the prosecution of crimes and the provision of legal aid to the victims of families at inquests. Cases cited include Lakhvinder ‘Ricky’ Reel, Michael Menson, Farhan Mire, Roger Sylvester and Christopher Alder. Ends with a list of 91 people known to have lost their lives to racism, either in racist attacks, in state custody or as a result of seeking asylum, between February 1999 and April 2021, including the 54 Chinese stowaways who were found dead in the back of a refrigerated lorry in Dover in June 2024.
Vol 44, no. 2, 2002
Does legislation against racial violence work?
Jenny Bourne
Written by an IRR staff member, the article comprises a critical commentary on The Hate Debate, a publication of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. It starts by asking why, particularly after Macpherson’s recommendation that police improve systems for recording racial incidents, is it becoming increasingly difficult to bring issues of racial motivation into the court room. Reviews existing provisions against racial violence, such as the Football Offences Act (1991) which outlaws racist chanting at football matches and the throwing of objects on the field; the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), which establishes penalty enhancements for a range of ‘racially aggravated offences’, and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 which includes a clause to cover religiously aggravated offences.
Bourne argues that the redefinition of racist attacks as hate crime owes much to the US, where radical movements against violence, including police brutality, became influenced by more conservative victim rights movements and the ‘hate crime’ discourse was born. Citing a report by the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, which finds that the CPS is reducing charges in more than one in four racist incidents and downgrading racially aggravated crimes to remove the race element, she concludes that legislation to punish hate crime has brought black people no closer to justice.
Volume 45, no 3, 2004
Community, cohesion and the state
Jonathan Burnett
Within this historically grounded examination of community cohesion policies by Jonathan Burnett, a research officer at the University of Leeds, lies a critique of the construction of Asian youth criminality. New Labour’s concept of community, drawing on US models of ‘communitarianism’, acts as a bridge between the concept of citizenship (and its ever-widening obligations) and criminality, the author argues. He takes as his starting point the community cohesion policies which were introduced after the ‘northern uprisings’ of 2001, with the Cantle Report (Community Cohesion: a report of the independent review team) being key. Community cohesion is seen as the forcible assertion into areas characterised by structural economic deprivation of a form of governance that ‘extends to both controlling and maintaining communities’ sense of identity. It is a thinly veiled attempt to control non-white communities designated a risk to Britishness because of their resistance to ever more intrusive control. While the violence of white communities is seen as ‘frustration’ and ‘instability’, the violence of angry and desperate Asian youths is representative of inherent Asian criminality, with state funding of community projects conditional on the later accepting a form of governance that establishes and maintains a community identify and value system consonant with Home Office desiderata. Examines the interdepartmental Ministerial Group on Policy Order and Community Cohesion’s recommendations on ‘active citizenship’ and the 2023 White Paper Respect and Responsibility – Taking A Stand against Anti-Social Behaviour, which makes reference to the need to extend the police ‘family’, with greater powers to local authorities and other agencies to combat anti-social behaviour. The White Paper came with an introduction from the then home secretary David Blunkett who characterised those who drew attention to punitive sentencing of Asian youth after 2001 violence in northern towns as ‘bleeding heart liberals’ with Burnett concluding that ‘active citizenship’ does not extend to community defence against racism.
Volume 46, no. 1, 2004
Special issue – The politics of fear: civil society and the security state
Anti-Muslim racism and the European security state
Liz Fekete
In an article that looks at the impact of EU wide counter-terrorism policies on race relations policies across Europe – and argues that a shadow criminal justice system for foreign nationals has been created within an expanded security state – Fekete, now deputy director of IRR, first sets out the EU framework, which was subsequently incorporated into British law. The Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act (ACTSA, 2001) introduced internment without trial for foreign nationals, leading to the incarceration of twelve detainees at Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons without trial for two years. Fekete also highlights the work of the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) – formed in March 2001 in response to the banning of 21 organisations under the Terrorism Act 2000 – citing its important submission to the Privy Council’s review of the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001. Also discusses the so-called ‘ricin plot’, in which the media sensationalised an MI5 claim that an Al Qaida-style attack was planned on the London Underground, with five of the men arrested eventually charged with immigration offences, but no terrorism charges.
Volume 47, no. 3, 2006.
Race, terror and civil society
A.Sivanandan
The author argues that, as a result of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, anti-Muslim racism has increased at every level of society, with political and public debate threaded with the politics of fear and the war on asylum and the war on terror converging to produce a racism that cannot tell a settler from an immigrant, an immigrant from an asylum seeker, an asylum seeker from a Muslim, and a Muslim from a terrorist. To support his argument, he cites the introduction of four pieces of anti-terrorist legislation over the past five years, as well as proposals to change immigration law to set new guidelines for deportation, specifying a list of ‘unacceptable behaviour’ which would merit deportation, even to countries that practice torture. At the time he was writing, an anti-terrorist bill was going through parliament [Terrorism Act 2006], which like previous legislation expands the definition of terrorism and creates new offences. Cites the Law Lords ruling of December 2004 that the indefinite detention of foreign nationals was discrimination and the subsequent Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 which introduced control orders legislation (house arrest and electronic tagging) to replace detention without trial.
Vol 48, no 4, 2007
From Good Friday to Good Relations: sectarianism, racism and the Northern Ireland state.
Robbie McVeigh & Bill Rolston
Though primarily concerned with the institutionalisation of sectarianism and the rise in racism in Northern Ireland following the Good Friday Agreement, this piece briefly addresses policing recruitment reforms following the Patten report. When the Police Service of Northern Ireland was established in 2001, the service was 93% Protestant. Reforms thereafter ensured that equal numbers of Catholics and Protestants were recruited, a solution that the authors argue led ‘to a formal embedding of sectarianism’ into state policies.
Arguing that sectarianism is racism, the authors argue that new levels of racism flourished after the Good Friday Agreement. There was a reluctance to address anything that might alienate loyalists, even their involvement in racial violence against migrant workers. This led the state, which was incapable of addressing racism and fascism, to embrace the ‘good relations’ paradigm, with the ground being prepared by the Northern Ireland Act 1998. From here on, racism and sectarianism came to be dismissed as the products of ‘ugly minds’, thus deradicalising both anti-racism and anti-sectarianism.
Integrationism: the politics of anti-Muslim racism
Arun Kundnani
The major focus of the article is race policy, and the process by which ‘British values’ were imposed on British Muslims; but in the process the author refers to the 2002 immigration and nationality white paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven, which proposed the changes to nationality law which led to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (provisions imposing additional tests for acquiring British citizenship and allowing deprivation of citizenship of dual-national British citizens). He also refers to the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 (cited in the piece as 2005) which lowered the threshold for deprivation of citizenship of dual-national British citizens to a simple ‘conducive to the public good’ test.
Racism, liberty and the war on terror. Extracts from a conference held by the Institute of Race Relations in September 2006.
Extracts have been divided into six sections.
(1)The global context.
A. Sivanandan
The first of two keynotes at an IRR conference in which the IRR director explains the purpose of the conference is to discuss the impact of anti-terrorist legislation on race relations in relation to refugees, asylum seekers and the Muslim community, concluding that it is vital we have an international perspective, even as we take on national and local issues.
(2)The historical context.
Gareth Peirce
In the second keynote at an IRR conference, human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce opens with a case study of one of her clients, Shafiq Rasul, who grew up in Tipton, West Midlands and was seized by a warlord in Afghanistan in connivance with the Americans and taken to Guantanamo Bay, with his rendition and torture eventually challenged in the American Supreme Court (Shafiq Rasul vs George W. Bush). She compares the experience of the Tipton 3, to the Northern Irish experience, concluding that Muslims are being constructed as a suspect community in much the same way as the whole of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland came to be presumed disloyal, suspect. She references the broadcasting ban on Sinn Féin, the Diplock courts, torture and a shoot-to-kill policy, and compares these to today’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), detention without trial, and deportation to torture.
(3) State policies and programmes in the ‘war on terror’.
The EU in cahoots with the US.
Tony Bunyan
Bunyan, director of Statewatch, outlines how the EU has cynically used the events of September 11 to cooperate with the US on issues like databases, passenger name records and biometrics and introduce measures that have nothing to do with tackling terrorism, or indeed any crime. Details are provided on the Visa Information System (VIS), which created a ‘blacklist’ of 126 countries for fingerprinting and a ‘white list’ who do not need visas, including America, Canada, Australia and Japan.
The politicisation of intelligence.
David Rose
Rose, a journalist, argues that we are now witnessing on both sides of the Atlantic the politicisation of intelligence, and discusses this in relation to the proposed Military Commission system at Guantanamo and the use of secret evidence gained under torture.
Guantanamo.
Victoria Britain
The speaker, an author and journalist, starts with a description of Guantanamo, where 450 prisoners, including eight British residents, are still held, emerged as the ‘iconic illustration of the US “war on terror”.’ Concludes with a discussion of judicial reviews brought by the families of eight British residents, and lost, as were appeals, concluding that the ‘legal system is used in cases like this as a kind of charade of legality’.
Extraordinary rendition.
Asim Qureshi
Asim Qureshi, a researcher for Cageprisoners [now Cage International) an organisation formed in 2003 to raise awareness of the plight of ‘war on terror’ detainees, looks at the evolution of ‘extraordinary rendition’ post 9/11, ‘ghost’ prisons or ‘secret detention’, noting that the Extradition Act 2003, ‘is quite simply rendition by another name’. In a discussion on British people or those with British residency who have been taken from different parts of the world, questioned at some point by MI5 or MI6, and who have ended up being rendered to different parts of the world, he focuses primarily on the case of Binyam Mohammed Al Habashi. The cases of Jamil al-Banna, Bisher al-Rawi, Talha Ahsan, Barbar Ahmad and Aafia Siddiqui are mentioned.
(4) The war on terror’s impact on the community.
Campaigning against anti-terrorist legislation.
Anne Gray
Anne Gray, is a member of the Campaign Against Criminalising Community that was formed in early 2001 in response to the Terrorism Act 2000. As well as this act, she cites provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act (ATCSA) 2001 and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 particularly referencing the banning of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and Hamas. She examines the way the anti-terror laws are used to deter, suppress and criminalise political activities of a non-violent kind, citing action taken against the distributors of the Turkish-language magazine Vatan, and the freezing of the bank accounts of Muslim charities. Though the Law Lords ruled against detention without trial in 2004, control orders and the power to detain individuals under the 1971 Immigration Act have turned homes into domestic prisons, she argues, with at least sixteen men, fourteen of whom are Algerian, currently under house arrest. Turning her attention to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), Gray examines the case of an Algerian refugee known only as Detainee Y, who was implicated in the so-called ‘ricin plot’ but later acquitted.
A community organisation responds.
Cilius Victor
A trustee of the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), the author argues that the ‘war on terror’ is challenging community organisations to learn and adapt. He provides a case study of a police raid by over 250 police officers on two homes in Forest Gate in June 2006 during which one man was shot and wounded. The context for the raids were scare scenarios about chemical weapons, with police sealing off the area for ten days, affecting around 300 people who had to show ID to get to their front doors. The families of those arrested were taken away, which was exactly what happened to the four cousins of Jean Charles de Menezes after he was shot dead by following 7/7, though it is still not clear whether he was killed under the specially created shoot-to-kill Operation Kratos.
Racial violence and the ‘war on terror’.
Shobna Das
A team manager at Support Against Racist Incidents (SARI) in Bristol, the author outlines the ways in which the war on terror has affected their work due to an increase in racial violence after 9/11 and 7/7, including an incident in which a Ugandan man was left in a coma for fifteen days. She outlines the pressure put on community groups to participate in ‘Gold Groups’, meetings which bring together top commanders and unit heads within the force to plan, implement and monitor responses to critical incidents.
The ’war on terror’ and attacks on Muslims.
Beena Faridi
A case worker and researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Faradi outlines the rise in Islamophobia post 7/7, with many incidents effecting Muslim women, criticising institutions for not taking the violence seriously, even when mosques are attacked. Discusses the killing of Kamal Raza Butt, days after 7/7 and provides a case study of a young PhD student who was beaten so badly that he was blinded and paralysed, only to be investigated as a terrorist.
(5) The attack on multiculturalism: a discussion
Bradford and the northern towns.
Herman Ouseley
Chair of the Ouseley Report into race relations in Bradford, the author (a former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality) identifies the drift towards segregation, poor political leadership and corrupt community leadership as giving rise to the communal tensions in Bradford that preceded the ‘riots’ in the northern towns. Discusses the law and order and ‘community cohesion’ response to the northern riots, specifically criticising community cohesion for linking segregation to Muslims refusing to mix rather than ‘white flight’.
The Lozells experience.
Salma Yaqoob.
A contribution from the well-known Birmingham anti-war activist, analyses the Lozells riots in Birmingham of November 2005 and how it was presented in the media as ethnic minorities fighting between themselves and proof that multiculturalism had failed.
(6) Linking the Struggles.
Salma Yaqoob
Salma Yaqoob brings the conference to a close, summarising the lessons for anti-racist struggle, drawing parallels with previous struggles around anti-Irish racism, and miscarriages of justice like the Birmingham 6, and pointing out that Moazzam Begg who was from Birmingham and was present at the IRR conference was only returned from Guantanamo Bay due to community pressure.
Bristol: ‘civilising’ the inner city.
Matt Clement
In an article that primarily looks at the legacy of racism and slavery in the context of the urban regeneration of the inner city of Bristol, the regional capital of the south-west of England, the author, a community worker and the Open University tutor, tells the story of the St Paul’s ‘riot’ of 1980 which was precipitated by a large-scale police raid on the Black and White café, on the neighbourhood’s ‘front line’ and at the heart of the largely African-Caribbean community. He charts what happened to the Black and White café since, recounting how it was compulsorily purchased by the local authority. Clement also looks at the evolution of community policing, anti-social behaviour and policing drugs frameworks since 2003 in the St Paul’s area. He provides as a case study of the policing of drugs in February 2003 in Easton, referencing a police consultation meeting that took place at the Malcolm X Centre in February 200 where Commander Rowe claimed that ‘Jamaican Yardies’ were preparing for conflict with local drug dealers.
Race & Class, Volume 50, no 3, 2009
Besieged in Britain
Victoria Brittain
The author, a journalist and co-author with Moazzam Begg of Enemy Combatant: a British Muslim’s journey to Guantánamo Bay, draws on her interviews with the families of Muslim men, including the Jordanian cleric Abu Qatada, mostly refugees, who have been subjected to imprisonment and/or house arrest under the anti-terror laws – concentrating primarily on the impact on the mental health of the men and their families of control orders, ‘SIAC deportation bail’ and torturous legal processes such as the use of secret evidence and the use of SIAC special advocates – barristers who can see the state’s secret evidence but not disclose it – at hearings. After the Law Lords ruled in December 2004 that detention without trial was unlawful, a dozen Algerian and Arab foreign nationals, who had been detained in Belmarsh prison as a national security risk, were released. After the July 2005 London bombings, they were rearrested and placed under house arrest, with the government seeking Memorandums of Understanding with various governments to ensure their deportations, immediately legally challenged.
Throughout the article, Britain makes reference to the broader context, other cases and legal judgements such as the case of Egyptian national, Hani el Sayed Sabaei Youssef. She also references the work of the Helen Bamber Foundation for survivors of torture and human rights violations.
Volume 51, no 3, 2010
Just over the horizon – the surveillance society and the state in the EU
Tony Bunyan
The author, the director of Statewatch, argues that the EU and member states including the UK are on track to become the most surveilled and monitored region of the world, and that this, combined with the emergence of a ‘policing state’ built on state racism, has generated a new authoritarianism system of governance little different in essence from a one-party political system. Amongst surveillance initiatives and mass-scale data gathering initiatives discussed are: common databases based on chipped biometric documents on passports, driving licenses and health records; EU-FBI requirements allowing for the interception of telecommunications (1995); UK national database on children, from birth, with personal details, school record and behaviour. The author points out that although the events of September 11 2001 and the war on terror were the triggers for the surveillance society, what were originally deemed exceptional measures were soon normalised, to the extent that ‘unacceptable behaviour’ comes under the scope of the surveillance state. This represents the overlap between the surveillance state and the policing state, and the new authoritarian turn. In the words of the UK-government sponsored thinktank Wilton Park, ‘Democracy must not be confused with capitalism… Although many capitalist countries are democracies, capitalism can exist without democracy.’
Evidence to the UK parliamentary select committee inquiry on preventing violent extremism
Institute of Race Relations
In 2009, the IRR published Spooked: how not to prevent violent extremism, research by Arun Kundnani based on thirty-two interviews with those involved with Prevent in local authorities, Prevent boards, and community and voluntary sector organisations. This research forms the basis for the IRR’s evidence to the UK parliament’s Communities and Local Government Select Committee inquiry into the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism Programme (Prevent). It finds that Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) Prevent work has been allocated to every local authority area with more than 2,000 Muslim, residents with the size of the grant closely proportional to the number of Muslims in the area, a form of religious profiling that constructs the whole Muslim community as a ‘suspect community’. The evidence specifically criticises: NI35, the national indicator on ‘building communities resilient to violent extremism’ imposed on communities without proper consultation: the government’s revised counter-terrorism strategy, Contest 2 particularly the Pursue strand, used for information gathering by police, with counter-terrorism police officers embedded in the delivery of other local services. Concludes with a set of 22 recommendations and a call for the government to rethink its ‘communities-led approach to preventing violent extremism towards one that focuses on democratic engagement across communities’.
Volume 51, no 4, 2010
Foreign nationals, enemy penology and the criminal justice system
Liz Fekete and Frances Webber
A pan-European study by the IRR European research project team of the creation of a separate criminal justice system for foreigners, characterised by harsher sentencing, prison segregation and deportation following sentence, as well as the expansion of immigration policing.
In the UK, Home Office immigration and asylum statistics reveal that the number of deportations following a criminal conviction increased fivefold from 2005-2008. The authors identify emergency measures introduced after the ‘foreign prisoners’ scandal’ of April 2006 (which led to the resignation of home secretary Charles Clarke) as well as specific provisions of the UK Borders Act (2007) introducing automatic deportation for many offences, and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (2008). Other legislation identified as problematic includes the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (2002, section 72) and the related Specification of Particularly Serious Crimes Order (2004) which listed theft and criminal damage alongside genocide and hijacking as ‘particularly serious crimes’. The authors document a battle between the Home Office and the courts over these provisions and their impact on young refugees, culminating in June 2009 in the Court of Appeal finding the Order unlawful for mandating deportation of refugees for minor offences, incompatibly with the Refugee Convention.
Building on a report by the London Detainee Support Group (Detained Lives), the authors warn that the government is setting up a separate prison system for foreign national prisoners, citing a secret agreement between the Ministry of Justice, the National Offenders Management Service (NOMS) and the UK Border Agency to concentrate foreign national prisoners in ‘hub prisons’, so as to make it easier to deport them when they complete their sentences.
The violence of incarceration: a response from mainland Europe
Luk Vervaet
In an extended review article, Vervaet, a prison educator fighting a state ban on his teaching in any prison in Belgium, discusses, in the pan-European context, issues raised in the publication The Violence of Incarceration, a collection of essays on imprisonment and state violence in the US, UK and Australia. In the process, Vervaet considers the situation in the UK, which for a long time has had the highest incarceration rates in Europe. He comments on the special security units – prisons within prisons – at Belmarsh, in south-east London, Woodhill in Milton Keynes and Long Lartin, Worcestershire. It ends with a call to pay more attention to prison revolts in resistance movements, such as the Lon g Kesh hunger strike in Northern Ireland in 1993.
Volume 52, no 2, 2010
UK: the reality behind the ‘knife crime’ debate
Rebecca Wood
This study of teenage violent crime in Britian in 2008 unpicks the reality behind media distortions of a ‘knife crime epidemic’, a depiction which rests on scaremongering about ‘violently nihilist, feral, often Black or Minority Ethnic teen gangs armed with knives and guns’. In the process, Wood, a researcher at IRR and author of a briefing paper on teenage deaths, makes reference to the government’s Youth Crime Action Plan launched in July 2008 with £100 million of funding, targeting ‘problem families’, lifting blanket anonymity for 16- and 17-year old offenders and increasing stop and search powers. A month prior to this the Home Office’s Tackling Knives Action Plan was launched, pledging £2 million funding for the ten police force areas in England and Wales judged to be most affected by knife crime. Both initiatives, involved the use of posters, websites and music videos (such as ‘Don’t shank just skank’) as campaigning material, re-education programmes run by schools, colleges, doctors, nurses and police, anger management courses, role-model initiatives, family intervention schemes, anti-stab knives and gang-spotting guides for parents. Wood also undertakes a statistical analysis of ‘sharp instrument’ homicides, which shows that teenage violent deaths were, despite media scare scenarios, not increasing, although Greater London remained the anomaly, with 2007 and 2008 seeing significant increases, with most of the teenage victims Black or Asian, with a large number of newly arrived migrants or refugees caught up in the violence.
Volume 53 no 2, 2011
Spaghetti House siege: making the rhetoric real
Jenny Bourne
On 28 September 1975 three, armed young political black men intent on a small-scale robbery at the Knightsbridge Spaghetti House ended up holding nine waiters hostage in a storeroom for five days in what became known as ‘The Spaghetti House siege’. Four hundred officers were deployed at the scene, Knightsbridge was closed to traffic, and fibre optics used for the first time for live surveillance. The Home Secretary and Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark were determined to play down any political connotation to the crime while the young men made demands as the Black Liberation Army and black power groups and key radical black leaders (many of whom knew the three as they had been active in black organisations) met privately to discuss how to end the siege without bloodshed and help in negotiations with the police. At their trial in June 1976, the three young men, now also radicalised by IRA prisoners while on remand, refused to recognise the court and received long sentences. From letters and poems sent out by one of the three during his incarceration, the author sketches the political background to the siege and his thinking on resistance to the racism and brutality of the criminal justice system.
Volume 53, 3, 2012
Rage against the market: Bristol’s Tesco riot
Matt Clement
Sociologist Matt Clement examines the background in heavy-handed policing, gentrification and inequality that led to the ‘Tesco riots’ in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol in April 2011, the first riot in mainland Britain since 2001, and a prelude to what was to follow in August 2011.
The author draws a comparison with the April 1980 ‘riot’ in the St Paul’s area of Bristol, an inner-city area adjacent to Stokes Croft. The ‘Tesco riots’ started after 160 riot police raided a squad, whereas the St Paul’s riot of 1980 started after a raid on the Black and White café. Amidst gentrification, a campaign against the Tesco store began in summer 2010 and the Tesco riots’, the author concludes, was a result of a ‘disproportionate and provocative’ police reaction to that campaign by police officers drawn from Avon and Somerset, Wiltshire and South Wales police.
Volume 54, No 1, 2012
Four days in August: the UK riots
Lee Bridges
For four days in August 2011, England experienced probably the most widespread public disorders in its history, with riots or other public disturbances in sixty-six locations, involving an estimated 15,000 people and leading to five deaths. Bridges analysis of the causes and consequences of the riots, which he sees as linked to the failure to address the grievances and concerns of the disenfranchised and disinherited, is based on a close reading of reports from the Metropolitan Police Service, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Ministry of Justice, books by academics Steve Reicher and Cliff Stott, as well as Tottenham MP David Lammy. Another key text, repeatedly referred to by Bridges is, Reading the Riots, the Guardian/London School of Economics survey of riot participants across the country.
The events that precipitated the riots started after officers from Metropolitan Police anti-gun crime unit Operation Trident apprehended a black man, Mark Duggan, in a mini cab and shot him dead. Bridges utilises the MPS review to describe the catalogue of errors by both police and the IPPC in relation to the death and the handling of a subsequent protest march. An expert on stop and search, Bridges provides a great deal of data on stop and search in London and nationwide, agreeing with the Guardian/LSE assessment that ‘a significant factor in sparking the disturbances was the humiliation, unjust suspicion, lack of respect and targeting that characterises the way rioters felt the police carry out stop and search’. He provides data on arrest, conviction and imprisonment, drawing attention to the very ‘different from of policing and pattern of arrest’ that developed, mostly as a result of the post-riot operation [Operation Withern] that relied on the analysis of CCTV footage of the various riot locations and used this to identify arrestees. The courts followed through on this, ‘clearly responding’ to ‘political demands that riot offenders’ be severely dealt with, concludes Bridges. Another feature of the article is the debunking of David Lammy’s claim that the rioters were ‘mindless people, and nihilistic and criminal elements’ and that the ‘riots’ were ‘criminality, pure and simple’ coordinated by gangs. The recommendations of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, set up after the disorders, are analysed, with its findings said to be on a continuum with the Victorian values and underlying notions of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ found in David Lammy’s book, with both reminiscent in their analysis with the type of ‘culture of poverty’ thinking found in the Moynihan report following the American urban disorders of the 1960s.
After Lawrence: racial violence and policing in the UK
Jon Burnett
As two men are convicted for the murder of Steven Lawrence, almost 19 years after he was stabbed to death in south-east London, the author, an IRR researcher on the ‘new geographies of racism project’, warns that despite the congratulatory rhetoric around Macpherson’s policing reforms, racist practices such as stop and search continue, and racist incidents, particularly against asylum seekers, migrant workers or visitors, and Muslims, are increasing. New forms of racism, underscored by government policies, find new targets, as racial violence shifting to smaller cities, towns and rural districts. Burnett provides case studies of Stoke-on-Trent and Plymouth and amongst many racist murders commented on are: Firsat Dag (Glasgow, 2001) and Kamal Raza Butt (Nottingham, 2005) and Shahid Aziz (Armley prison, 2004).
Race & Class, Volume 54, No 3, 2013
Total policing: reflections from the frontline
Liz Fekete
The first of two reflections on discussions at the June 2012 Symposium ‘Policing communities: race class and the state’ organised by IRR, the Power, Conflict and Justice Research Group, Edge Hill University in conjunction with the Tottenham Defence Campaign. The symposium, called after the August 2011 ‘riots’, and the government’s announcement of a huge expansion in riot training, advocacy of the use of water cannon and plastic bullets in future ‘riot’ situations, brought together campaigners from Tottenham (Tottenham Defence Campaign), Belfast (Relatives for Justice) and Derry (Pat Finucane Centre), as well as representatives of the Muslim and Gypsy and Traveller organisations who shared their long experiences of militarised policing and traced the ways in which strategies used in Northern Ireland were and continue to be transferred to Britain. Parallels between the invasive policing of Broadwater Farm and Republican areas of Belfast were made. Many police killings are discussed, including that of Mark Duggan, Azelle Rodney, and Blair Peach whose death led to the founding of INQUEST. Also addressed is the Tottenham 3 case, as is that of Guantánamo detainees, such as Binyam Mohamed, whose case was taken up by Cageprisoners, also participants at the Symposium. A wide ray of policing and anti-terrorist operations, practices and units are discussed including: the Specialist Firearms Command (CO19), the anti-gun crime initiative Operation Trident, and the related Operation Matrix (Merseyside), Operation Withern (pan-London police operation into the ‘riots), stops at ports and airports under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000; the invention of vaguely defined crimes under Section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006; the joint enterprise doctrine. Government legislation and other legal measures discussed included the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA); closed material procedures at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC); the greater admissibility of hearsay evidence under the Criminal Justice Act (2003) and anonymous witness evidence under the Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Act 2008, replaced by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009; the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) criminalising trespass and paving the way for the criminalisation of the nomadic lifestyle.
Police accountability, the Irish peace process and the continuing challenge of secrecy.
Daniel Holder
The second of two reflections from the symposium on ‘Policing communities: race, class and the state’ (see Fekete, above). Daniel Holder, deputy director of the Belfast-based Committee on the Administration of Justice, focuses, above all, on the area of covert policing and the running of agents. Historically, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), failed to work within human rights frameworks or even policy guidance frameworks at a UK level. The author traces evolutions following the policing reforms promised on the back of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland (Patten Commission). These led the way to the transformation of the RUC into the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the creation of new accountability structures in policing, such as a Policing Board and the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, an independent complaints body, with justice powers developed to the new power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly. The exemption, therein, on ‘national security matters’ paved the way for the British government to announce in 2005 that the area of covert policing would be transferred from the PSNI to MI5 (subsequently formalised in the 2006 St Andrew’s Agreement). Comments on Operation Ballast (Police ombudsman investigation into the running of state agents in a loyalist paramilitary group in north Belfast) and Operation Stafford, in which the Historical Enquiries Team looked at unresolved killings during the conflict. Concludes with an examination of the Justice and Security Bill, which if passed would allow for secret evidence, ‘closed material procedures’ (CMP) in a range of civil court proceedings, with serious implications for the post-conflict situation in Northern Ireland.
Vol 54, 4, 2013
The first three articles in this edition are themed together under the title, ‘Cuts, crime and racialisation’
Editorial
Bourne, one of the editors of Race & Class, relates the themes of the issue to attempts by the state to roll back the gains of the Macpherson inquiry.
Britain: racial violence and the politics of hate
Jon Burnett
The author, who has carried out research for IRR in Plymouth, Peterborough and Stoke-on-Trent (New Geographies of Racism project) argues that racial violence is now dealt with via a multi-agency approach and regarded by policy-makers as part of a generalised ‘hate crime’ agenda which personalises the act of an individual, absolves the state of institutionalising racism and at the same time opens the door to a specious argument from the extreme Right that the white British are now race hate’s victims. The creation of a hate crime industry is linked to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which placed a duty on the courts to increase the sentence of any offence deemed to be aggravated by the victim’s disability or sexual orientation. The hate crime industry is represented at the local authority level, by an array of hate crime officers, diversity representatives, criminal justice agencies who are recognised as having a stake in the ‘hate crime world’, with this approach dovetailing with a multi-agency approach and redolent of the Consultative Committees set up by Lord Scarman following the 1981 uprisings.
Grooming and the ‘Asian sex gang predator’: the construction of a racial crime threat
Ella Cockbain
The depiction of a racial crime threat around ‘grooming gangs’ – inextricably associated with ‘Asian sex gangs’ who seek out white British girls for horrific sexual abuse –became widespread in media, public and policy debate in the UK in 2011, when the Times newspaper alleged a ‘conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs’, thus capitulating ‘grooming’ into the national consciousness. The author, an expert on child sexual exploitation (CSE), highlights the risks of racialising criminal justice issues and a narrow race-based construct of ‘grooming’, showing how such narratives can fuel racist violence, distort policy, exacerbate community tensions. In contrast, two large-scale government studies published by the Child Exploitation and Online Projection Centre and the Office for the Children’s Commissioner for England clearly demonstrate that CSE is not a uniquely Asian threat and that the single largest ethnic group among suspects was white. The article also traces historical continuities between the construction of the ‘Asian sex gang predator’ and moral panics around mugging in the 1970s, citing previous work in Race & Class by Cecil Gutzmore. By providing a simple overview of key definitional and statistical considerations, the article argues for a shift away from a fixation with grooming as a uniquely racialised threat, towards responding to child sexual exploitation in its entirety.
The case against joint enterprise
Lee Bridges
In making the case for reform of the UK law of joint enterprise (a form of secondary liability), emeritus law professor, Lee Bridges draws on the House of Commons Justice Committee’s 2011 inquiry into joint enterprise and charts the expansion of the doctrine over recent years, criticising the Director of Public Prosecutions’ subsequent draft prosecutorial advice for failing to clarify the law and thereby leaving the door open for future miscarriages of justice. Joint enterprise is a racialised weapon used by police and courts to target black and ethnic minority communities who have faced unfair criminalisation as a result, states the author, who foregrounds the work of the campaigning organisation Joint Enterprise Not Guilty By Association, and comments on the Victoria Station case [twenty teenagers originally charged with joint enterprise murder), as well as the London Metropolitan Police’s video, ‘Who killed Deon’, which was widely shown in cinemas, on social media and at community venues and ends with the message ‘If your presence, knowledge or actions lead to murder you’ll be charged with murder under Joint Enterprise’.
Volume 55, No 2, 2013
The legacy of Hillsborough: liberating truth, challenging power
Phil Scraton
Following the publication of the report of the Independent Panel on the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 supporters of Liverpool FC were crushed to death at an FA cup semi-final at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield in April 1989, the report’s lead author reflects on the decades-long struggle led by the survivors and the bereaved families for truth and justice.
Scraton reveals how the interim report of the Taylor inquiry, in August 1989, unequivocally blamed police for the tragedy, and for the dishonest blaming of fans, but the Director of Public Prosecutions said there was insufficient evidence to justify criminal proceedings against South Yorkshire Police, and the coroner at the inquests returned to the ‘drunken fans’ narrative. The verdicts of ‘accidental death’ left relatives very distressed.
He describes how campaigning by the Hillsborough Family Support Group (HFSG), set up within a month of the disaster, led to a legal challenge to the flawed inquest, a further ‘judicial scrutiny’ and a private prosecution of Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, all unsuccessful, and finally, after the 20th anniversary of the disaster, a proposal to the Home Office for full documentary disclosure, without redaction, to an Independent Panel. The report led to, amongst other things, an apology by then prime minister David Cameron to the families, and the inquests’ quashing by the High Court on the application of the attorney-general, with fresh inquests ordered.
UK: the way to pariah status in Europe
Frances Webber
The author, a retired lawyer, describes moves by Conservative ministers to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998, seen by the Right as a criminals’ charter, and threats to leave the European Court of Human Rights, against the background of a surge in support for the hard-right, anti-Europe, anti-immigration party UKIP and a row with the ECtHR over prisoners’ voting rights. A Bill of Rights Commission set up in 2011 to explore alternatives to the European human rights system could not agree. In 2013, then prime minister David Cameron and home secretary Theresa May, with justice minister Chris Grayling, considered temporary withdrawal from the ECtHR over Abu Qatada, a Jordanian cleric whom they were prevented from deporting to a trial tainted by torture evidence and a possible death penalty. The article includes a brief history of the UK’s often troubled relationship with Europe’s human rights institutions, largely because of its institutional brutality against its colonial and former colonial subjects and thus its relative comfort with torture and complicity with torturing states.
Volume 55, No 3, 2014
Extending immigration policing and exclusion in the UK
Frances Webber
In responses to two government consultation documents, ‘Tackling illegal immigration in privately rented accommodation’ and ‘Controlling immigration – regulating migrant access to health services in the UK’, the author argues that the proposal to require landlords to check prospective tenants’ immigration status and to implicate medics in the denial of hospital care to the undocumented would ensure that those who work in the health sector and those who provide housing act as extensions of the UK border police. Both sets of proposals are discriminatory, breach fundamental rights, lack sound evidence base and encourage racial discrimination, while conscripting landlords (for whom criminal penalties are proposed for non-compliance) and health sector workers into the UK’s border police.
Volume 56, no 1, 2014
Investigated or ignored? An analysis of race-related deaths since the Macpherson Report
Harmit Athwal and Jon Burnett
The authors, editor and assistant editor of IRR News respectively, examine 93 deaths in the UK with a known or suspected racial element which took place since the 1999 Macpherson Report. The research finds that asylum seekers, new migrants, students and those working in the night-time economy are particularly at risk. Data is provided on the age of victims, place and nature of attacks. It foregrounds the unwillingness of both the police and the courts to understand and acknowledge the racial context of attacks as evidenced in cases such as those of Errol McGowan, Liaquat Ali and Changez Arif. Another prominent case discussed is that of 19-year-old Zahid Mubarek who was killed by a white racist-cell mate at Feltham Young Offenders Institution [in March 2000] . An inquiry into his death identified 186 institutional failings, as well as a pervasive institutional racism in the prison system. The authors suggest that because the criminal justice system’s response to racial violence has become disproportionately concentrated on decisions about whether racial motivation meets the threshold to be reflected in sentencing (as per the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998) any broader understanding of racism and the conditions informing racial violence are being excluded from trials.
Volume 56, no 3, 2015
This edition of Race & Class is themed around the idea of ‘Crime and Punishment’
Criminalising the Other: challenging the race-gang nexus
Patrick Williams
Criminologist Patrick Williams, drawing on research in Manchester and the North West of England, takes a deep dive into the construction of the ‘gang’ narrative’ in social research, government policy, and in the media, comparing them to an earlier period, when ‘street robbery’ or ‘mugging; was constructed as a crime largely committed by black youth, as analysed by Stuart Hall and others in Policing the Crisis. Although the 2011 ‘riots’ were central in establishing the ‘gangs narrative’ (government ministers unashamedly attributed the violence to gangs and set up the Ending Gangs and Youth Violence Programme) there had already been, since 2004, a trend towards the development of specialist (gun and) gang units in England and Wales, such as Trident in London, Ventura in Birmingham, Stealth in Nottingham, the Matrix in Liverpool and the Xcalibre Task Force (XTF) in Manchester. Williams focuses on the development of gang-databases in Manchester’s XTF, noting that 89 per cent of individuals on the data-list belonged to a BAME group
In the process, Williams establishes the ways in which the gangs’ narrative expands the criminal justice system’s control of marginalised and excluded young Black men, legitimises over-’policing and creates a ‘gang industry’ linked to the CJS and the creation of a ‘pathological criminology’. He concludes that, just as with the construction of the ‘mugger’ in an earlier period, the ‘” gang” has been adopted as an explanatory device that transcends the entrenched social and structural problems experienced within Black and Asian communities.’
‘I don’t have a life to live’: deaths and UK detention
Harmit Athwal
This is an extract from the IRR’s forthcoming report Dying for Justice which documents 508 deaths in custody of BME, migrant and refugee communities in suspicious circumstances. Athwal, a researcher on the report, concentrates here on deaths in Immigration Removal Centres, nearly all run by private security companies, amounting to a separate custodial system for failed asylum seekers who have been largely separated from the prison population and placed in mostly purpose-built removal centres, subject to their own rules. Conditions at Yarl’s Wood were exposed by the Daily Mirror in 2003 in an undercover operation leading to the first ever inquiry into an immigration and removal centre by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman (March 2004). A 2005 BBC investigation revealing racism and abuse at Oakington Immigration Reception Centre and during the deportation process results in a Prison and Probation Ombudsman inquiry. The article maps out what has changed re the monitoring of BME deaths in custody since the ‘70s and ‘80s (when IRR published Deadly Silence), citing the launching of an official Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody, amongst other things. Amongst cases cited is that of Manuel Bravo, who committed suicide in Yarl’s Wood after being detained alongside his 13-year-old son, with his act linked to a desire to secure permanent status for his son, The cases of Joy Gardner and Jimmy Mubenga who both died following police restraint during deportation attempts are also covered. In 2013, the Cabinet Office set up an Independent Advisory Panel on Non-Compliance Management to help the Home Office to develop a ‘restraint package’ which ‘minimises harm and maximises safety’.
The defamation of Joy Gardner: press, police and black deaths in custody
Ryan Erfani-Ghettani
The author, a researcher at IRR, examines the relationship between the police, and the press, and the way prejudicial information is released to the press, after a death in police custody, foregrounding the case of Joy Gardner who died following a deportation raid in 1993, and was presented in the press as a violent, aggressive ‘illegal immigrant’. The media’s interest in the case waned until the decision, in April 1994, to charge three of the officers involved in her death with manslaughter, with the media providing a platform to the Police Federation who labelled it a ‘political prosecution’ taken to ‘appease anti-racism campaigners’, launching further attacks on local MP Bernie Grant and the Commission for Racial Equality.
The article also discusses the media’s response to the deaths of Roger Sylvester, Mickey Powell, Jean Charles de Menezes and Mark Duggan, whose shooting at the hands of the police, sparked nationwide unrest in 2011, with the Independent Police Complaints Commission criticised for appearing to put out information, immediately after his death, that Duggan had been involved in a ‘shootout’ .Over the next two years ‘unnamed police sources’ repeatedly fed into the media accusations that Duggan was a known and dangerous gangster.
Volume 57, no 1, 2015
Migrant Media and the road to Injustice
Ken Fero
The author, a radical filmmaker, recaps the history of the radical documentary group Migrant Media, which he founded, alongside others, in the 1980s. In the process, Fero tells the story of the making of the film Injustice, a documentary about black deaths in police custody from 1993-1999, and the police’s attempt to suppress it. With TV refusing to screen Injustice the documentary was subsequently shown in hundreds of community venues, cinemas and won many awards at film festivals. It influenced the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith who carried out an investigation which called for a review of the CPS’s prosecution decision-making processes. Fero provides a first-hand account of the formation of the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC). UFFC was set up as a coalition of family campaigns calling for the immediate prosecution of police officers for manslaughter or murder following a death in police custody Initially, it campaigned for the abolition of the Police Complaints Authority (PCA, whereby police investigate themselves following a death in police custody). The PCA was later abolished and replaced by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
Injustice was preceded by the film Tasting Freedom, which tells the story of hunger strikes by Algerians and Zaireans at Haslar, Pentonville Prison, Harmondsworth and Campsfield House and covers the death of Omasase Lumumba in Pentonville prison in 1991. Migrant Media were then commissioned by Channel 4 to make Justice Denied, which focuses on the community’s response to the death of Joy Gardner. Following the release of Injustice, Migrants Media made many other films, including Who Polices the Police.
Volume 59, no 3, 2018.
Lammy Review: without racial justice, can there be trust?
Liz Fekete
In the first of two commentaries on the Lammy Review, commissioned by the Conservative government, the author, director of IRR, takes issue with the analysis and recommendations of a government review into the experiences of people of Black Asian and Minority Backgrounds of the criminal justice system. Led by David Lammy MP, the review bypasses Macpherson and takes us back to the frameworks of the Scarman report into the causes of the 1981 Brixton riots, argues Fekete. While Lammy finds evidence of disproportionality in outcomes he fails to provide any analysis of the causes of disproportionality, pointedly avoiding any mention of institutional racism or the racialisation of crime, preferring instead to concentrate on ‘unintended bias’ and ‘prejudice’ in individual decision with these acting as the main barrier to fair treatment. The absence of any youth perspective in the report is a serious lack, with Lammy attributing high reoffending rates among some BAME groups to the failure of the youth justice system to effect parenting orders as well as the desire of young BAME offenders to ‘rebel rather than reform’. The fact that specific policing measures, such as stop and search, the joint enterprise laws and the Metropolitan Police Gangs Matrix are flagged up in the report are a testimony to the hard work of campaigners in these areas, argues Fekete. The Mayor of London’s review of the Metropolitan police’s Trident Matrix, which grew out of Operation Trident, is acknowledged.
Lammy Review: will it change outcomes in the criminal justice system?
Lee Bridges
Emeritus Law Professor Lee Bridges, continues the critique of the Lammy Review, commenting on its remit, the lack of real action over the Trident Matrix database and considers his understanding of the joint enterprise laws, and the Supreme Court decision of 2015 (R V Jogee), as well as the system of plea bargaining, and the role of the CPS in contribution to ethnic disproportionality, superficial. The Conservative government excluded policing from the remit of the report, where by far the highest rates of ethnic disproportionality are found in police activities such as stop and search and arrest. But Lammy, who appears to have a ‘rose-tinted’ and ‘nostalgic’ view of the courts, also let the CPS off the hook for its charging decisions. Lammy’s ‘timidity’ over pre-sentence reports which have been widely replaced by ‘fast delivery’ pre-sentence reports produced on the same day as the sentence, is also criticised.
Volume 62, no 3, 2021
A special issue on Race, Mental Health, State violence.
Guest edited and with an editorial by Monish Bhatia and Eddie Bruce-Jones
Mental health and death in custody: the Angiolini Review
Eddie Bruce-Jones
The author, a legal academic who had previously helped organise a 2018 Symposium on Race, Mental Health and State Violence, discusses, in relation to mental health, the findings and recommendations of the first official review of practices and processes relating to and following police-related deaths in the UK. (The Angiolini review, 2017). He highlights the work of INQUEST, the United Families and Friends campaign, and the work of families and support organisations. He uses their words and analysis to frame the analysis that follows and points out that, at the time of writing, most of the Angiolini review’s 110 recommendations had not been taken up.
Racial surveillance and the mental health impacts of electronic monitoring of migrants
Monish Bhatia
The Criminal Justice Act 1991 first introduced electronic monitoring (also referred to as tagging) for criminal sentencing and punishment, with England and Wales now having the highest number of individuals subjected to this technology in the world. The justification for Electronic Monitoring (EM), which the author, a criminologist, terms ‘e-carceration’ – the shifting of the site of confinement to the home – is that it reduces the prison population.
Under the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004 EM was extended to immigration controls, with some asylum seekers being fitted with an ankle device and subjected to curfew if deemed high risk. It is not imposed as a criminal sanction, but as an administrative measure, an alternative to detention, though there is no statutory requirement to seek the consent of those tagged.
Having set the legislative scene, the author goes on to explore the use of EM in the migration arena as a racial surveillance practice and the impact on asylum seekers’ mental health. Drawing on ethnographic data, he highlights the lived experience, voices, and resistance modes, of migrants and racialised groups.
The psychologisation of counter-extremism: unpacking PREVENT
Tarek Younis
The author, a lecturer in psychology, argues that the UK’s counter-radicalisation policy, Prevent, exemplifies the burgeoning ‘pre-crime’ industry, revealing also a deep overlap between national security and mental health. He unpicks Prevent training materials and frameworks which depend largely on the Extremism Risk Guidance Framework as well as attempts to ‘map’ radicalisation using neuroscientific imagery. Younis argues that Prevent training, engages in performative colourblindedness (it was subsequently extended to the far Right), in line with the post-racial state’s need to evade the charge of racism even as it engages in racialised boundary-making. Prevent’s message towards the far Right that it is taking its ‘Britishness’ ‘too far’, is contrasted to its message on Muslims, that they do not belong to Britain. Younis briefly touches on the increased use of citizenship deprivations and deportations of Muslims within counter-terrorism policy, referring to the case of Shamima Begum.
The explicit rationale for Prevent, which operates in a pre-criminal space, is to identify individuals susceptible to developing an intent to commit political violence in the future. Under revised Prevent guidance issued in 2015, a duty was placed on all public bodies across the UK to ensure staff receive Prevent training, with teachers also placed under a duty to refer individuals vulnerable to engaging in knife/gang violence. The Channel programme decides whether a mental health intervention is needed after a doctor referral.
Baptised by fire: an interview with Suresh Grover
Jasbinder S. Niijar
Niijar, a trustee of both the IRR and Monitoring Group, interviews Suresh Grover, who was one of the founders of the Southall Monitoring Group in December 1981 and is currently director of the London-based Monitoring Group. In this wide-ranging interview, Grover recaps on why a monitoring group was needed in Southall, one of the first post-war settlements of New Commonwealth Asian workers in London. He cites the racist murder on 4 June 1976 of Gurdip Singh Chaggar, the militarised and violent policing of a counter-protest in April 1979 to the National Front (leading to the demolition of the People’s Unite, the killing by the SPG of Blair Peach and the attempts to criminalise around 342 people who were brought to trial at magistrates’ courts). The urban uprisings of 1981 were the final spark that led to the creation of SMG. Grover explains that the idea of a monitoring group was taken from the Black Panthers in the US and that, from the start, ‘it did not mean the monitoring of data and analysis, but the monitoring of police racism, violence and misconduct’. Campaigns in the 1980s, such as the Kuldip Sekhon campaign, and the campaigns for Stephen Lawrence, Ricky Reel and Michael Manson campaign followed. Following the creation of a national network to follow the recommendations of the Macpherson report, the group became the Monitoring Group. Grover is critical of post-Macpherson developments and the political campaign, including by Met police commissioner Cressida Dick to dismantle Macpherson’s definition of institutional racism, regardless of how accurate it was. In the article, Grover also touches on his long-term relationship with IRR, and particularly the impact of its director, Sivanandan, and the study Police Against Black People, as well as the relationship between Black and Asian struggle and the Irish struggle.
Volume 63, no 3. 2022
Notes on policing, racism and the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK
Scarlet Harris, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Patrick Williams and Lisa White
The authors, all sociologists, carried out research for the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and present excerpts from the subsequent report, ‘A threat to public safety: policing, racism and the Covid-19 epidemic’. This was published by IRR and examined policing of BME communities in terms of the Coronavirus Act 2020 and the Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations which granted unprecedented powers to the police. Interviews with those impacted conclude that racialised minoritised communities were the most harshly affected during the pandemic – being more likely to be stopped by the police, threatened or subjected to violence or falsely accused of rule-breaking and wrong-doing. Lockdown conditions, new police powers and histories of institutionally racist policing posed a threat to vulnerable communities, allowing encounters to escalate. Participants also observed how police themselves in encounters, including the policing of Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, ignored regulations about distancing and wearing masks, thereby putting people at risk.
Volume 63, No 4, 2022
Impunity entrenched: the erosion of human rights in the UK
Frances Webber
In a review of the government’s 2021 legislative programme, Webber describes a consolidation of an authoritarian vision in which the rule of law is undermined. Police impunity is furthered through a defiant defence of the over-policing of racialised minorities, exemplified by the hugely disproportionate stop and search of young black people, and the grant of even wider powers – in policing Gypsies, Roma and Travellers; homeless people; processions and assemblies; anyone with a weapon-related conviction, through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill, even as egregious police racism, misogyny and criminality are exposed. She examines the huge expansion of data collection and exchange with scant regard for privacy rights; of digital surveillance such as facial recognition of protesters, often in ‘partnerships’ with private companies associated with the far Right; seizure and scrutiny of mobile phones of migrants. She examines the Nationality and Borders Bill (NABA), which criminalises those crossing the Channel in small boats, bars them from refugee status and allows their detention in conditions described by official inspectors as ‘squalid and unsafe’; the programme of mass deportations; and the failure of the Windrush compensation scheme (for those wrongly detained or deported as illegal migrants). Executive attempts to usurp or curtail the constitutional roles of the judiciary and parliament include a Judicial Review and Courts Bill to cut off avenues of legal recourse; excessive use of delegated legislation with minimal parliamentary scrutiny; dictating to judges by imposing minimum sentences and legal presumptions in the PCSC Bill; and simply ignoring court orders while attacking the integrity of lawyers engaged in criminal defence or representing asylum seekers.
Volume 64, no 1, 2022
Racism, radicalisation and Europe’s ‘Thin Blue Line’
Liz Fekete
This article by IRR director Liz Fekete takes the form of a European audit of location specific, territorial and quasi-military policing, understood against the backcloth of the introduction of new technology (AI, data harvesting, network mapping) and enhanced policing powers. The article, which was written in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests of Summer 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, also considers the power of police trades unions who the author shows are aggressively mobilising to prevent any restriction to their powers following deaths in police custody.
The organisation of modern policing under neoliberalism is linked to an everyday policing culture where rank and file officers display open contempt for the racialised ‘undeserving poor’ (surplus populations). This was exemplified by the scandal that led in February 2022 to the resignation of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, who lost the support of the London Mayor after the Independent Office for Police Misconduct published a damning report on misconduct of up to 19 police officers at Charing Cross police station who shared brutal misogynistic, homophobic and racist messages on social media.
Several references are made in the course of the article to the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill [subsequently Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022] which undermines the notion of police as public servants by providing for a police covenant, a declaration of support for the police.
There is also discussion of the Gangs Matrix, a secret police gangs database launched by the Metropolitan police after the 2011 ‘riots’, which can be consulted by a wide range of public services and is then used, to prevent ‘suspected gang members’ from accessing housing, benefits and education.
Volume 64, no 2, 2022
Britain and the repression of Black Power in the 1960s and ‘70s
Ben Gowland
The author examines Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office files as well as black community newspapers in 1960s and 1970s to understand the involvement of the UK government in the suppression of Black Power in independent West Indian states as well as in the UK to draw out the transnational dynamics of state repression and the shared opposition to British (neo)imperialism across the Atlantic. The UK government cooperated closely with Special Branches and police forces in the Caribbean and coordinated security intelligence in the region. The Information Research Department of the FCO not only gathered information on Black Power in the region but also produced anti-Black Power propaganda. Key individuals such as Pauulu Kamarakafego, organiser of the first Black Power conference in Bermuda, were under surveillance by Special Branches in the region with the FCO connecting up intelligence. Intelligence was used in bannings from Caribbean territories, such as that of Walter Rodney, British troop deployment and psychological operation campaigns. In the UK, Black Power groups confronted the over-policing of black people over the Mangrove restaurant, Metro youth club and the publication Grassroots – all of which led to campaigns against the arrests and prosecutions of key Black Power activists.
The racialisation of British citizenship
Frances Webber
In this article, though primarily interested in immigration law, Webber, a former human rights barrister and vice chair of IRR, implicitly invites us to consider how immigration law bleeds into criminal law, particularly around the history of citizenship stripping. While Webber takes us through the history of citizenship laws and deprivation powers, the piece pivots around the campaign against Clause 9 of the 2021 Nationality and Borders Bill which, following an intervention from the Law Lords, was amended, so as to restrict no-notice deprivation to specific scenarios. In the process, Webber mentions several important cases, that of Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, Mahdi Hashi (after being deprived of his British citizenship, he was kidnapped in Somalia and taken to the US to stand trial for terrorism); Mohamed Sark and Bilal al-Berjawi (killed by US drone strikes after losing their British citizenship) and the ‘tragic case’ of the citizenship stripping of Shamima Begum. She outlines the three main Acts of Parliament that transformed the powers of the government to revoke British citizenship: The 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act; the 2006 Immigration and Asylum Act; and the 2014 Immigration Act that for the first time allowed citizenship to be removed from naturalised citizens with no other citizenship. She also recaps the anti-terrorist legislation passed in the wake of 9/11, and the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIMs). A boycott by human rights groups and Muslim groups of the government review of the Prevent programme in 2021 following the appointment of William Shawcross, a former director of the Henry Jackson Society, is mentioned.
Volume 64, no 3, 2023
Legacy, truth and collusion in the North of Ireland
Mark McGovern
Sociologist Mark McGovern continues his investigation of collusion between state agents and loyalist paramilitaries, foregrounding the British state’s attempt, via legislation, to prevent any further investigation or prosecution of former British soldiers, through the Northern Ireland (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill [subsequently passed]. He argues that the Bill, as it stands, would stop virtually all further conflict-related criminal and civil cases, inquests and any further investigations undertaken by independent watchdog bodies such as the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland created in the wake of the Good Friday agreement.
The piece examines a number of official reports that confirm longstanding allegations of collusion between state agents and loyalists, particularly in the 1980s when policing in the North saw a fundamental shift away from prevention and detection of crime towards prioritising the gathering of intelligence. This was driven in part by a policy of ‘police primacy’ which saw the expansion of the intelligence infrastructure and specialist, militarised counterinsurgency units within the RUC. At the same time, the use of informers and agents became the fulcrum of the ‘intelligence war’, leading to an ‘intelligence mindset’ whi8ch places the collection of information between the prevention and detection of crime
Volume 64, no 4, 2023
Policing rights in the UK 2022: an audit
Frances Webber
The author reviews the increasingly violent policing of racialised minorities, through: Violence Suppression Units working ‘microbeats’: disproportionality in stop and search including degrading strip searches of schoolchildren (case of Child Q in Hackney); the accelerating toll of deaths and injuries resulting from police encounters (deaths of Oladeji Omishore and Chris Kaba are discussed); the findings of the Casey Review of systemic racism and misogyny in the Metropolitan Police, dismissed by ministers and senior police; the repression of protest through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and other linked measures such as Serious Violence Reduction Orders and Gang Injunctions and the Public Order Bill (introduction of Serious Disruption Prevention orders). The policing of migrants through the attempted off-shoring to Rwanda, stopped by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is also discussed, as are attempts to restrict the human rights of migrants through a Bill of Rights. Concludes with a discussion of the extension of policing to areas such as public sector investments, school curricula, student unions and strike action by workers at a time of increasing immiseration.
Volume 65 no 1 2023
Abolishing institutional racism
Adam Elliott-Cooper
With the starting point of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK in 2020, Elliott- Cooper, a lecturer in social and public policy, argues that racist policing has been and is still the impetus for popular Black resistance and for the conclusion that the UK is institutionally racist – an idea going back to the 1960s Black Power Movement. Contrasting the view from within radical Black movements with the Macpherson Report into the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (1999) the piece pinpoints the major flaws in the way that the report defined institutional racism – devoid of historical context, non-understanding of the state, and focused on individuals’ ‘prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping’. This limited definition put institutional racism on the national agenda but reduced it to bias and a lack of diversity. Traces the path from the community-led Stephen Lawrence Campaign to today’s abolitionist perspectives of e Black Lives Matter, he argues that BLM now challenges liberal reforms to policing, calling into question state power and racial capitalism. In the course of the article, Elliot-Cooper references many deaths at the hands of the police, including those of Smiley Culture, Kiingsley Burrell, Mark Duggan, Sarah Reed, Jermaine Baker and Mzee Mohammed.
Volume 65, no 3, 2024
‘County lines’: racism, safeguarding and statecraft in Britain
Insa Koch, Patrick Williams and Lauren Wroe
Over the last decade, the authors have conducted ethnographic, embedded and activist research with policy-makers, professionals, families and young people impacted by ‘county lines’ policing. They joined forces in this article to unpick government policies relating to dealers in ‘county lines’ drug trafficking cases, particularly its emphasis on multi-agency work, co-location, information sharing and intelligence gathering across different government bodies. Koch, Williams and Wroe chart the process by which ‘county lines’ emerged as a logical extension of the government’s racist and classist language surrounding ‘gangs’, knife crime and ‘youth violence’.
‘County lines’ is located as a continuity and extension of the Ending Gangs and Youth Violence (EGYV) programme, introduced in 2011, after police shot and killed Mark Duggan. In 2015, the EGYV programme was rebranded as Ending Gang Violence and Exploitation (EGVE), incorporating and centring the exploitation of children in the gangs’ story and naming tackling county lines as top of six priorities. The similarities between ‘county lines’ cohort lists and those of the Met’s Violent Gangs Matrix (VGM) in the name of safeguarding are discussed.
Policies implemented in the name of safeguarding the vulnerable are now acting as a gateway for criminalisation, not just under drugs laws but under the Modern Slavery Act 2015 which has been repurposed by the courts to deal with drugs issues. The racialised construction of the ‘Black drug dealer’ is linked to s23 of the Drugs Misuse Act 1971 which paved the way for racially minoritised groups to be over-represented in police-recorded searches for drugs. With the advent of the Modern Slavery Act, law enforcement began to exploit opportunities to use the legislation to prosecute drug dealers for human trafficking offences, with county lines treated as a form of ‘criminal exploitation’.
Volume 65, no 4, 2024
Racist inferences and flawed data: drill rap lyrics as criminal evidence in group prosecutions
Eithne Quinn
Quinn, a professor of cultural studies, draws on criminal cases identified by the project ‘Prosecuting Rap: Criminal Justice and UK Black Experience Culture’, to dissect the ways in which the state uses violent rap lyrics to build secondary liability in group prosecutions, thereby targeting young Black people through their expressive culture. She takes apart the Crown Prosecution Services’ charging recommendations for prosecutions including the CPS guidance on gang-related offences in relation to the admissibility of gang evidence, also calling for greater scrutiny of the use of police as ‘in field’ authorities on rap in the courtroom. Quinn warns that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 has handed the police even broader, ill-defined powers through Serious Violence Reduction Orders that expand guilt-by-association
The article revolves around a discussion of a 2020 joint enterprise murder case in London, in which Quinn served as a rap expert. At the core of dragnet Rap group prosecutions lies the joint enterprise doctrine, with young Black people being the most victimised by its Secondary Liability rules, leading to the formation of campaigning organisations like JENGbA, which launched a successful action against the CPS’s failure to record data on the age, race, sex and disability of those prosecuted under the joint enterprise doctrine. Art Not Evidence, a campaign which calls for the restriction of the use of artistic expression in criminal trials, is also cited.
Majority Jury Verdicts in England and Wales: a vestige of white supremacy?
Nisha Waller and Naima Sakande
This article, by two researchers linked to the legal charity APPEAL, prompts a critical revaluation of the evolution of the English jury system. Historically, the English and Welsh legal system required a unanimous decision from all twelve jurors for a conviction. This was changed following the introduction of the 1967 Criminal Justice Act, allowing a prosecutor to secure a guilty verdict with the agreement of just 10 of 12 jurors, removing a safeguard against wrongful conviction. The 1967 Criminal Justice Act was preceded by a Home Office appointed Departmental Committee on Jury Service (Morris Committee) which was established amidst fears that the ‘labouring classes’ ‘immigrants’ and ‘coloureds’ would negatively impact on jury quality.
Drawing parallels with the 2020 landmark case in the Unites States, Ramos v Louisiana that outlawed majority verdicts amid recognition of their racially prejudices origins, the authors expose the racist and classist prejudices behind the shift from unanimous to majority verdicts in England and Wales in 1967, also documenting intense surveillance and prosecution of Black Power activists under the Race Relations Act 1965 and making reference to the wrongful convictions of the Oval 4. Drawing on archival materials, including the IRR’s Black History Collection and Home Office files, the authors demonstrate that this procedural change coincided with public anxieties about ‘coloured’ immigration, the rise of Black Power and anti-racist activism.
Volume 66, no. 1, 2024.
Anti-Palestinian racism and the criminalisation of international solidarity in Europe.
Liz Fekete
In a piece that foregrounds the attack on the Palestinian diaspora in Europe since 7 October 2023 in relation to Israel/Palestine, the author looks at the interplay between anti-Palestinian racism and the right to protest and the way it has been rolled out in different western European countries in a carefully calibrated strategy to force pro-Palestinian demonstrators off the streets, backed by the use of escalating force. She argues that the British media (which have infiltrated online chat groups, to encourage police prosecutions, and in one case infiltrated Palestine Action and passed on information to the police), have whipped up an exaggerated sense of threat. It is used to justify the police’s strategy of using Section 12 (1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 (which criminalises the expression of opinions supportive of a banned organisation) against prominent Palestine solidarity activists, as well as sections 12 and 14 of the 1986 Public Order Act to harry the organisers of demonstrations by placing an ever-expanding number of penalties and conditions against them. The Met’s response to the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza and its impact on London also included the intensive retrospective trawling of images of demonstrators, as well as social media posts, in order to bring prosecutions, including for antisemitic incidents. A ‘Hate Crime Protest Leaflet’ distributed at a national ceasefire demonstration in London is referred to, as is the arrest in Manchester of Masha Khawaja, for chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ and an FOI request that led to the release of public order arrest data from Operation Brocks from October to December 2023.
Volume 66, no 4, 2025
Repression and resistance: counter-terror raids target Kurdish community in London
Iida Käyhkö
A doctoral student in security studies, Käyhkö situates armed raids and arrests on the Kurdish Community Centre in Haringey, north London, within post-2001 counter-terrorism targeting of the Kurdish community. Paddy Hillyard’s concept of a ‘suspect community’, evolved in relation to the state’s response to Irish Republicanism, is vital for understanding the criminalisation not of action or conduct, but identity and affiliation, based on – usually racialised – notions of social networks in which criminality and danger are endemic. Käyhkö sees the Prevention of Terror Act (PTA, 1974) as important for laying the ground for the Terrorism Act 2000, seeing a connection between the suppression of the Irish, and Muslim and political diaspora communities connected to ongoing struggles for anti-colonial liberation. Central to counter-insurgency approaches is proscription, a system of ‘permanent containment’. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is central to the cultural and political life of Kurds, both in Kurdistan and the diaspora, was banned by the British government in 2001.Today, apart from those linked to the PKK, those identified with the Kurdistan Freedom Movement (KFM) have been added to no-fly list lists and/or had their banks accounts closed, with community centres raided, all consequences of proscription.
But as already indicated, Käyhkö’s primary focus is a raid on the Kurdish Community Centre in north London and private addresses that took place on 27 November 2024, as part of an investigation into suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) activity, leading to charges being brought against six people for membership of a terrorist organisation. She describes the hypermilitarized nature of the raids, during which Haringey’s airspace was temporary closed, concluding that these raids represented an ‘unprecedented escalation in the scale and seriousness of political repression’