Anti-Racism

On Monday 15 October I attended a meeting on behalf of my union branch, Lambeth Unison, to discuss the setting up a local Labour Against Racism and Fascism network.

The meeting was attended by Secretaries and BAME Forum members from 14 South London local Labour Parties, as well as union reps.

The meeting was initiated by activists in Dulwich and West Norwood CLP who had been alarmed by the rise of new far-right street movements in the UK, led by the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA), and coalescing around the #FreeTommy movement.

On 17 October a protest was called outside the council meeting at Wandsworth Town Hall to protest against the Tory council's racism. The event was called after two incidents. The borough's Black History Month was replaced with a 'diversity month' in an attempt to depoliticise the event.

Somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people marched through Berlin on Saturday 14 October in a protest against “racism, social exclusion and the shift to the right (‘Rechtsruck’)”.

The “#Indivisible” demonstration was backed by a range of individuals and organisations — around 4,500 of them — that Stand Up to Racism could only dream of. Official publicity for the demonstration declared:

Last month saw the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie’s sprawling novel defies summary: interlinking stories meld scurrilous fantasies, dark humour and cutting political satire directed not only at Islam, but British racism and Indian immigrants’ attempts to adapt. It is an honest attempt to deal with the warping pressures of racism, religion and cultural dislocation.

Tory politician Boris Johnson has provoked a scandal by writing, in a Daily Telegraph article opposing Denmark's ban on Islamic face veils, that women who wear them“look like bank robbers” and “letter boxes”.

On the last Friday in July Serco emailed less than a dozen public authorities and NGOs in Glasgow to inform them that as of the following Monday it would be implementing a policy of changing the locks on the accommodation of asylum-seekers who had been refused asylum.

It is unlikely that the timing of the announcement was coincidental. The Scottish and UK Parliaments were both in recess, as too was Glasgow City Council.

On Tuesday 31 July Indianapolis welder Antoine Dangerfield filmed what became a viral video, watched over 2 million times in two days, of a wildcat strike by Latino construction workers building a new UPS hub.

In the video and in a subsequent interview with Jacobin magazine Dangerfield explains that some Latino workers, working for a different contractor but in the same hub were ordered to go home (effectively sacked) by a white boss he calls racist.

On 21 July 2018, a demo called by supporters of English Defence League co-founder and far-right activist Tommy Robinson ended quickly in humiliation. In sharp contrast to the thousands of Robinson supporters on the streets of London the Saturday before, the Cambridge ‘Free Tommy’ demo had a turnout of 35 at most.

No Problem Here — Understanding Racism in Scotland challenges “the conventional ‘race-blind’ narratives that Scotland and its elites have crafted over many years,” according to which “Scotland does not have a serious racism problem.”

This “now powerful myth that there is ‘no problem here’” has put down even deeper roots in recent years as a result of “the new common sense of Scottish politics, the dominant story that has been forged by the SNP and others.”

July saw the one-man circus that is President Donald Trump smear its rancid trail across Europe.

Most eye-catching was Trump’s support for the anti-immigrant racism of the European populist right. He re-told the standard cultural racist narrative to the Sun, saying that immigration had “changed the fabric” of the continent “I think you are losing your culture.”