For equality, against bigotry

The sweeping victory of the Forward Momentum slate in the Momentum national coordinating group election means that every candidate elected bar one signed the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights pledges. Candidates in the Momentum election supporting the Momentum Internationalists platform signed up to them, but criticised the pledge which suggests an emphasis on exclusions from the party rather than challenging transphobia in vigorous debate. Many candidates on the conservative left/Stalinist Momentum Renewal slate signed the LCTR pledges but four did not, for reasons that are worth paying...

Arguments against strengthening the rights of transgender people, on both right and left, are often posed through a false counterposition with women’s rights. Those making them frequently accuse trans rights advocates of ignoring “women’s views”, “women’s concerns” and so on. New polling by YouGov, commissioned by PinkNews, undermines these arguments even further. (See here for the full results.) Men in the UK agree that “a person should... be able to self-identify as a gender different to the one they were born in” 43% to 33% (the rest say they don’t know). Women agree 57-21. As you’d expect...

This page brings together various anti-racist resources to learn about anti-racist movements, and arm yourself with ideas to beat back racism: readings and pamphlets, video and audio.

• This story is told in more detail in the pamphlet Workers against slavery: the US Civil War, the First International and the British working class • For a shorter version of the following article, see the PDF of Solidarity issue 554 In the 1860s, through a four year, 600,000-death civil war, slavery in the United States was destroyed. The defeat of revolutionary movements unleashed by the war, above all movements of the ex-slaves, created the system of white supremacy and racial segregation which endured till the 1960s and whose legacy shapes the US today. Solidarity has told this story...

On 16 June Public Health England published a report, Beyond the Data: Understanding the Impact of COVID-19 on BAME Groups (see here). PHE have produced a striking summary of the multiple ways in which the Covid-19 crisis is far more of a crisis for black and brown people (and some other ethnic minorities such as Travellers) in the UK. The findings confirm that the Tories’ sacrifice of many thousands of lives to the interests of profit and their neo-liberal and nationalist ideology is not just an assault on the whole working class but specifically racist. However, the recommendations are...

Far right mobilisations were held in London, Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow, Newcastle, and beyond, on 13-14 June, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. In London, thousands of far-right demonstrators took to the streets, ostensibly in defence of memorials and statues. Bristol saw hundreds, perhaps 500, with similar numbers in Leeds and Glasgow. The organisers of the Black Lives Matter demonstration in London called off Saturday’s planned demonstration for this reason. London Anti-Fascist Assembly cancelled their planned counter-demonstration to this far-right threat. Many involved were hit...

The Momentum Renewal faction in Momentum's national coordinating group election has put up a statement which centres on a claim that Workers’ Liberty supports "banning Islamic headscarves in schools”. This claim is untrue. The AWL opposes bans on the hijab, including in schools. We have hosted arguments for a ban specifically among children in primary school, both by a minority of our own members (who proposed an unsuccessful motion to change our position to support that) and by left-wing Muslim-background feminists from outside our organisation, whose voices we believe deserve serious...

The Office of National Statistics compile statistics on the number of Hate Crimes reported each year. They have more than doubled since 2012 to 103,000 in 2018-19. Of those, nearly 79,000 were race hate crimes. Between April 2018 and March 2019 the police made 376,000 stop and searches In England and Wales, a rate of 7 per 1,000 people. The rate for white people, however was 4 per 1,000 and for Black people 38 per 1,000.

The murder of George Floyd has sparked a global movement against racism and police brutality. The discussion of racist violence and police repression have again shone a spotlight on how dangerous it is to be a black man in America. But by viewing the criminal justice system as the frontline of structural racism and men as the primary participants, we risk ignoring the violence which is a day to day reality for black women. Black women’s interaction with the state, through law enforcement, is marked by violence. Black women are murdered by the police. They are assaulted and injured by the...

On Saturday 6 June 6,000 people (equivalent of 45,000 in Britain) demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the plan of the new Netanyahu-Gantz coalition government to formally annex large parts of the West Bank to Israel, thus creating a bar against any future Palestinian state being more than a collection of scattered patches of land. Netanyahu has long threatened annexation, and now the government talk of moving on 1 July. Police initially tried to ban the protest on virus-control grounds, but backed down. The Joint List of Israeli-Arab parties, the soft-left Meretz, and the grassroots movement...