Race is once more central to British politics—from Black Lives Matter to the ethnically diverse Tory government’s obsession with deporting refugees, and the rise of a far right claiming that white people are being oppressed by “wokeness”. Several new books… Continue Reading
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement of 2020 was arguably the most inspiring movement against racism in recent decades.1 It represented the largest social movement in the history of the United States and forced discussions about racism onto the agenda… Continue Reading
The eruption of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on the 25 May was a spectacular highlight to the eerie summer of 2020. In the United States alone, an… Continue Reading
Avtar Singh Jouhl is the national president of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA GB) and was a leading workplace militant and anti-racist activist in the Smethwick area and in the foundries of the West Midlands from the late 1950s through… Continue Reading
A review of Evan Smith, British Communism and the Politics of Race (Haymarket, 2018), £24.99 Evan Smith’s book deals with the Communist Party of Great Britain and anti-racism from 1945 to the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Aiming for… Continue Reading
The Anti Nazi League and the mass movement it generated in the late 1970s is one of the great achievements of the revolutionary left in post-war Britain. The experience is particularly important today with the growth of the far right… Continue Reading
Internationally the neoliberal order continues to implode. Donald Trump seems intent on pursuing trade wars with both the United States’ strategic rival China and allies such as the European Union and Canada, while he embraces détente with North Korea, once… Continue Reading
On 20 April 1968 Enoch Powell gave a talk in a small upstairs room to 85 Tories in Birmingham’s Midland Hotel. The words of this Conservative shadow minister and MP for nearby Wolverhampton South West were not directed towards these… Continue Reading
This is the story of how a bar-room shooting involving one “Stag” Lee Shelton became one of the most prominent narratives of 20th century popular culture in America: William Lyons, 25, colored, a levee hand, living at 1410 Morgan Street,… Continue Reading
A review of Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015), £12.99, Lewis R Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015), £28.49 and Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: The… Continue Reading