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
In 2013, during his time as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson gave a lecture to city bankers in which he said: Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality… Continue Reading
There is currently a welcome call to “decolonise” universities and academia.1 This is about more than demanding the removal of statues of old imperialists. The movement sets out to end the dominance of conservative white men as the repositories of… Continue Reading
A review of Jim Wolfreys, Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France (Hurst, 2018), £14.99 This April, French president Emmanuel Macron urged Catholic bishops to “engage once again” with the “political scene” and “repair” the relationship between… Continue Reading
The following lyrics were written by an anonymous black soldier in the 54th Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment, one of the first black combat regiments, at the height of the Civil War in the United States (1861-5). They undermine the pernicious myth… Continue Reading
Within weeks of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, news and media channels were dominated by charges of antisemitism levelled against his supporters, the National Union of Students and others for their opposition to the State of Israel. The furore… Continue Reading
The British vote on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union was a bitter blow for the establishment, big business, the international financial institutions, the rich and the politicians.1 With only minor exceptions they had united to support a… Continue Reading
In August 2014 unarmed 18 year old black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson. Brown was shot six times including twice to the head, despite having… Continue Reading
Racism, according to the New Labour communities secretary John Denham, is on the decline. The government’s progress in promoting racial equality in the last decade is, he argues, substantially responsible for this state of affairs.1 Denham’s claim is astonishing in… Continue Reading