Anti-Racism

The UK’s fertility regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has found that IVF outcomes have varied widely for Black, Asian and minority ethnic background patients compared to white patients. The report, issued December 2023, gives data up to 2021. The average IVF birth rate per embryo transferred has increased across all ethnic groups. However, Black and Asian patients aged 18-37 had lower birth rates at 23% and 24% respectively in 2020-1. White patients had 32%. Single Black and Asian patients are also accessing fertility treatment far later than their white...

Proud Valley , the second film I’m highlighting for the 40th anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, was directed by Penrose Tennyson in 1939. It was the last British film to feature the Black American activist, singer and actor Paul Robeson. He plays David Goliath, an American sailor stranded in Cardiff, who makes his way up the valleys to find work at a colliery. He is accepted into the community, partly due to his splendid singing voice which immediately assures him a place in the colliery choir. However, all is not well. An underground explosion kills the choirmaster and the management...

In February 2018, Lee Anderson was suspended from a council Labour group after hiring a digger and placing concrete blocks to stop Travellers camping in a car park. The Tories welcomed him in, and made him deputy chair of the Conservative Party in 2023. Now many Tories are agitating against Sunak’s embarrassed withdrawing of the Tory whip from Anderson for ranting: “the Islamists have got control of... [London mayor Sadiq] Khan and they’ve got control of London, and they’ve got control of Starmer as well... “People are just turning up in their thousands, and doing anything they want... Khan...

Recent legislation — namely the Police, Crime, and Sentencing Act (2022) — gives the government new powers which are intended to push out the Roma way of life. Roma-government relations have become more strained as a result, and access to resources a harder and more weary battle. The Act does a number of things, the most problematic of which is the criminalisation of “trespassing” on public and private property. At the same time as attacking the right to protest, it clamps down on the act of traversing land, a central element of Roma culture. It is one of the worst attacks on the community in...

Adam Keller, a longstanding peace activist in Israel, spoke to Solidarity in December 2023

We have the impression that xenophobia is on the rise in France, and that this xenophobia targets particularly the Muslims. What does that mean in practice? Verbal or physical attacks on the street? Bullying of Muslim colleagues at work? Muslim pupils in schools? Who is mobilising for this xenophobia - who are its agents? Like the majority of French Arab-Muslims, I use the term Islamophobia because what we are experiencing is much more complex than just racism. For example, people who have converted to Islam are subject to an extreme violence that cannot simply be attributed to the fact that...

Between the 1880s, when state coercion swelled a previously much smaller-scale system of similar institutions, and the last school closing in 1997, something like 150,000 children from Canada’s indigenous peoples — First Nations, Métis and Inuits — were effectively incarcerated in residential schools. In the 1930s, this included one third of indigenous children. Most of the “residential schools” were run by Catholic organisations; at the system’s height in 1931, 44 out of 81, though only a quarter of Canada’s population was Catholic and, unlike Ireland, it was not a Catholic state. In 1969...

Suella Braverman’s sacking as Home Secretary on Monday 13 November shows much about the direction of, and tensions within, the Conservative Party. The immediate reason for Braverman’s dismissal was her refusal to expurgate the most egregious parts of her article in The Times of 8 November, but the underlying reasons are more political. Braverman has consciously and cynically shifted to a hard-right position. It would appear that some of this was licenced by Number 10, but tension between her and the core round Sunak has become more evident recently. She asserted in September that...

Bradley Onishi’s book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next is an attempt to trace back from the 6 January 2021 riot at the Capitol the influence of White Christian Nationalism (WCN) and see how it has become, according to Onishi, a core part of the Trump-MAGA movement. He concludes that 6 January will not be the last attempt at a coordinated, violent insurrection against democracy. He also tells his personal story about how he became a born-again Evangelical in Orange County, California, a teenage zealot in the Rose Drive Friends Church...

A referendum to “recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) Voice” in the Australian Constitution will be held on 14 October. Prior to January 1788, about 750,000 people in more than 500 First Nations groups lived on the continent. Then an invasion began, with soldiers, convicts, and settlers bringing disease, and driving First Nations people off their ancestral lands, which had sustained their bodies, culture and spirits for over 60,000 years. First Nations people never ceded their sovereignty. They resisted dispossession...