Workers' Liberty

Middle class producers at the BBC have conveniently rediscovered the working class in order to make a series that attempts to drive a wedge between workers. The vile advert designed to build some hype around the “White” series depicted a bulldog man’s face being progressively blacked out by foreign words.

Chris Rock at the Hammersmith Apollo.

Last week my seventy year old mother, who walks with the aid of a stick, was deemed a security threat by a bus driver.

By Robin Sivapalan
I read Assed’s initial article just over a week ago when I was invited by comrades in the SWP to join the Facebook group set up to defend him. On a quick reading I was pretty disappointed by what he had to say and also, from experience, I could predict the scale and type of enraged response this article would provoke.

Yves Coleman, in Paris, has written an interesting response to an Italian sociologist's article hailing the French riots of 2005. Read it here. Of particular interest to readers in Britain may be Yves' section which he entitles "The Racialisation of Social Questions Leads Nowhere",

With a Federal election looming and opinion polls consistently running against the Coalition it is no wonder that this conservative government has once again played the race card.

By Stuart Jordon

At this year’s TUC conference, the labour movement showed its weakness as it sat supine and listened to "its" unelected leader, Gordon Brown, make one of the most vicious right-wing speeches in Labour party history.

By Camila Bassi

Three phases mark the history of multiculturalism in Britain. The first starts after the period of immigration from the Commonwealth in the 1950s and 1960s.

Darren Bedford comments on the recent NAACP demonstration in Detroit, USA

A recent NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) demonstration has breathed new life into a perpetual debate surrounding offensive language in hip-hop music. It’s a debate that, for socialists, touches on issues of state censorship, racism, homophobia, misogyny, the link between politics and art and of course the power of language itself.

By Robin Sivapalan

MARGARET Hodge, Labour Minister for Industry and MP for Barking, has sparked another row over immigration and housing.

Last April, in the run-up to the local elections, she provided a rallying call to the BNP by claiming that eight out 10 people she spoke to on the doorstep were considering voting for the far right.

A report has claimed that East End schools are dividing by race.

While 17 Tower Hamlets primary schools have more than 90%+ Bangladeshi pupils, nine have fewer than 10%. Three of the borough's 15 secondaries have less than 3% Bangladeshi pupils, while two have more than 95% Bangladeshi pupils and three over 80%.

By Sacha Ismail

When it’s not busy attacking public sector workers’ miserable pensions as overly generous and telling us how easy life is for asylum-seekers, the favourite pastime of the foul Daily Express is bashing Britain’s Muslim population.

Robin Sivapalan examines the educational and social background to gangster and gun culture and starts a discussion on how institutional racism still poisons British society.

The recent anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade has prompted debate about lessons for today. One lesson is that formal, legal reforms will never bring about full equality under capitalism. Two hundred years on racism in Britain tragically continues to thrive; it is continually being reshaped by capitalist imperatives and bourgeois political concerns. It is a multi-faceted thing, taking economic, political, social and cultural forms. It is experienced on a daily basis by black and minority ethnic people in a variety of areas, including employment, public services, the law and policing, media and politics and in the streets. Mike Rowley presents an overview.

Anyone wondering what the purpose is of LUL's Black Asian and Minority Ethnic Network can find an answer in the latest On The Move - which appears to suggest that it's to help a small number of black people get into senior management jobs!

By Martin Thomas

In France’s municipal elections, on 11 and 18 June, the fascist National Front won control of its first big city, Toulon, in southern France.

It also won two smaller cities, Orange and Marignane, and generally scored well though patchily.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge has now signed Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death warrant. They plan to kill him on 17 August and thus barbourously to satisfy the racist cops who continue to campaign for his death and the blood lust of those who elected Tom Ridge as governor. Time is running out for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Time is short in which to lodge the protests and mount the pickets that may make the difference between life for Mumia-Abu Jama and a horrible death at the hands of the hired killers of the state of Pensylvania.

Ruth Kelly is determined to fight the rise of the BNP. The problem is the method by which she aims to do this – by treating foreigners in a way that the BNP would heartily approve of!

Kelly wants immigrants to learn English. Problem is, she intends to achieve this not by, erm, teaching them English, but by stopping Councils from providing translation facilities. How, exactly, will that magically enable someone to speak a language they can not speak at present?

In an otherwise useful piece in the Guardian on 17 January on the cant around the forthcoming bicentenary of slave trade abolition, Chavez-loving journalist Richard Gott manages to miss a key point – popular agitation.

By Colin Foster

The Sun put this on its front page the day after the arrest of nine people in Birmingham: "A vile terrorist plot to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier in Britain was smashed yesterday.

No matter how hard David Cameron tries to appear all cuddly and progressive, his party salwarts can't seem to help letting the racism slip out.

His porcine cheeks ruddy with the burst veins of the long-haul serious whisky drinker, looking like an overfed pork butcher on a spree, Nick Griffin, Führer of the fascist British National Party, emerged from the Crown Court in Leeds spluttering with triumph and vindication. He praised the jury. He denounced the politicians. He told people how wonderful the BNP is.

By Sacha Ismail

I'm not, shall we say, an avid reader of the Daily Express, but its frontpage headline today (Saturday 18 November) caught my eye. "Fury over halal Christmas dinner" shout big letters, over an article bizarrely devoted to a "story" about one school in Rotherham deciding to serve its children halal chicken rather than turkey.

Workers at the Daily Star forced their bosses to scrap a planned anti-Muslim tirade when the National Union of Journalists chapel passed a resolution that the page should be pulled and threatened strike action to back it up.

If you haven't heard about this already you might like to look at this article.

Its about a Tory councillor and prospective Parliamentary candidate, Ellenor Bland, sending a horrendously racist poem around the office. She says she recieved it from her husband, who is also a Tory councillor. This just gets better.

Remember that story a few weeks back about how "Muslim louts" had vandalised a house in order to prevent returning squaddies from living there? It was one of a rash of disgracefully bigoted stories pointing an accusing finger at Muslims - and whipping up hatred against immigrants in general.

The BBC’s programme Shoot the Messenger caused a bit of a furore. When I sat down to watch it I was already aware that its working title had been Fuck Black People. To say the least I felt somewhat uncomfortable, not least because this a story about a black IT worker whose idealism leads him to become a teacher — which is also a remarkably accurate description of me (though my idealism is of a different brand). Although I didn’t get to relax during the course of the programme, the nature of my discomfort changed.

By Sean Matgamna

Do Muslim women in Britain have the right under law to wear the hijab or the niqab (face-covering veil)? Yes, they do.
Has anybody challenged their legal right to dress as they feel their religion demands? Not that I know of.
Is it appropriate for a government minister, Jack Straw, to publicly criticise the religious observances of the Muslim community? No, surely, it is not!