When racists rage against racism
The controversy that started last week when someone dug up a five-year-old Facebook comment by Jeremy Corbyn on a picture of an anti-Semitic mural by an obscure London artist has not gone away. What...
Category: Racism
Why Aditya Chakrabortty (may have) called himself Paul
This morning I saw a Twitter thread (starts here, ends here) from Haringey councillor Joe Goldberg, purporting to expose the middle-classness and inauthenticity of the pro-little-people and anti-establishment stance of the Guardian columnist Aditya...
Review: Panorama, “White Fright”
Last night a 30-minute Panorama programme was shown on BBC1 that looked at Blackburn, a town of about 140,000 in Lancashire (north-western England) where the white British majority live largely separate lives from the...
Look after your health, and fight for your healthcare
Earlier today Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner who was choked to death by New York police for illegally selling cigarettes in 2014 (one of a series of unarmed Black Americans, mostly men,...
Otto Frank and the editing of Anne Frank’s diary
An online women's publication called "The Establishment" last year published an article attacking the editing of Anne Frank's diary by her father, Otto Frank, for publication in the 1940s after the death of the...
How Labour’s researchers passed up a chance to expose Tory racism
Yesterday Theo Bertram, a former advisor to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, posted a tweet thread (starts here, ends here) on his work as part of Labour's research team during the 2005 general election...
Following in Grandpa Phil’s footsteps
It's long been a cliché that Prince William represents a "new generation" of British royalty who are unencumbered by the prejudices and stifling customs of their grandparents in particular — the ones who got...
On British Muslims and US racial politics
Recently I've noticed a trend among Muslims in the online community of associating Muslims and Islam with 'brown-ness' and in opposition to 'whiteness' as well as the uncritical parroting of dogmas which are in...
Labour, anti-Zionism and the past
The controversy over supposed anti-Semitism on the left of the Labour party continues, with the Times publishing an article (paywalled) the other day proclaiming that Jeremy Corbyn had been called upon to throw out...
On Stephen Kinnock and regulation of labour markets
Earlier today I saw a Twitter thread posted by the Labour MP Stephen Kinnock (son of Neil) who is a member of the Brexit select committee in Parliament (starting here, ending here, claiming among...
UKIP, the ‘burqa’ and FGM
Over the weekend the so-called UK Independence Party published as part of its 2017 election manifesto an "integration agenda" which includes a ban on face coverings, which it describes as a "deliberate barrier to...
Labour an “Apartheid party”? Really?
There's an article in today's Mail on Sunday by Dan Hodges, a Blairite columnist and former GMB union and Labour party staffer (and son of Glenda Jackson), proclaiming that anyone who remains a member...
The alt-right’s Barry Kent
Readers of a certain age will remember the character of Barry Kent from Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole series of books about a young man growing up in the Midlands (of England) in the 1980s...
Who are ‘Liberty GB’ anyway?
Yesterday Channel 4 News broadcast a conversation involving Jack Buckby, the "outreach officer" and former parliamentary candidate for 'Liberty GB', and Barbara Ntumy, deputy president of the London Metropolitan University students' union and a...
On Black Lives Matter and Muslim participation
On Friday evening a well-known western Muslim scholar, in an interview with the British journalist Mehdi Hasan at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit (RIS) 2016 conference in Toronto, made some offensive and inaccurate remarks...
Is anti-Semitism really “a hate apart”?
Let’s be clear – antismetism is a hate apart | Howard Jacobson | Opinion | The Guardian The above is in last Sunday's Observer, and is part of a genre of articles in which...
Heathrow: No free ride for Zac Goldsmith
Today the government announced its preferred option for airport expansion in the south-east of England, and as had been expected, that was a third runway at Heathrow in west London. The other main option...
Yes, Black lives matter. But so do other people’s journeys
Last week I was working at a site just north of Heathrow airport, the quickest route to which is down the Heathrow spur and off at the bottom. On Friday morning I was returning...
Jews, Muslims, the left and “anti-Semitism”
Since I wrote my last piece on the left and claims of "anti-Semitism" against Labour students and the Left more generally, a spate of claims of anti-Semitism against various Labour politicians, two of them...
Does the Left really have an anti-Semitism problem?
Recently accusations have started flying that the Left, including the Labour party, has a 'problem' with anti-Semitism and that Jeremy Corbyn, the party's leader, hasn't been doing enough to combat it. The accusations include...