In August 1976, women employed at the Grunwick photo processing plant in north west London walked out on strike. 30 years later, in 2006, women employees at Gate Gourmet, a factory that prepared in-flight meals for British Airways, also walked out.
This book describes how these two groups of women were led to take industrial action – and their subsequent betrayal by the trade unions. Their stories are set against an academic account of migrant settlement, work and family life in the…
Over 50 people gathered in London on Saturday 10 November to celebrate the launch of a new book, The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence. The event was a welcome mix of hearing from different authors (people of colour and also white) about the work they had contributed, followed by a thoughtful Q and A and discussion, refreshments and more incisive observations by the rapper Lowkey and…
As I write, Britain is in the middle of the most extraordinary political uncertainty as it tries to leave the European Union (EU). As we pointed out before the referendum, Brexit…
Not a single national newspaper reported the National Unity Demonstration Against Racism and Fascism in central London on 17 November (though many did cover the Extinction Rebellion civil disobedience that day).
60,000 people gathered from around the country, particularly trade union branches and local Labour parties.
Speakers included Labour MP Catherine West, Labour MEP Claude Moraes, Len McCluskey of Unite the Union, and Mark Serwotka, the new president of the Trades…
A new book, The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence, published by Zed Books is being launched on Saturday 10 November in London. Peace News contributor Marc Hudson conducted an email interview with one of the book's three editors, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, presidential fellow in…
Goal: For non-white women in urban areas to no longer be required to carry documents proving formal employment.
SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC GOALS: 4 points / 6
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 1 / 3
The anti-pass campaign took place in the Orange Free State in South Africa to protest against non-white South African women being required to carry documentation of formal employment. ‘Non-white’ is a term that was often used in South Africa to classify non-European ethnicities…
PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series continues with this showcase for the writing of the legendary science fiction (SF) writer and memoirist Samuel R. Delany, featuring the title novella, Delany’s famous 1998 essay ‘Racism in Science Fiction’, and an interview with Delany by series editor Terry Bisson.
Clocking-in at seventy-two pages, The Atheist in the Attic centres on the famous November 1676 meeting between the philosophers Leibniz and Spinoza (the latter the atheist…
This book grapples with the puzzling, and seemingly sudden, political trend that has seen much of mainstream European politics shift firmly into the right (and arguably further).
Fekete offers a multifaceted approach to understanding the rise of far-right politicians such as Marine Le Pen in France and outcomes such as Brexit – developments which have baffled the left – as well as the racism underlying these currents.
She rigorously argues that governments across the…
In April 2015, the US city of Baltimore erupted in mass protests after the brutal murder by police of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man. African-American photographer Devin Allen, born and raised in Baltimore, documented the uprising without judgement. In the book of his photographs, A Beautiful Ghetto (Haymarket Books, 2017),…
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
12 July – 22 October 2017; Tate Modern; 10am – 6pm daily; £15, £13.10 concessions, under-12s free.
Mark Godfrey & Zoe Whitley
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
Tate Gallery Publishing, 2017; 240pp; £29.99
‘The fantastic…
How should we respond here in the UK to the Trump presidency? For a number of reasons, we should not focus on Trump himself – on boycotts of outlets that carry Trump-branded goods, for example.
Following Erika Thorne’s wise words elsewhere in this issue, we can focus instead on those leadership can help us turn back the dangers that confront us, those who are most threatened by Trump’s rise.
There are some inspiring things happening in the US.
I was moved…
Last year, excluding suicides, over 13,000 people in the US – including roughly 2,500 children and teenagers – were killed by firearms. In 2012 – the most recent year for which comparable statistics are available – the number of gun murders per capita in the US was nearly 30 times that in the UK.
Yet, though ‘each individual death is experienced as a family tragedy that ripples through a community,’ notes Gary Younge ‘the sum total barely earns a national shrug’. Indeed, with the…
Hsiao-Hung Pai is a Taiwanese writer who has lived in London’s East End since 1991. Over three years she spent many hours interviewing far-right extremists and campaigners, often maintaining contact with them.
’Their faces on the TV screens and the front pages of newspapers show such deep anger, hatred and, above all, alienation, yet no explanation is ever given’, she writes. ‘Surely, I thought to myself, no one’s born a bigot. So what are the circumstances that have driven them…
What, if anything, links Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate in the US, and Jeremy Corbyn, just re-elected Labour party leader here in the UK? There has been a string of articles in the mainsteam media connecting the two men – with distaste – as ‘populists’.
Back in July, Telegraph columnist Janet Daley trumpeted that ‘Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are warning signs that something terrible is happening to politics’. She…
The climate crisis is a racist crisis. That was the message of a Black Lives Matter UK protest at London City Airport on 6 September, when nine activists used a tripod and chains to close down a runway for over six hours, grounding over 130 flights.
The action sparked two debates. One was about the relevance of climate change, aviation and pollution to the anti-racist struggle.
Black Lives Matter UK (BLM) said: ‘Black people are the first to die, not the first to fly,…
