Placards wait ahead of an anti-racism march in London, in which speakers expressed anger at the Illegal Migration Bill.

The hidden class politics of the UK’s immigration debate

Liberals preach cultural tolerance to the working classes while inflicting death-by-policy on migrants Government ministers warned of an influx of migrants overwhelming public services. Newspaper headlines declared war on imagined armies of welfare cheats invading Britain through easily penetrated borders. Plans to build accommodation centres for asylum seekers were abandoned in the face of local…

Training is the Graveyard of Struggle: An Anti-Racist History

The following is the text of a talk given at Goldsmiths College’s Department of Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies on December 11, 2020. Anti-racist training should not be part of the demands we make because it’s the easiest way for our struggles to be co-opted and defanged. Training as a solution implies theories of racism…

The West is Dying – of Narcissism

In his signature 2001 general election speech, Conservative party leader William Hague argued that four more years under Tony Blair would turn Britain into “a foreign land” governed from Brussels and overrun with asylum seekers. Labour “thinks Britain would be alright if only we had a different people,” he claimed. The implication was that a…

Communities of Resistance book cover

On A. Sivanandan’s Communities of Resistance

Below is the introduction to a new edition of A. Sivanandan’s classic collection of essays Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. A. Sivanandan was the foremost intellectual of the black working-class movement in Britain during its insurgent heyday from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The essays collected here, written between…

Disembowel Enoch Powell

Fifty years ago, British politician Enoch Powell set the template for a racist neoliberal populism that has reached its apotheosis today. On April 20, 1968, British member of parliament Enoch Powell addressed a small meeting of conservative activists in a Birmingham hotel and called for the “re-emigration” of the million or so people of color…

The right-wing populism that drove Brexit can only be fought with a genuinely radical alternative

For the first time in British political history, a far-right political movement, fuelled by Islamophobia and nativism, has won in a national poll. Yet more than a week after the Brexit vote, Britain’s mainstream political commentators have been unable to state that simple fact. Instead, they see the vote as either a legitimate protest against…

Violence comes home: an interview

ISIS’s recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology. More radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem. After the Paris attacks, what are the logical and tragic consequences of war with no geographical limits? In this interview, published by openDemocracy, the ramifications of the…