While liberal antiracists argue over vocabulary, radicals take direct action – which is the only way to change the system In news that ought to please antiracist campaigners everywhere, just recently everybody seems to be talking about antiracism. Chief executives such as Larry Fink of BlackRock, one of the most powerful financial companies in the…
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…
Borders uphold a global system of apartheid – and we should demand nothing less than their abolition. In this interview, activist and writer Harsha Walia lays out how borders and citizenship maintain colonial axes of power. From Fortress Europe outsourcing border control far into the African continent in exchange for aid, to Canada securing the…
Governments around the world have used the pandemic as an excuse to expand their powers. Populations have been divided on the basis of race and class into those deserving of protection and those perceived as risky and to be controlled. Migrants, refugees, precarious workers, and racialized groups have faced vulnerability and repression. Many Western liberals,…
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…
To neoliberal states, the pandemic is a racialized security threat and a market opportunity. Our fight is for the right to breathe — in every sense. Ruling elites are pursuing the convergence of two dreams in their response to COVID-19: a state dream and a market dream. The state dream entails emptying public space of…
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…
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…
Politicians talk tough on immigration but fail to recognise Britain’s underlying demand for a highly exploitable workforce. Almost 40 years after Enoch Powell delivered his anti-immigrant rivers of blood speech, Britain is still unable to move beyond his grim legacy. In recent weeks, we have returned once more to the old paradigm he popularised…
This essay on New Labour, digital media, and network ideologies appeared in The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony, edited by Lee Artz and Yahya R. Kamalipour (State University of New York Press, 2003) Over the last five years, so much has been written about the internet and the so-called knowledge economy that it may appear…