Anti-Racism

In the USA, police shot and killed 1,004 people in 2019. The comparable figure for the UK is 3, for France 26, for Germany 11. The USA has 655 people in jail per 100,000 population. The UK’s figure, high by world standards, is 140. The Netherlands, 54. The USA had 12 deaths in police custody per 100,000 arrests last year; the UK, two. US police make three arrests per year per 100 population; the UK, a more typical figure, one. Social provision in the USA is weaker than in most relatively well-off countries. In many well-off countries, even in poorer districts, generally “the state” means...

Momentum Internationalists has launched an open letter calling for Keir Starmer to withdraw his criticism of protesters who pulled down statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol and instead back their action. Please add your name: bit.ly/starmercolston The issue with Starmer is wider. Beyond the Colston remark and a few anti-racist platitudes, he has been largely silent in this crisis. Neither his record as Director of Public Prosecutions — for example failure to prosecute the police killers of Jean Charles de Menezes, or aggressive prosecution of people after the 2011 riots — nor his...

I was in the mess room when the shouting started. I paid no attention at first. I knew the demo in central London [3 June] had been big, but didn’t really twig whether people would be out on a Wednesday afternoon and how they would get there and get home. “Jay, I think you should come out here”, F, who is covering on another station, radios through. I get into the ticket hall. It’s not normal peak-time busy, but its busier than normal. Yeah, people are shouting, but it’s not an aggressive protest in the station. The manager obviously feels differently and is rushing to try and close some of...

There was a discussion at our National Executive Committee of PCS about the Black Lives Matter protests in the USA. There was overwhelming support for the struggle against racism and police brutality. Some comrades did raise safety concerns about mass gatherings at a time when the threat from the virus is still high, and BAME people have been disproportionately affected. The issues will be discussed further within the union, as we want members to be able to protest safely. Racial inequality is an industrial issue in the civil service. As well as the virus disproportionately impacting BAME...

A radio interviewer asked David Nabarro, World Health Organisation special envoy on Covid-19, what he’d say to the interviewer’s (or Nabarro’s) young adult children about the Black Lives Matter protests. Nabarro replied: “Yes, of course, you go [to the protests]. Because it matters. This is so important. “But you wear a mask, and you keep it on properly. You keep physical distance, and it can be done...” He added: “It’s probably on the transport going to and from [the protests] that the risks are greatest”. The (mostly) young people who have gone on the streets against racism are right to do...

With Biden currently well ahead in the polls for the November US Presidential Election, we should be very concerned about how Trump’s cult of street thugs, simpletons, and Klansman are going to react when he loses the presidential election. They are convinced there is a conspiracy from the “deep state” and that the election will likely be rigged against him, despite all the evidence suggesting it is in fact his Republican Party who are attempting to rig it through attacks on the press and voter suppression. We have seen over the past month two different sides of America, both prepared to...

On 25 May, George Floyd, 46, died after being arrested by police outside a shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Crime and policing" is the intro by a Workers' Liberty activist in the second of a five-part series of meetings "The state, crime, prisons and the police". Upcoming meetings in this series and beyond can be found here . Part one here . Video: See Workers' Liberty's channel for other videos and playlists. See the above video on facebook and on twitter Audio: Workers' Liberty · Crime and policing — 2/5 in The state, crime, prisons and the police Download, listen to, and subscribe to all our audio here. The Labour party went into the 2019 election calling for police increases larger than the...

With migrant workers making up the vast majority of recent Covid-19 cases in Singapore, there are renewed calls for the government to reduce Singapore's dependence on migrant labour. On the surface, this appears to be a progressive proposal, given that it is being made in response to the cramped and unsanitary nature of the migrant worker dormitories. In reality, however, these are xenophobic demands to reduce the number of foreigners and these demands have nothing to do with improving conditions in migrant worker dormitories. Many have compared migrant labour to a drug to which Singapore is...

Katrina Faccenda is a Labour Party activist in Edinburgh and Labour candidate for the Scottish parliamentary seat of Edinburgh Northern and Leith. She talked with Sacha Ismail. This crisis has starkly highlighted all sorts of inequalities and made them glaring. Vulnerable people are now much more vulnerable – people in poverty, women, BAME communities. It’s an indicator not so much of how awful the pandemic is, as how dysfunctional our society was even before. At the same time, we’ve seen the power trade unions can have when they actually put their mind to it, winning victories and concessions...