Brown leaves Leicester following BNP row

Preston North End have signed Wayne Brown following the defender’s departure from Leicester City by mutual consent.

Brown was left out of Leicester’s squad for their play-off semi-final matches against Cardiff after he angered teammates, including PFA chairman Chris Powell, by revealing he had voted BNP in the recent general election.

At the time, PFA Deputy Chief Executive Bobby Barnes expressed his disappointment at Brown’s decision.

The PFA has worked for many years with a number of anti-racism bodies to try and eradicate racism from the sport, at all levels, and Barnes felt Brown’s actions had ‘set the movement back’.

“Football has worked hard over the years to really be a beacon in the fight against racism and it is very discouraging to hear these comments when you think of the tireless work so many people, and so many organisations, have put in to get to where we are today.

“In my day as a player you had to contend with racist comments coming from the terraces, so for this to come from within a dressing room is very, very disappointing and our members are angry that Wayne Brown was not prepared to abide by our mission statement.”

How to beat the BNP

It is only through open debate that we can expose the BNP’s false prospectus and vile intentions, argues Margaret Hodge.

By Margaret Hodge

How the media helps the BNP

The Guardian – There was a brilliant column by Johann Hari a few years ago about his experience of appearing on a Sky News programme hosted by newspaper columnist Richard Littlejohn. Having admitted he didn’t know how much an asylum seeker got in benefits, Littlejohn screeched at Hari: “It’s people like you who help the BNP!”

Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that the election of two MEPs would bring the BNP under closer scrutiny since last year. Surely the media glare would expose its nasty underbelly? The party’s deputy leader, Simon Darby, doesn’t seem to think so:

Read more

Irresponsible election campaign may cause race riots in Britain

Wilson accuses anti-racism groups

The finance minister has criticised some anti-racism groups for what he says is their failure to have an open debate about immigration and racism.

Sammy Wilson has claimed some organisations use charges of racism to get public funding.

He said when there was “any attempt to have an honest debate” on the issue of immigration “the people involved in that were accused of being racist”.

He said racism charges coincided with appeals for money from some groups.

Mr Wilson said his remarks were made “in the context” that the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities Executive Director, Patrick Yu, had “raised the issue of racism”.

“He had raised the issue of my remarks, the fact that local people should have precedence for jobs and had raised that in the context of wanting more money for his organisation to deal with racism in Northern Ireland,” he said.

“What I had said was that first of all when there was any attempt to have an honest debate on the issue of immigration, immediately the people who were involved in that were accused of being racist.

“Secondly these charges of racism then were always coincided with the holding out of the hand for more money for the organisations which were dealing with the issue.

“From that point of view organisations like NICEM needed to keep raising this issue because that was one way of perpetuating their own existence.”

Mr Wilson said the “anti-racism industry” brought in millions of pounds and employed “scores of people”.

“Of course they have to justify their existence and now and again I think they take an unfair shot at politicians and when they do they can’t expect people to remain silent,” he added.

NICEM are expected to comment later.- BBC News

Racism continues to scar Northern Ireland

By David McKittrick

The message in the letter to immigrant communities in Belfast could not be starker or more brutal. “Get out of our Queen’s country before our bonfire night and parade day,” it declared.

Emblazoned with a skull, it descended into a mixture of the semi-literate and the directly threatening with the warning: “Other than your building will be blown up.”

The leaflet was delivered to centres in Belfast representing the city’s Islamic, Indian and Polish communities, in advance of this weekend’s high point of the loyalist marching season.

It has clearly generated worries among those communities, since all three of the centres would not comment on the threat.

But Patrick Yu, who heads the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities, said the leaflets were designed to threaten and frighten, adding: “It really is more about trying to reignite the issue.”

Just last month more than one hundred Romanians were flown out of Northern Ireland following a wave of attacks on their south Belfast homes in an episode which received worldwide publicity.

Although the letter is marked “Combat 18″ and bears loyalist slogans, the authorities do not believe that any local or outside organisation is behind this threat or other racist attacks.

The belief is that both the attacks on Romanians and the general pattern of incidents are largely the work of racist individuals, mostly teenagers, in a primitive show of xenophobia and dislike of “outsiders.”

But the major complication this weekend is that the annual 12th of July celebrations have been extended with several nights of festivities in prospect before the main Orange Order march takes place on Monday.

In the evenings loyalists gather round bonfires piled high with waste wood, unwanted furniture and old vehicle tyres. While most of these occasions pass off without serious incident, very large amounts of alcohol are consumed by many.

With large numbers of intoxicated teenagers and young men roaming the backstreets, the concern is that some of them might decide to target the homes of migrants for casual violence.

Racist incidents are already running at a rate of almost a thousand a year, mostly taking the form of attacks on migrants and their homes. Many of these live in or close to loyalist areas and are therefore vulnerable.

The police said yesterday: “Hate crimes and racially motivated attacks will not be tolerated by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It is important to point out that it is a small group of people who are responsible for these incidents.”

“Anyone out there who has information about anyone involved in the production or distribution of material which promotes or incites racism must bring that information forward.”

The police and Orange Order this year launched a joint initiative aimed at reducing the consumption of alcohol, using the slogan “Enjoy the day – make sure it’s not a blur.”

They have urged people “to behave responsibly, to show tolerance, to avoid provocation or an inappropriate response to provocation.”

July in Northern Ireland is sometimes described as a mad month when the blood can run high, with Catholic-Protestant tensions often increasing as the marching season reaches its climax.

In a familiar annual pattern, the past few weeks have seen sectarian attacks in and around Belfast and especially in County Antrim with both Protestant and Catholic premises targeted. Orange halls have been damaged in arson attacks while five Antrim Catholic churches were this week attacked with paint bombs.

All but a handful of Catholic families now remain in the village of Ahoghill, which has seen regular outbreaks of sectarian violence.

Antrim Protestant clergyman the Rev Robert Coulter said of those responsible: “These are mindless thugs who, it must be emphasised, are acting alone. This type of sectarian vandalism – be it Protestants attacking Catholic churches, or Catholics attacking Orange halls – will find no support within any community.”

Against such a background the risk is that migrant homes may present an easy and tempting target to young drunks. At court proceedings arising from previous July incidents defendants were said to have been “out of their heads” after days and nights of drinking.

The fact that racist attacks now take place at a rate of almost a thousand a year seems to indicate that they have become endemic. Due to the troubles, migration to Northern Ireland was for a long time comparatively rare.

But with the steady reduction of paramilitary violence a stream of immigrants has arrived from Poland, other European countries and further abroad in the last five years.

Almost from the start some of these new arrivals came under attack, producing claims that racism is the new sectarianism.

Official surveys have confirmed a significant level of local opposition to those moving in from abroad.

Asked in a survey if Eastern Europeans were acceptable as residents in their local area, 18 per cent of respondents said no. This figure was even higher for members of the Islamic faith: 31 per cent said these were unacceptable.- The Independent

Volunteers help Romanians following Belfast racist attacks

British Red Cross is supporting a group of more than 100 Romanian people who have been evacuated from their homes in Belfast following a spate of racist attacks.

Since 11 June, there has been a series of racist incidents and attacks on the homes of Romanian families in the south Belfast area. This tense situation came to a head on Tuesday evening (16 June), when more than 100 Romanian residents fled their homes and were taken to a church hall where they spent the night.
A team of Red Cross volunteers was immediately called out and stayed until the early hours providing food, drinks and warm clothing to the evacuated residents. They were also on hand to provide emotional support to the shocked families, several of whom had been terrorised and had their homes vandalised in the past week. The group included pregnant women, young children and one five-day-old girl.

Very frightened

Another team of volunteers arrived early the next morning to accompany the Romanian families as they were moved to the Ozone Leisure Centre in south Belfast. The Red Cross has been working alongside the Salvation Army and ethnic minority support groups.

John Lyttle, volunteering advisor, said: “Our volunteers responded very quickly and brought along vital supplies – and, just as importantly, a bit of human kindness and support – to these unfortunate and victimised residents.”

Community support

He added: “Obviously, the Red Cross condemns outright any form of discrimination. It’s also worth remembering that there’s been a marvellous groundswell of support here from the wider community that, for me, has completely over-shadowed the shameful behaviour of an unrepresentative minority.”

Margaret Ritchie, social development minister, has stated that those who fled their homes will be temporarily re-housed in the city. – British Red Cross

Also read related story:
Belfast Romanians in hiding as attacks continue (Guardian)

New campaign by PCS union

By Natasha Dhumma

Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) have launched a campaign to prohibit the employment of members of racist organisations within the Home Office and UK Border Agency.

PCS’s members believe that it is unacceptable for members of racist organisations to implement asylum and immigration policy, as their political beliefs are incompatible with performing the duties of sensitive roles such as border officers, enforcement officers and asylum caseworkers properly. The Prison and Police Services introduced a ban on the employment of British National Party, National Front and Combat 18 members and now members of the PCS union are petitioning for similar employment restrictions in Home Office departments. - Institute of Race Relations

Sign the petition here

Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS)

Remembering Kelso Cochrane

By Harmit Athwal

Next weekend, a series of events will take place in west London to remember Kelso Cochrane, one of the first recorded victims of racially motivated murder in the UK.

Fifty years ago on 17 May 1959, Kelso Cochrane, an immigrant from Antigua, was murdered in Notting Hill by a gang of White men as he walked home from a local hospital after receiving treatment for an injury he had sustained in his work as a carpenter. Kelso was stabbed and later died in hospital. His murder came a year after the Notting Hill ‘race riots’ when the Black community of Notting Hill was forced to defend itself from attacks by gangs of racist Teddy Boys. Oswald Mosley’s British Union Movement and Colin Jordan’s White Defence League were both active in the area at the time. A Union Movement member later claimed in an interview with the Sunday People that a group member was responsible for the murder. No one has ever been convicted for the murder of Kelso Cochrane.

Kelso’s funeral became a rallying point of opposition to racism and fascism and a platform for Black and White unity. Over 1,200 people lined Ladbroke Grove to pay homage and to follow the hearse as it made its way to Kensal Green cemetery. The grave, which has recently been rediscovered, is inscribed ‘From the Trades Council and his West Indian Friends’.

Fifty years on, a number of events will take place in west London culminating on Sunday 17 May with the unveiling of a blue plaque at the Grove Inn Restaurant & Bar. The events have been organised by the west London-based 1958-9 Remembered: 50 Years On Project, which has been running a year-long programme of events to remember the 1958 Notting Hill riots and to celebrate community achievement since then.

A concert will also take place on Saturday night aimed at young people, with film screenings and music by local performers and DJs, see below for a full list of events:

Can community campaigns against racism survive the new funding agenda?

By Rebecca Wood| Institute of Race Relations

IRR News explores the depoliticisation process which threatens all community-based anti-racist groups, be it via the government’s ongoing strategic partnership strategy or courtesy of the newly emerging ‘hate crimes’ agenda.

Birmingham group faces closure

Twenty years ago, Birmingham Racial Attacks Monitoring Unit (BRAMU) was established by community activists after a Home Office report found that victims of racial harassment and racist violence were reluctant to report such incidents to statutory organisations, particularly where these organisations were felt to be the source of the discrimination.

The unit has since then provided support and advice to, and campaigns on behalf of, those who have been subjected to racist discrimination, harassment or violent attacks. It has been involved in 3,500 cases and currently has 120 ongoing cases, according to its chair, Maxie Hayles.

Birmingham City Council’s Equality and Diversity Division’s £60,000 funding commitment to BRAMU terminated at the end of March. It represented the conclusion of a three-year agreement, one instalment in a long-standing relationship between the council’s equality division and the community group.

The realisation that the council would not be renewing its financial commitment to BRAMU leaves the unit in a serious financial quandary. It has issued press releases warning that it may face closure without this much-needed funding, has written to local councillors and MPs and is planning to lobby the full council meeting scheduled for 7 April 2009.

But it is not only the decision not to renew a long-standing partnership between the council and BRAMU that raises concern. A clear message has been sent to the group: change your exclusive focus on race and broaden your remit to tackle all ‘hate crimes’, because you no longer tally with the changing funding priorities at City Hall.

Adapting to the new funding streams

According to Shaquille Dixon of Birmingham’s Equality and Diversity Division, BRAMU should now ‘be seeking to adapt their services to the Hate Crimes Agenda rather than just focus on race as this could limit their opportunities for funding from other sources – namely the Safer Birmingham Partnership who are now responsible for delivering [Birmingham City Council's] Hate Crime Strategy’.

He added: ‘The agenda has since moved on and we’re in continued dialogue with BRAMU to help develop and adapt its business model to take account of the changing funding environment.’

The Safer Birmingham Partnership is a partnership of agencies, bringing together the likes of Birmingham City Council, West Midlands Police and West Midlands Fire Service. It is still not clear whether there is even funding available for community groups such as BRAMU within this partnership.

Strategic partnerships

On the one hand, what is happening in Birmingham is a variant of ‘multi-agency’ policing, developed following the 1981 uprisings in inner-cities and the Scarman Inquiry. Then, the concept of ‘multi-agency’ policing was developed, ‘based on the nominally liberal notion that the problem of crime cannot be resolved by the police alone through law enforcement but requires closer cooperation between the police and other agencies’. Thus efforts were made ‘to recruit a variety of non-police agencies, such as community and tenants’ groups, housing departments and local churches, into collaborative schemes of multi-agency crime prevention and community policing’.[1]

In Birmingham, the Safer Birmingham Partnership represents a new kind of ‘multi-agency’ approach, bringing together the police and other local authority bodies with the express task of tackling crimes including racial violence. The difference is that local community groups are not seen as partners, but at best as agents implementing a strategy decided in their absence.

Yet the irony of directing victims of racial abuse to approach the very institutions they believe are failing them is not lost on BRAMU’s Maxie Hayles: ‘Victims still do not report incidents and have to suffer in silence from incidents such as verbal abuse, property damage and assault. The fact that people do not trust the criminal justice system and would rather suffer the terror of racism than risk being helped shows that organisations like BRAMU are needed to support and advocate on behalf of the victim.’

R.I.P. institutional racism?

Ten years after the Macpherson report, which found the police to be institutionally racist, one of Sir William Macpherson’s advisors, Richard Stone, argued that ‘Black citizens and police employees have been failed… almost nothing has changed in ten years’.[2]

Organisations like BRAMU were created by communities which felt that they were being failed by the statutory bodies which were meant to protect and support them. Decades on, most agree with Richard Stone: nothing has changed, yet the political climate has shifted, and shifted to the degree that Trevor Philips, the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, can claim that institutional racism is dead. It has also shifted to the extent that an organisation like BRAMU, as well as other community-based anti-racist groups and Race Equality Councils, can find themselves increasingly marginalised. Or, as Cilius Victor, a trustee on another community-established group the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), summarises it, ‘the whole discussion on race has taken a reactionary leap back twenty years in the post 9/11 world and the space for critical thought and engagement is now getting narrower and narrower and narrower’.

Lord Herman Ouseley, former head of the Commission for Racial Equality (the precursor of the Equality and Human Rights Commission), attests to the idea that as the space for critical engagement is reduced, so Race Equality Councils are being ’squeezed’ by a government keen to cut costs and apply the ‘light-touch’ regulation now so infamous in the financial sector to the race relations sector.

Jenny Bourne, a long-time anti-racism campaigner, points out the dangers of the new approach: ‘Little by little the anti-racist perspective has been undermined. And it’s not just that local groups lost their funding and that the issue has got depoliticised. It is also that the terrain of racial violence has become “professionalised”. I use the term disparagingly. Of course it is good that government agencies are taking racial violence seriously – that is what part of the struggle was always about. But not if it is just a matter of getting organisations to meet targets. Not if it is just a matter of saying how many cases you have dealt with. Do we know what kind of service is being given to those who report racial attacks to new corporate-style bodies? I am certain they won’t be getting the customised, community-based support of yesteryear – when people actually went and stayed in homes with people under attack, walked their children to school, accompanied them to difficult meetings with the police or housing departments. Nor will individuals get the sense of empowerment they used to get by working with others who had faced similar things.’

As Cilius Victor argues, one of the most important pitfalls that groups like NMP and BRAMU must avoid falling into is becoming ‘little more than the same government department in a new guise, an outpost, a colony of the local authority department’. The danger for organisations is that in the fight for funding, one of their initial reasons for existence, to hold local government institutions to account, becomes lost as they become commandeered, moulded and end up supplying the very service that the state should be providing.

The ‘hate crime’ agenda takes hold

Yet Birmingham’s ’strategic partnership’ approach, and the resultant squeezing out of BRAMU, is only one side of the story. For the Safer Birmingham Partnership’s ‘Hate Crime Strategy’, launched as BRAMU’s relationship with the council is being fundamentally redefined, is a recent development.

The idea of ‘hate crime’, or crimes motivated by intolerance towards certain groups in society, has to a large degree been imported into the UK from the US. There, it has been slowly emerging, seeded in the civil rights movement and flowering in the era of identity politics by social movement and community activists. Victim-support movements, gay activism, disability-rights campaigners, alongside anti-racist activists, have sought in some respects to change ‘the way we think about violence and its motivations’.[3]

What is the problem with BRAMU being told by the City Council that it needs to include victims of other forms of ‘hate crime’ in its remit? After all, shouldn’t the desire to eliminate all forms of discrimination be applauded? There are two reasons why those of a progressive persuasion must tread cautiously when it comes to ‘hate crimes’.

Victims and their attackers

One major criticism of the ‘hate crime’ agenda comes from the way in which it focuses on individual acts, and in doing so directs attention away from societal racism and focuses it instead on the socially-deviant attacker and his/her victim.

So racist attacks are re-branded as ‘anti-social’ and ‘hate crimes’, devoid of any sense that they are symptomatic of a racist society, but rather the actions of a few bad apples. In this way, we are directed away from questioning why those who are subject to racist attacks are not being protected by the police and judiciary. Instead we focus on the deviant attacker, who is now defined as ‘anti-social’, and we direct their victims to contact Victim Support for their individual medico-psychological help.

This reduction of a social issue to an individual one matters, firstly because community monitoring groups were set up not just to deal with individual cases of racial violence. They were also, importantly, set up to take into account the larger political and economic forces which were sustaining such violence (be it through, for example, the media, the police or housing departments), and to try to change perspectives and policies. According to Jenny Bourne, ‘This is about the shearing of politics from these cases. And it is about not only no longer taking on these institutions, but also being forced to adapt to their agenda.’

It also matters because these communities, failed by the institutions meant to protect them, joined together to campaign against an at best indifferent and at worst discriminatory provision of services.

And it matters, because it was in the joining together of cases that an argument about the failure of the state could be mounted.

These comments are born out by the reality on the ground in Birmingham, where victims of racial violence and harassment are now being directed to contact Victim Support lines run by the police and the city council. On a national level, the proposed cutting of fifty posts from the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s already understaffed and weakened helpline does little to instil confidence in its ability to support victims of discrimination. The news of resignations and financial irregularities, against a backdrop of disputed political directions and controversial leadership, also doesn’t bode well for the infant Commission’s unifying project.

Do we need specialist services?

There is a second reason to be cautious of the ‘hate crimes’ agenda. We should be wary of the imposition from above of an agenda which aims forcibly to re-model groups in the misguided belief that equality can only be achieved by providing a single service for all.

The experience of Southall Black Sisters (SBS) is instructive. A long-standing domestic violence support group for BME women in west London, its funding was abruptly cut in 2008 by Ealing Council. The council was using a government proposal, since dropped, which said that ‘community cohesion’ was not best served by ’single identity groups’ which provided specialist services. So, the logic went, local government funding arrangements should be used to force organisations to broaden their remit to include all groups.[4]

SBS took Ealing Council to court, and won. There are echoes of SBS’ experience in the currently evolving developments with regards to BRAMU’s funding dilemma in Birmingham. As Lord Justice Moses said, pointing out how Ealing’s approach to the funding of SBS was fundamentally flawed: ‘There is no dichotomy between the promotion of equality and cohesion and the provision of specialist services to an ethnic minority.’[5]

In the act of demanding that BRAMU widen its remit and rebrands itself as a ‘hate crimes’ body, or be sidelined by a partnership formed between the police and the local authorities, BRAMU is neutered and race is sidelined. And in this process, the victims of racist harassment and violence are directed back to the very bodies they distrusted and felt were failing them through complacency and perhaps even collaboration.

*Hatnews is not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author’s alone.

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