The authors examine recent research from the Institute of Race Relations, which documents the deaths of over 200 asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who have lost their lives trying to reach the UK or in work-related accidents, as a result of racial attacks and, most often, as a result of self-harm, especially in detention centres.
the northern English towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford saw violent confrontations between young Asians and the police, culminating in the clashes of 7±9 July in Bradford in which 200 police of®cers were injured. The clashes were prompted by racist gangs attacking Asian communities and the failure of the police to provide protection from this threat. In the scale of the damage caused and the shock they delivered to the nation, the 2001 riots were the worst riots in Britain since the Handsworth, Brixton and Tottenham uprisings of 1985.The ®res that burned across Lancashire and Yorkshire through the summer of 2001 signalled the rage of young Pakistanis and Bangladeshis of the second and third generations, deprived of futures, hemmed in on all sides by racism, failed by their own leaders and representatives and unwilling to stand by as, ®rst fascists, and then police of®cers, invaded their streets. Their violence was ad hoc, improvised and haphazard. It was no longer the organised community self-defence of 1981, when Asian youth burnt down the Hambrough Tavern in Southall, where fascists had gathered, or when twelve members of the Bradford Black United Youth League were arrested for preparing petrol bombs to counter violent fascist incursions into their community. And whereas the 1981 and 1985 uprisings against the police in Brixton, Handsworth, Tottenham and Toxteth had been the violence of a community united ± black and white ± in its anger at the`heavy manners' of the police, the ®res this time were lit by the youths of communities falling apart from within, as well as from without; youths whose violence was, therefore, all the more desparate. It was the violence of communities fragmented by colour lines, class lines and police lines. It was the violence of hopelessness. It was the violence of the violated. 1Colonialism has been interwoven with the history of the northern mill towns since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Cotton-spinning ± on which the towns' early success was based ± was a technology, borrowed from India, which became central to the emergence of northern England as the`factory of the world'. Cotton grown in the plantations of the Caribbean, the US deep South, or the ®elds of Bengal was brought to Lancashire and Yorkshire to be spun into cloth and sold back at pro®t to the empire. This was a global trade before globalisation.By the 1960s, the mills were investing in new technologies which were operated twenty-four hours a day to maximise pro®t. The night shifts, which were unpopular with the existing workforce, soon became the domain of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers who were now settling in the mill towns. But as the machinery developed, the need for labour diminished, and such labour as was needed could be got for less elsewhere. The work once done cheaply by Bangladeshi workers in the north of England could now be done even more cheaply by Bangladeshi workers in Bangladesh.As the mills declined, entire towns were left on the scrap-heap. White and black workers were united i...
The Institute of Race Relations has over the last twenty-three years been monitoring the 508 deaths in custody in suspicious circumstances of individuals from BME, migrant and refugee communities, which rarely make the headlines and for which no person is ever convicted (to be published as the report Dying for Justice). Here, in an extract, the author examines the culture of racism and the impact of privatisation and sub-contracting in the detention and deportation of ‘failed’ asylum seekers. In case after case it exposes how the vulnerable, mentally- and physically-ill are neglected – leading to deaths by self-harm and inadequate treatment. The death during deportation of Joy Gardner, which involved disproportionate and reckless use of force, is examined in depth. The use of equipment of control for those who are clearly fearful of being forcibly returned, remains a vexed issue.
Martha Osamor, now 75, is one of the many unsung heroes of Britain’s black community, and has spent almost all her adult life fighting to better the position of people in Tottenham and beyond. She came to Britain in 1963, and has worked in the community, through the unions, in the women’s movement, in the local council and the Labour Party (which, controversially, deselected her from standing for a safe seat in 1989). Undeterred, Martha is still fighting, most recently over the treatment of the family of Mark Duggan, shot dead by police on the street. We met her in a shop-front rented by the African Women’s Welfare Association above Edmonton Green covered market, where she still helps to provide information and advice, to talk over her life and political times.
Since the publication of the Macpherson Report in February 1999, there have been at least ninety-three deaths with a known or suspected racial element in the UK. Of these, 97 per cent of the victims were from BME communities (including those from Gypsy or Traveller communities and European migrant workers). Particular groups of BME people are at risk -asylum seekers, new migrants, students and those working in the night-time economy. In only a quarter of the cases was the allegation of racism accepted and prosecuted as such, with racial motivation factored into sentencing. The over-strict interpretation of the legal provisions for racial motivation may be inhibiting the (racial) charging of perpetrators and in fact removing the racial context of a crime from the court room. It also appears that if authorities, including the police, had, on occasion, intervened earlier, against persistent harassment and low-level abuse, some deaths might have been prevented.
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