Category: Enoch Powell
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Love Milkshakes, Hate Racism: A short history of throwing food at the far right
In the last month, milkshakes have been lobbed at several far right candidates in the Euro elections. First it was former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, then UKIP’s misogynist YouTuber Carl Benjamin and now Nigel Farage as he was out campaigning in Newcastle for his new Brexit Party. When Farage visited Edinburgh, the local…
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‘No Platforming’ at Bristol University in the 1980s and Now
The protests against Eric Kaufmann at the University of Bristol last week are part of a much longer history of ‘no platforming’ at the university, stretching back to the 1980s. This research is part of a book that I am writing on the history of ‘no platform’ and free speech at British universities for Routledge’s Fascism and…
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The history of racial violence in Britain: A short reading list
I saw this tweet during the week: Fifteen years ago, I taught a course on collective racial violence in the US. It is the only course I decided to never teach again. #Thread — Walter D. Greason (@WorldProfessor) August 13, 2017 And then tweeted this: Reading this & thinking about what would you include in…
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From Powell to Brexit: My interview with the Weekly Worker on ‘race’, anti-racism and the British left
This week, the CPGB’s Weekly Worker (see here for more info on its background) conducted an interview with me about my forthcoming book, British Communism and the Politics of Race, as well as on my research in general and the anti-racist movement in Britain since the 1960s. You can read the full interview here. It…
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New piece at History & Policy: Brexit, imperial nostalgia and the “white man’s world”
This is just a quick note to let people know that the website History & Policy has published a piece by myself and Steven Gray (University of Portsmouth) on Brexit and imperial nostalgia for the ‘white man’s world’ of the former settler colonies. You can read the piece here.
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Powellism and the advent of the British far right: The Communist Party response
48 years ago this week, Tory Minister Enoch Powell gave his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he predicted dire consequences for Britain if further immigration from the Commonwealth continued. While criticised by many at the time, Powell’s speech opened up a political space to the right of the Conservative Party, mobilising around the…
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‘By whatever means necessary’: The origins of the ‘no platform’ policy
Recently the concept of ‘no platform’ was in the news again when there were attempts to cancel a talk by Germaine Greer at Cardiff University. While there is no doubt that the use of ‘no platform’ has expanded since its first use in the 1970s, the term is bandied about in the media with little…
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Integration and limitation: Labour and immigration, 1962-68
Last night, Channel 4 aired a program on the 1964 election in the seat of Smethwick, where immigration became a controversial topic and was used to reason why Labour lost a safe seat to the Conservatives. I have written about the use of a racist slogan during the election campaign before (here and here), but…
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Enoch Powell and the immigration “challenge” to Thatcher (1985)
In the file on the Scarman Report and the 1985 Handsworth riots that has been recently released by the National Archives, there is a series of documents concerning a challenge made by Enoch Powell to Margaret Thatcher to clarify her position on immigration. Speaking to the Birkenhead Conservative Women’s Association in September 1985 (two weeks…
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Review: Constructing Post-Imperial Britain by Jodi Burkett
My review of Constructing Post-Imperial Britain: Britishness, ‘Race’ and the Radical Left in the 1960s by Jodi Burkett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) has just been published online by Contemporary British History journal. Here is the opening paragraph of my review: Jodi Burkett’s book, Constructing Post-Imperial Britain: Britishness, ‘Race’ and the Radical Left in the 1960s, is a well-executed examination…
New Historical Express 