Institute of Race Relations

Calendar of Racism and Resistance ( 23 December – 6 January 2026)

22 December: Belfast City Council passes a motion supporting the Palestine Action prison hunger strike in England, demanding that the hunger strikers be granted bail and calling for the organisation’s ...
Institute of Race Relations

Bricks, urine-filled bottles and racist abuse: Teesside dad’s hell living in TS4 – Teesside Live

Bricks, urine-filled bottles and racist abuse: Teesside dad’s hell living in TS4 – Teesside Live ...
Institute of Race Relations

A threat to public safety: policing, racism and the Covid-19 pandemic

A new report from the IRR and Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) suggests that policing during the Covid-19 pandemic undermines public health measures whilst disproportionately targeting Black ...
Institute of Race Relations

Citizenship: from right to privilege

Citizenship-stripping powers introduced since 2002 have enshrined a ‘second-class citizenship’ in the UK, mainly affecting British Muslims, says a new report from the Institute of Race Relations.
Institute of Race Relations

Stop changing the subject – the problem is fascism

These far-right riots and the ensuing racist and Islamophobic violence are unparalleled. Yet the government’s response is to focus on ‘violent disorder across the ideological spectrum’. This ...
Institute of Race Relations

The fading red line: Barnardo’s role in the detention and removal of children

Barnardo’s reflection on its first two years at Cedars ‘pre-departure accommodation’ raises once again the problem of NGOs working to a state agenda. When, in the wake of the coalition’s ‘abolition’ ...
Institute of Race Relations

Recollections on the Asian Youth Movements that emerged in the 1970s

On the launch of the young people’s oral history project exhibition ‘Activating Newham Community & Activism 1980-1991’, Jasbir Singh writes about his experiences and the seminal work of the Asian ...
Institute of Race Relations

How Black Working-Class Youth are Criminalised and Excluded in the English School System

While a minority of young, multiracial working-class Londoners caught up in serious youth violence are schooled in the Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) and Alternative Provision (AP) that forms part of the ...
Institute of Race Relations

The Met Gangs Matrix – institutional racism in action

Lee Bridges, Professor Emeritus (School of Law, University of Warwick), examines the ethnic composition of the Metropolitan police’s gangs database. In October 2014, the Met police disclosed ...
Institute of Race Relations

Language testing of asylum claimants: a flawed approach

Following a critical Supreme Court judgment on the Home Office’s use of controversial language analysis tests to determine the nationality of asylum seekers, Aisha Maniar asks: why does the government ...
Institute of Race Relations

Unravelling the concept of unconscious bias

To mark the anniversary of the death of A. Sivanandan, the IRR examines how useful his ideas are for unravelling the recent turn in the UK to the concept of unconscious bias. Until the Guardian ...
Institute of Race Relations

From GPS tagging to facial recognition watches: expanding the surveillance of migrants in the UK

Written by Lucie Audibert (Lawyer and Legal Officer, Privacy International) & Monish Bhatia (Lecturer in Criminology, Birkbeck, University of London) Through its use ...