ELECTORAL POLITICS| GOVERNMENT POLICY 4 March: The home secretary announces a suspension of study visas from 26 March for students from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan and of Skilled Worker visas for Afghan nationals, saying a high proportion of those claiming asylum after arriving through a ‘legal’ route are from these countries, which amounts to
17 February- 3 March 2026 There is no equivalence between racism and anti-racism, between politicians who fuel Islamophobic narratives and those who counter them. In Manchester’s Gorton and Denton by-election, Reform UK’s campaign was explicitly nativist and Islamophobic, while the Greens, as underlined by Hannah Spencer’s victory speech, countered Islamophobia and highlighted migrant rights. That is
ELECTORAL POLITICS| GOVERNMENT POLICY See also anti-fascism and far Right for more information on the situation in France following the death of Quentin Deranque. 17 February: In what is seen as France’s Charlie Kirk moment, the lower house of the French parliament holds a minute’s silence for Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old far-right activist who died
ELECTORAL POLITICS| GOVERNMENT POLICY As anti-migrant, anti-equalities, anti-abortion, misogynistic and anti-LGBTQI rhetoric in electoral campaigning are increasingly interlinked, we reflect this in the coverage below which also includes information on the influence of the Christian Right as well as the religious Right generally. 3 February: At the European parliament, Patriots for Europe and the European
20 January – 4 February 2026 In Minneapolis, the same city where George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin six years ago, two people have been killed in recent weeks by ICE agents during protests. Renée Good and Alex Pretti were both US citizens. These deaths point to a darker reality unfolding in
ELECTORAL POLITICS| GOVERNMENT POLICY 23 January: The Times reveals that, last autumn, ministers suppressed a report titled Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, collated with the joint intelligence committee, which warned that climate change could drive mass migration to Britain, because it was seen as too negative. (Times, 23 January 2026) 26 January:
University of Manchester sociology lecturer Siobhan O’Neill’s research, published in the January 2026 edition of the IRR’s journal Race & Class, emerges out of community organising around an under-researched aspect of state violence: police pursuits. According to the IOPC, in the last ten years there have been 299 police-related road traffic fatalities in England
ELECTORAL POLITICS| GOVERNMENT POLICY 13 January: West Midlands police and crime commissioner Simon Foster says that MPs on parliament’s home affairs committee are biased against chief constable Craig Guildford, calling for him to lose his job while their inquiry into his decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a Europa League match against Aston
Policy and prosecutorial responses to the summer 2024 riots delink the violence from racism, paving the way for anti-immigration and Islamophobic protests and far-right vigilantism to form an infinite loop. A unique study published today by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) finds that policy and prosecutorial responses to the Summer 2024 riots that followed the brutal killings of three
23 December 2025 – 6 January 2026 The continuing political and media feeding frenzy over the citizenship of Alaa Abd el-Fattah and Shamima Begum reveals the colonial roots and racist undertones of debates on Britishness and belonging, never far from the surface. The historic tweets of British-Egyptian rights campaigner el-Fattah calling for the killing of
