By pressuring Mexico to halt oil shipments, Washington is escalating its blockade of Cuba into a direct bid for economic collapse and regime change, argues SEVIM DAGDELEN
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Black British activism after WWI
In the second in a four-part serialisation of his new book, African Uhuru, ROGER McKENZIE outlines the organised resistance to a surge of racism against black workers in law and in the unions as they returned from the war
LOWER RANKS: Black workers were often recruited to work on the railway in jobs that white workers did not want to do
As the government quietly upgrades the role of Britain’s special forces, their growing global footprint and near-total exemption from democratic oversight should alarm us all, says ROGER McKENZIE
A society that grows accustomed to ‘undesirable’ people also grows accustomed to undesirable deaths. Minneapolis serves as a wake-up call, including for our own refugee policies, writes MARC VANDEPITTE
Recent research pushes back the date of the earliest cave art by several thousand years. ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT look into the science applied
As Labour plans a centralised National Police Service, the resignation of a chief constable over the Maccabi football ban reveals how policing, technology and narrative management converge when public order and class power are at stake, says NICK WRIGHT
Sudan’s paramilitary attacked a Chadian military garrison, killing seven soldiers and prompting the government to issue a “final warning. PAVAN KULKARNI reports
THE summer of 1919 was as red in Britain as it was on the other side of the Atlantic in the US. It was a year of international unrest and fear at the same time as being a time of excitement, hope and radicalism, springing from the new world that had been ushered in by the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Much of Britain’s 1919 black population was made up of seafarers, dock workers and colonial troops returning from doing their duty in World War I.
This should not be taken to conclude that black workers only arrived in Britain after World War I. Far from it. There has been a sizeable black population in Britain since Roman times when soldiers of African descent were sent to guard Hadrian’s Wall. But 1919 witnessed a new phenomenon — organised attacks on a community in Britain based on race.
Prior to World War I trade unions in Britain took the principled position of resisting moves by employers to pay black workers, African or Asian, less than their white counterparts. But this principled position disappeared after the war even though unions in the colonies sought to forge an alliance with them against these racist employer practices.
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