In February 1968 Enoch Powell attacked Kenyan Asians who held British passports and who therefore had the automatic right of entry into Britain. In less than three weeks Labour had responded by rushing through parliament a new immigration bill aimed at removing that right unless British passport holders had a close connection with Britain. In one single move Labour rendered 150,000 Kenyan Asians effectively ‘stateless’, whilst retaining a clause for those whose grandparents were born here (ie those who were white) to continue to enjoy free entry to the UK. Far from silencing the likes of Powell, Labour’s abject capitulation merely encouraged him. Within weeks of Labour rushing through its new act, Powell made his most inflammatory speech yet, predicting that ‘rivers of blood’ would flow if immigration was not curbed further.47 When the Labour government finally fell in 1970, its supporters demoralised and disillusioned, it left behind a legacy of racism more shameful than perhaps any other in its history.Despite Labour’s fairly transparent posturing in opposition, and its protests against the Tories’ 1971 Immigration Act, little changed when it next took office. When Labour won the 1974 election it moved very quickly to tighten the rules even further.48 It was under Labour, for instance, that gynaecological examinations of women were carried out at airports supposedly to determine their virginity, and it was during the 1974-79 Labour government that hazardous X-rays were taken at airports to determine the age of prospective entrants into Britain.49 Within two years of winning the election Labour also joined the racist agitation which surrounded the expulsion of a small number of Asians from Malawi, evidenced by Bob Mellish’s claim in 1974 that people ‘cannot come here just because they have a British passport–full stop’. By now this was abundantly clear for all to see, for removing the right of British passport holders to enter the UK had, after all, been the main point of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which Bob Mellish’s own party had forced through the Commons with obscene haste.In reality, the episode surrounding the expulsion of the Malawi Asians in 1974 was one of the clearest examples yet of the way in which racist agitation for immigration controls has virtually nothing at all to do with the actual numbers of immigrants who attempt to gain entry to Britain at any one time. Only 250 Malawi Asians were being expelled from Malawi and all could easily have been incorporated into the voucher system for that year. Even so right wing Tory MPs tabled motions demanding urgent discussion on the ‘changing demographic character of Great Britain’50 (meaning of course the colour of people’s skin) and Labour’s home secretary, Roy Jenkins, responded by assuring them that Labour would maintain ‘strict immigration control’ and would ‘root out’ illegal immigrants and overstayers.51 By 1978 Labour had buried its conscience for good, a fact demonstrated by Merlin Rees’s famous television admission that all immigration controls were aimed at stopping ‘coloured’ immigration.52 Of course Labour had always accepted this basic premise, which had been recommended by its own cabinet committees during the 1950s and which was institutionalised for the first time in the 1962 Act. The only difference now was that they were prepared to openly admit it.
Category Archives: human rights
TPP: Lessons from New Zealand | Inter Press Service
Asia-Pacific, Featured, Food & Agriculture, Globalisation, Headlines, Trade & InvestmentTPP: Lessons from New ZealandBy Jomo Kwame SundaramReprint | | Print | Send by email |En españolJomo Kwame Sundaram was an Assistant Secretary-General responsible for analysis of economic development in the United Nations system during 2005-2015, and received the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Feb 2 2016 (IPS) – A new paper* on the implications of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement for New Zealand examines key economic issues likely to be impacted by this trade agreement. It is remarkable how little TPP brings to the table. NZ’s gross domestic product will grow by 47 per cent by 2030 without the TPP, or by 47.9 per cent with the TPP. Even that small benefit is an exaggeration, as the modelling makes dubious assumptions, and the real benefits will be even smaller. If the full costs are included, net economic benefits to the NZ economy are doubtful. The gains from tariff reductions are less than a quarter of the projected benefits according to official NZ government modelling. Although most of the projected benefits result from reducing non-tariff barriers (NTBs), the projections rely on inadequate and dubious information that does not even identify the NTBs that would be reduced by the TPP!Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAOAgricultureThe main beneficiaries in NZ will be agricultural exporters, but modest tariff reductions of 1.3 per cent on average by 2030 are small compared to ongoing commodity price and exchange rate volatility. Extensive trade barriers to agricultural exports in the Japanese, Canadian and US food markets remain, and will be locked in under TPP. TPP has also failed to tackle agricultural subsidies that are a major trade distortion. Significant tariff barriers remain in some sectors in Japan, Canada and the US likely to be ‘locked in’ under the TPP that are almost impossible to remove in the future. TPP’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures limits on labelling may also restrict opportunities for food exporters to build high quality, differentiated niche market positions.TPP has also been used to undermine negotiations in the World Trade Organization, the only forum for removing such trade distorting subsidies.ISDSTPP’s investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions and restrictions on state-owned enterprises will deter future NZ governments from regulations and policies in the public interest, for fear of litigation by corporate interests. The threat, if not actual repercussions, are good enough to ‘discipline’ governments by causing ‘regulatory chill’. TPP is very much a charter for incumbent businesses, especially US transnational corporations. Thus, it inadvertently holds back the economic transformation the world needs. The agreement’s TPP’s benefits are likely to be asymmetric as it is more favourable to big US business practices and will deepen the disadvantages of small size and remoteness. Potential ISDS compensation payments or settlements could far outweigh the limited economic benefits of TPP. Even when cases are successfully defended, the legal costs will be very high.Value-additionTPP can both help and hinder ambitions to add value to raw materials and commodities, and to progress up value chains. However, it is likely to reinforce NZ’s position as a commodity producer and thus hinder progress up the value chain where greater economic prosperity lies. More analysis based on the actual agreement is required to ascertain the conditions for and likelihood of such progress. TPP will limit government’s ability to innovate and address national challenges and is likely to worsen rapidly escalating problems such as environmental degradation and climate change.Furthermore, TPP is projected to reduce employment and increase income inequality in NZ. In its analysis, the government has not considered the likely costs, which are probably going to be very significant, and may well outweigh economic benefits.TPP thus falls well short of being “a trade agreement for the 21st century”, as its cheerleaders claim. A more comprehensive, balanced and objective cost-benefit analysis on the basis of the October 2015 deal should be completed before ratifying the TPP.
Here Lies the Abyss: Xenophobia and Gender After the Cologne Assaults
Yet, as one might expect, such people project a fantasy onto us, ignoring the fact that this crime has sparked ample condemnation from feminists around the world. Local German feminists took to the streets of Cologne to highlight not only the police’s lackadaisical protection of women that night, but the larger plague of sexual violence (committed by white German men as well as non-white) throughout the country, refusing to scapegoat refugees and immigrants for a wider social problem. It was, after all, the city police (hardly in the thrall of poor refugees) who suggested a “code of conduct” for women who wished to avoid being raped.As two German feminists, Stefanie Lohaus and Anne Wizroek wrote in Vice recently:“Sexual assaults and even rape happen every year at big events like Oktoberfest. ‘The way to the toilet alone is like running the gauntlet: within 50 feet, you can be sure to tally three hugs from drunken strangers, two pats on the ass, someone looking up your dirndl and some beer purposely splashed right down your cleavage,’ wrote Karoline Beisel and Beate Wild in 2011, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. An average of 10 reported rapes take place each year at Oktoberfest. The estimated number of unreported cases is 200.”
Source: Here Lies the Abyss: Xenophobia and Gender After the Cologne Assaults
“In Iran I was working as a model and I went to an…
“In Iran I was working as a model and I went to an international high school. Because of the rough political situation my brother and I decided to leave. We imagined Europe to be a safe haven. Our final destination is and has always been Britain. We have family there. We left when I was 18 and now I’m 20. We have done most of our journey by foot and it has been extremely rough. We experienced terrible things on the road. We have been kept in prison in Macedonia for 20 days with barely any food. Also the Belgium police have arrested us because we tried to get to Britain by truck. When they found us they drove us 68 kilometers from this camp and dropped us in the woods. They took away our money, our two cellphones and our coats and sweaters. It was raining and we couldn’t stop shivering from the cold. We just kept on walking until we found our way back to this camp. I have many more stories but I’m saving them. One day I will write a book about all of this.”
Tim’s El Salvador Blog: Zika in El Salvador
Any discussion of reproductive health in El Salvador also requires mention of El Salvador’s absolute ban on abortion. There are no exceptions, and the country will prosecute women who have abortions for murder. Pregnancies are going to happen in El Salvador in the coming months and years. While we may see some reductions in birth rates among the small middle and upper classes, it seems unlikely in the many areas of the country where poverty is persistent. From a Washington Post story titled The country with the world’s worst homicide rate now grapples with Zika:In this web of slums, there are blocks where 8 in 10 houses are breeding sites for mosquitoes. The city is a patchwork of rival gang territories that are defended so fiercely that health authorities cannot enter some neighborhoods. In just the first three weeks of January, El Salvador recorded 2,474 new suspected Zika cases, nearly half of them here in the capital. Many infected pregnant women live in these densely packed southern neighborhoods. “It’s uncontrollable,” said Eli Leiva, 40, an elementary school teacher in San Jacinto who has several students with Zika. “It’s a problem that has gotten totally out of hand.” Doctors are worried that basic public-health messages are not reaching their audience. Many residents ignore the recommendation to destroy mosquito breeding grounds by disposing of standing water, even though El Salvador has suffered repeated outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya, fevers transmitted by the same type of mosquito that carries the Zika virus. Teen pregnancy is rampant, abortion is illegal and contraception is discouraged in the heavily Catholic country. Many women interviewed dismissed the advice not to become pregnant as unrealistic.It is not a matter of lack of information being disseminated throughout the country. The newspapers and airwaves are full of stories about the virus and public service announcements on avoiding mosquito bites. But the country has been fighting dengue and chikunguya for years, two diseases carried by the same mosquito which carries Zika. Unless that fight becomes more effective, we can expect to hear about Zika as a recurring public health problem in El Salvador.
‘I Want a Safe Place’: Refugee Women from Syria Uprooted and Unprotected in Lebanon | Amnesty International USA
Shortfalls in international assistance and discriminatory policies imposed by the Lebanese authorities are creating conditions that facilitate the exploitation and abuse of women refugees in Lebanon, said Amnesty International in a new report published ahead of the Syria Donors Conference in London on February 4.The report, ‘I Want a Safe Place’: Refugee Women from Syria Uprooted and Unprotected in Lebanon, highlights how the Lebanese government’s refusal to renew residency permits for refugees and a shortage of international funding, leaves refugee women in a precarious position, and puts them at risk of exploitation by people in positions of power including landlords, employers and even the police.
What Asian Americans Are Bringing to Campus Movements for Racial Justice | Race Files
Discussing the future of their work, Tran said: “Hopefully more people within the Asian American community understand that Asian American activism does exist, that Asian American students can make differences within campuses.”Wong stressed the importance of highlighting existing student efforts, encouraging students at other campuses to reach out to strategize and build together: “There is a community in that way because a lot of students think that there aren’t students doing this and they have to do it on their own.”Ultimately, Asian American student movements depend on a radical shift in perspective, one in which students see themselves not as visitors but as stakeholders and change agents within their institutions.“The more that people feel like they belong in a space, the more they feel like they should change what’s going on if they feel like it’s wrong,” said BAATF and BAASA leader Theresa Yeo. “That feeling of empowerment: if there’s a problem you can do something about it. You don’t just have to sit with it. That’s something I’ve learned in this past semester. I definitely think that’s something that comes with a sense of belonging, a sense of saying ‘This is my space. This is my house. I can do something here.’”
Source: What Asian Americans Are Bringing to Campus Movements for Racial Justice | Race Files
Donald Trump Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Trump Wants A Ruthless America”Believe me, I’ll change things. And again, we’re going to be so respected. I don’t want to use the word ‘feared,'” he told the audience. But that is precisely what Trump wants: to be feared. His bid for the White House, long ridiculed, is a fight for a ruthless, brutal America. Behind his campaign slogan “Make America great again!” is the vision of a country that no longer cares about international treaties, ethnic minorities or established standards of decency.Trump wants to attack head-first again. The 69-year-old embodies a new harshness and brutality, and both a physical and emotional crudeness. Trump has launched an uprising of the indecent, one that is now much bigger than he himself, a popular movement of white, conservative America that after eight years under Democratic President Barack Obama, yearns for a leader who will usher in the counter-revolution.
Source: Donald Trump Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World – SPIEGEL ONLINE
UK grants first license for GM embryos
Britain has given the green light to scientists to modify the genes of human embryos for research. Critics say it raises ethical questions over the future of “designer babies.”
Source: UK grants first license for GM embryos
Money, get back.
I’m all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it’s a hit.
Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit.
I’m in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.
Money, it’s a crime.
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re
giving none away.
Afghan refugees could get money to return home
Germany’s Interior Minister appeals to failed Afghan refugees to return home to safe areas. Thomas de Maiziere is in Kabul to work out a remedy with the Afghan government, which may include financial incentives.







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