News

Anti-immigration feeling is as high across Europe as it is in the UK. Often the reaction against immigration has a lot to do with primordial fears about the ‘foreignness’ of other cultures and is often associated with skin colour. Continental Europe, like Britain, is dealing with the effects of multiculturalism and globalization. Legitimate fears about job security, social breakdown, economic decay and crime are wrongly entangled with race, ethnicity, religion and immigration.

A picture tells a thousand words and is indelibly etched in the viewers mind. The British Broadcasting Company know and understand this better than most. So, what picture did they want to paint when their flagship news programme, - 10pm news - highlighted its top story on immigration last night?

BBC’s anchor man Huw Edwards announces:

Measures to control immigration are at the heart of the Government’s plans for the year ahead"

BBC man on the ground Mark Easton explained further:

History repeating itself.

The news that the Coalition Government is to bring forward legislation contained in today’s Queens Speech, that will force landlords to check the immigration status of potential tenants.

It’s a controversial move, which reflects a rush to the right, by a Government desperate to outflank an increasingly xenophobic UKIP flush after recent success in local elections.

Few doubt that the philosopher and writer Cornel West is one of the giants of African American thinkers. His statue is now truly international.

His best selling book ‘Race matters’ helped force America to better understand and deal more effectively with the persistent racial inequalities in the US.

Decades since that book and many books since, West continues to be America’s philosophical moral standard bearer, demanding, as he puts to show ‘Truth to power’.

Rakshita Patel argues that if we believe in race equality, we should also be committed to ensuring equal rights for everyone, and should show solidarity with our Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender brothers and sisters.

The London woman who may be on course to become the UK’s first black female Member of the European Parliament has said that in Britain, VE Day should be marked with as much ceremony as Remembrance Sunday.

VE Day was the public holiday celebrated on 8 May 1945 to mark the date when the World War II Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany and the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, thus ending the war in Europe.

Justice being done?

Yesterday when I read Joseph Harker’s article in the Guardian, demanding the ‘White Community’, confront a pernicious, hidden, and long standing paedophilia, I thought this would unleash the ‘dogs of hell’, upon him. After all it was a blanket accusation arguing that White society has largely ignored the cries of young children when they have accussed carers, celebrities and others in positions of power of serious sexual abuse.

Hilary Brown is a one woman force of nature. Hailing from one the oldest black communities in the UK, Cardiff Wales, all who know her affectionately as her Ms Brown in that typical Caribbean tradition of someone held in high regard. Ms Brown has a long history of public service to the community.

For those with long memories you may remember the case many years ago of two young black men who were the subject to a brutal and savage racist attack, in the centre of Cardiff.

As voters in 35 councils took to the polls yesterday, early results are now starting to come through.

These mid term elections are often thought of as a good political gauge of national sentiment as the main parties braced themselves for a tough night.

David Cameron admitted that voters were likely to punish governing parties between general elections.