Category Archives: news

news, UK

Priti Patel plans to introduce racist SVRO stop and search laws

Home secretary Priti Patel has announced the government’s intention to push ahead with yet more racist stop and search powers for the police, despite no evidence that they help to stop violent crime.

The government plans to introduce legislation to enable the introduction of Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVRO), which would allow the police to stop and search any individual who has been convicted of a prior criminal offence.

Patel announced the new measures in comments to the Mail on Sunday.

But there is no evidence that stop and search fights crime. In 2018/19 nothing was found in 72% of searches. Black people are already 10 times more likely to be stopped than who’re people and the serious violence reduction orders will increase this racial disproportionality. 

Add to this the fact that the draconian Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act means the police already have wide discretion to stop and search without the need to show “reasonable grounds”, the real purpose of Patel’s new power grab is to be seen to be acting tough and, sadly, to stir up more racism.

Only 5% of stops under Section 60 lead to an arrest.

SVROs will give the police power to search anyone with a previous conviction without having to provide grounds for doing so. How are such persons going to be identified? By the colour of their their skin? 

The rollout of SVROs comes on the back of the increase in stop and search targeting Black kids, under the guise of the Covid legislation. Stops in May 2020 in London shows that 1 in 8 of all Black males aged 15 to 25 were stopped in London.

Stops by the London Metropolitan police in May 2020 were double the figure for 2019, according to the Home Affairs select committee.

Patel told The Mail on Sunday: “A minority will say these measures are disproportionate and will affect minority communities or claim that this is racism. That is simply not true.

“People will say these measures are controversial. But to me, when people are dying, that doesn’t matter. The government’s number one job is to keep our people safe.”

The Tories don’t care how many more lives their policies ruin and care even less about the addressing the real causes of violent crime.

Much of inner city violent crime on the streets is driven by turf wars over drugs, so why not legalise all drugs.

Many stops in London and elsewhere are initiated because a police officer says they could small cannabis, so why not legalise cannabis as they have in Canada and more than a dozen US states?

Meanwhile, Black men continue to die after contact with a police officer, such Mohamud Hassan who dies in Cardiff last week after allegedly been beaten by police office at the Butetown police station.

 

news, US

Parler data dump ongoing with names of terrorist organisers set to emerge

Its a few years late but social media has booted fascist-enabler-in-chief Donald Trump and now his supporters on Parler are about to be uncovered.

That has thrown up also sorts of real issues about the power of social media over our lives and politics, but the arguments of the right shutting down Trump is an affront to free speech is specious, to say the least.

But there can be no freedom to spread hate and violence, which is what Trump has been doing and to be honest it is what his followers continue to do on Twitter and Facebook.

Trump and assorted racists and fascists thought they would be able to spew their filth on Parler, but after Amazon’s withdrawal of Amazon Web Services hosting and its removal from the Apple and Google app stores, that outlet has been blocked too.

Parler data dump set to expose fascists

Parler is underwritten by Trump billionaire backer’s the Mercer family and has billed itself as the home of the far right.

Today it emerged that the entire content of Parler has been accessed and is currently being downloaded.

So in addition to all their live-streaming and selfies of their criminal conduct on Capitol Hill, we will soon have access to much of the planning and the individuals and organisations responsible.

Obviously relying on the police to bringing any of the far right criminals to justice is a waste of time given the police were accomplices and facilitators, apart from one or two honourable exceptions.

As the Parler planning is uncovered we will have further reports.

If you are wondering about the extent of the collusion and facilitating between cops and fascists, then the video below should help clear things up. Even as a woman laid dying, the police we talking to the far right rioters about calming down so that theey could let them continue on their journey around the Capitol building in search of lawmakers to kidnap, put on trial and execute, as was planned by some of the terrorist elements.

Even after a woman lies dying, police tell far right rioters to calm or you can’t some in! If they were Black their heads would have been blown off by now: “You guys can’t come in here if you are so unruly. You guys got to calm down”

The Daily Kos has more on how the Parler data was accessed here and more from Vice here.

news, resources

30% of children held on remand in the UK are Black

Nationally 30% of all children held on remand in the UK are Black. That’s the shocking finding of Transform Justice and the Howard League for Penal Reform.

The data was revealed following a Freedom of Information request.

Director of Transform Justice, Penelope Gibbs said: “This huge racial disparity in the treatment of London’s children cannot be explained away. Remand separates children from their families and disrupts their education, and yet most children who are remanded do not go on to receive a prison sentence. 

The Howard League also reveals in a research briefing that in the past nine years the number of children being arrested has fallen but the figure for Black kids have stayed stubbornly high. Overall there were 71,885 in 2019.

Black kids are four times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts.

Using the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) designator, 51% of children incarcerated were from those backgrounds, as at September 2020.

Children who are victims of county line gangs or trafficking are being treated as criminals by police when they are in fact the victims.

The government as usual has some soothing words to balm the wounds:

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “We are working across government to tackle the deep-rooted causes of BAME children’s over-representation in the criminal justice system. This includes reviewing the disproportionate use of remand, along with improving legal advice and developing schemes for early intervention.”

So yet more reviews, but nothing will happen to free the children ensnared in the British injustice system until radical action is taken to force change.

The findings of the Lammy Review into racial inequality in the justice system have still not been acted upon, despite the government indicating that it would follow through on the review’s recommendations.

Excerpt from the Howard League research briefing:

The large reduction in the numbers of child arrests in the last decade is a success story but the data shows continued inequalities for Black children and those from minority ethnic backgrounds who have not benefitted from efforts to divert children to the same extent as white children. Government figures reveal that Black children are over four times as likely as white children to be arrested. The proportion of
white children arrested has fallen by 13 per cent over the last ten years, whilst the proportion of Black children arrested has doubled to 16 per
cent (Youth Justice Board, 2020).

The disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on Black children and children from ethnic minority backgrounds grows
exponentially as children progress through the system, resulting in huge disparities in the numbers held on remand and serving sentences in child prisons. In September 2020, 51 per cent (273) of the 536 children
held in youth custody were from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds (HM Prison and Probation Service, 2020). In Feltham and
Cookham Wood prisons, around two-thirds of children being held on remand are Black or from minority ethnic backgrounds (Howard
League for Penal Reform, 2020a).

Child-Arrests-2019-FINAL-onlineDownload
news, UK

Tory MP Richard Drax refuses to pay reparations for his slave wealth

The Tory MP for South Dorset, Richard Drax, omitted to include in the UK parliamentary register of members interests the fact that he owned a plantation on the Caribbean island of Barbados.

That’s right – the landowning Tory’s family wealth is based on slavery. Indeed, according to the Observer newspaper he is the richest landowner in the House of Commons.

His family owns the 250 hectare Drax Hall plantation, which has been in the family as a slave-worked plantation since 1640, right up until 1836 – in other words since the beginning of Britain’s colonial slave-trading shame, which was one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever.

Drax Hall Barbados

The  Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission has demanded that Drax acknowledge his ill-gotten gains and pays reparations, but he has refused to do so.

Richard Drax inherited the plantation after the death of his father in 2017.

Drax omitted to add to the register thousands of acres of land that he owns in the UK. He has only now chosen to rectify those omissions and that of the Barbados plantation following an investigation by the Observer newspaper.

Vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies Sir Hilary Beckles estimates that 30,000 people were worked to death on the Barbados plantation over a 200 years period, with around 300 people ensalve on the estate at any one time. It was the largest sugar plantation on the island.

The Drax planter-merchant family went on to establish their sugar plantation model in Jamaica, which the British took from the Spanish and established as a colony in 1655. It was a model that was replicated across the Caribbean and north America.

Drax Hall Jamaica
If anyone is wondering where the Drax family got the money from to build Charborough Park in Dorset, it came from working Africans to death over two centuries in the Caribbean. The average life expectancy of a slave in the British Caribbean was around seven years.

Drax, not surprisingly is no friend of the Black lives Matter movement.

In June he jumped on the exaggerated media reports of the BLM protests at the time, saying: “The desecration of the Cenotaph by rioters two weeks ago, on the actual D-Day anniversary, was beyond ironic.”

Drax is also in favour of racist immigration controls. In 2013, he voted to increase restrictions: “I believe, as do many of my constituents, that this country is full.”

The Barbados government should requisition the Drax property immediately with no compensation. They should also send a bill to the UK government demanding payment of reparations, given the “compensation” paid to slave owners upon emancipation – the cost of which UK taxpayers incredibly only finished paying off in 2015.

The Slave Compensation Act of 1837 distributed around £20 million to slavers. The compensation in today’s money is estimated at £50 billion, not including reinvestment of capital and the attendant compounding effect. The enslaved people got nothing.