‘I’m from St Raphael’s estate’: an interview with George the Poet

10 July 2020 — Institute of Race Relations

Written by Jessica Perera

IRR’s Jessica Perera continues her examination of the human cost of estate regeneration by talking about pride and potential with a north-west London poet.

George Mpanga is a London-born spoken-word poet and host of the award-winning ‘Have you heard George’s Podcast?’ If you have not yet discovered the podcast, you might be more familiar with its accompanying advertising posters: ‘it’s hard to listen when you’ve never been heard’ that are dotted across the capital. Concerned that his community on the housing estate he grew up on, St Raphael’s in the north-west London borough of Brent, would not be heard during the current regeneration consultation, George recorded a poem explaining the fears the community had regarding the redevelopment plans.

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The School That Tried to End Racism: A cruel experiment in furtherance of identity politics

10 July 2020 — WSWS

By Margot Miller

Channel 4’s two-part documentary, The School That Tried to End Racism, centres on events during the filming of a group of Year 7 (eleven- and twelve-year-old) pupils over three weeks in April last year.

The pupils were subjected to a cruel experiment, but this was positively described by the programme’s narrator as a “ground-breaking initiative” concerning racial bias.

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EXCLUSIVE: OR Tambo’s forgotten speech at Chatham House in 1985

9 July 2020 — Mail & Guardian 

OR Tambo would have been 100 this year

Oliver Reginald Tambo 

On October 29 1985, Oliver Tambo gave a speech at Chatham House in London. In it, he urged a reluctant British government to support the fight against apartheid — and expertly dissects the hypocrisy in not doing so. For decades, the speech was buried in the Chatham House archives. For its centennial celebrations, the think tank has made the speech publicly available for the first time, in partnership with the Oliver & Adelaide Tambo Foundation. Tambo’s daughter, Nomatemba Tambo, will be discussing the speech on a Chatham House webinar on Friday, July 10. This is an edited version of Tambo’s address.


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Israel’s new UK ambassador will expose delusions of Britain’s Jewish leaders

10 July 2020 — Jonathan Cook

With Corbyn the bogeyman gone, Tzipi Hotovely will finally force Britain’s liberal Jews to confront truths about Israel they long ago buried

Middle East Eye – 10 July 2020

After years of successfully drawing attention away from Israel’s intensifying crimes against the Palestinian people by citing a supposedly growing “antisemitism crisis” in Britain’s Labour Party, Jewish community leaders in the UK are exasperated to find themselves unexpectedly on the defensive.

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