Thursday, 15 October 2026 — Institute of Race Relations
When it comes to racism and anti-racism, the past is seldom another country.
Resistance to the past traumas of violent racism, including far-right incursions into Asian neighbourhoods of Southall, Newham, Bradford, Rotherham etc, live on in the collective memory. And thanks to archives across the country, including the IRR’s Black History Collection and its digitisation of the CARF magazine, we also have documents and campaign literature that aid memory.
This week on IRR News we focus on the past in the present in terms of the collective fight against racism and sectarianism across time and place.
First, we highlight three important new educational resources – vital additions to the archives.
Jenny Bourne reviews Taj Ali’s remarkable new book ‘Come What May, We’re Here to Stay’ which traces the long roots of South Asians’ political resistance to British racism and colonialism, with chapters on the post-war struggles of industrial workers and the impact of Black Power on self-defence movements. Details of book launches across the country can be found here.
Rebellion, an electrifying new documentary film by Migrant Media, premiered at the 70th anniversary of the BFI London Film Festival, takes up the theme of self-defence with a retelling of the story of the Bradford 12, twelve young Asian men charged in 1981 with conspiracy to cause explosions for preparing to defend Bradford from an imminent racist skinhead attack. A list of screenings, including in Nottingham and Leeds, can be found here.
Finally, our friends at Beyond the Pale Books in Belfast have made available for free download a digital version of Garvaghy, a Community Under Siege which tells the story of how the Catholic/nationalist community fought back in the 1990s against the reviled Orange Order parades that had such devastating consequences.
All three are vital to understanding the violent far-right and anti-immigrant protests that we document every week in our regular Calendar of Racism and Resistance. This week on IRR News we draw attention to the escalation of far-right protests, on the South Coast of England, motivated by anti-migrant racism, as well as the trashing of Houses in Multiple Occupancy in Manchester.
But we have also extended our monitoring of the far-right and ultra-nationalist threat to include attempts by the Orange Order to reassert their right to dominate Catholic/ nationalist neighbourhoods by walking the King’s Highway from Drumcree church into the Catholic enclave on the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, County Armagh.
Since the Good Friday Agreement (1998), it has become fashionable to claim that while racism is on the increase, sectarianism is on the way out. The two-week stand-off at Portadown, close to where the Orange Order was founded over 200 years ago, shows this to be a fallacy. The Orange Order’s attempt to parade, which was met with a mass sit-in and blockade, was ultimately unsuccessful. But it has caused alarm, particularly as it came just a few months after a racist pogrom in Northern Ireland led to the trashing of minority ethnic businesses and migrant workers being burnt out of their homes.
Without doubt, sectarianism and racism, far from being mutually exclusive, go hand in hand. Both assert the right to dominate ‘lesser people’ who are racialised, whether on account of skin colour, religion or foreigner status. Academic experts like Bill Rolston and Robbie McVieigh have analysed sectarianism’s roots in British colonialism. There is also a long history of the more extreme elements within Unionism/Loyalism making common cause with the British far Right, which most recently includes Loyalist paramilitaries, influenced by both sectarian and far-right narratives, engaging in a racist pogrom.
As the archives of militant struggle, which now includes Migrant Media’s documentary on the Bradford 12, prove, the 1980s and 1990s were periods when the children and grandchildren of former colonial subjects in England were under siege from the far Right in much the same way as their peers in Northern Ireland were under siege from the Orange Order. At that time, there had been a shared understanding that colonial history and the roots of racism linked Irish, Black and Brown struggles.
It is time to make common cause again, and unite against all forms of racism and sectarianism.
IRR News team
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe.
Calendar of Racism & Resistance
In this week’s Calendar, we cover asylum and migrant rights, far-right fascism, electoral politics across the UK and Europe and more.
Find these stories and thousands more on our Register of Racism and Resistance database.
Jenny Bourne reviews Taj Ali’s remarkable new book ‘Come What May, We’re Here to Stay’ which traces the long roots of South Asians’ political resistance to British racism and colonialism, with chapters on the post-war struggles of industrial workers and the impact of Black Power on self-defence movements. Details of book launches across the country can be found here.
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