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Fifty years ago Enoch Powell made national headlines with his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, warning of an immigrant invasion in the once respectable streets of Wolverhampton. This local fixation brought the Black Country town into the national spotlight, yet Powell's unstable relationship with Wolverhampton has since been overlooked. Drawing from oral history and archival material, this book offers a rich local history through which to investigate the speech, bringing to life the racialised dynamics of space during a critical moment in British history. What was going on beneath the surface in Wolverhampton and how did Powell's constituents respond to this dramatic moment? The research traces the ways in which Powell's words reinvented the town and uncovers highly contested local responses. While Powell left Wolverhampton in 1974, the book returns to the city to explore the collective memories of the speech that continue to reverberate. In a contemporary period of new crisis and division, examining the shadow of Powell allows us to reflect on racism and resistance from 1968 to the present day.
, 2007 ). A new ‘special’ strategic partnership In 2014, in one of two joint annual leadership summits that have become a feature of Australia–Japan ties, Prime Ministers Shinz ō Abe and Tony Abbott announced that a ‘new special relationship had been born’ ( Placek, 2014 ). The term ‘special relationship’ has usually been reserved only for the closest of ‘allies’ – such as the UK and the US, or the US and Israel – which imbues such proclamations with a serious degree of political capital. Though the term ‘ally
This book recounts the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain from 1942 to 1945, about 8 per cent (240,000) were African-American; the latter’s relationships with British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2,000 babies. The African-American press named these children ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girlfriends. Up to half of the mothers of these babies, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave their children up for adoption. The outcome for these children tended to be long-term residency in children’s homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on ‘coloured’ children, who were thought to be ‘too hard to place’. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. Accessibly written and illustrated with numerous photographs, this book presents the stories of over forty of these children. While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.
Hume, pp. 14, 195. As Arthur notes, Hume’s reward for his opposition to the MacBride Principles was to be called ‘England’s main propaganda expert in the United States of America’ in a letter to the Derry Journal written by Fr Seán McManus, a leader of the republican lobby in the US; Arthur, Special Relationships, p. 276, n. 78. 15 Routledge, John Hume, p. 195; White, John Hume, p. 251. 16 Irish Press, 29 September 1983. 17 Coogan, The Troubles, p. 408; R. B. Finnegan, ‘Irish-American relations’, in Crotty and Schmitt (eds), Ireland on the World Stage, p. 99; White
little better) repeated, bloody and failed attempts at conquest. At the other extreme, alliance with England might become a bloodless conquest, or at least a ‘special relationship’ bringing little profit or honour to the junior partner. Both of these solutions had their advocates in medieval Scotland, but when forced to choose, the Scots consistently chose defiance. England’s record of aggression was too well known for it to be trusted as an ally. Scotland instead spun itself a wider international web: trading across the North Sea to the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia
apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States … is about played out. Great Britain … has seemed to conduct policy as weak as its military power.2 The second and third propositions invite rebuttals, which I hope will be more than expressions of injured pride. Before examining them, it is first necessary to address the risk of over-generalisation. Some generalisations are inadvertent and follow from the shorthand terms we use. In particular, the expression ‘British decision-makers’, is no more than a term of convenience. No regime
Anglophobia in Fascist Italy traces the roots of Fascist Anglophobia from the Great War and through the subsequent peace treaties and its development during the twenty years of Mussolini’s regime. Initially, Britain was seen by many Italians as a ‘false friend’ who was also the main obstacle to Italy’s foreign policy aspirations, a view embraced by Mussolini and his movement. While at times dormant, this Anglophobic sentiment did not disappear in the years that followed, and was later rekindled during the Ethiopian War. The peculiarly Fascist contribution to the assessment of Britain was ideological. From the mid-1920s, the regime’s intellectuals saw Fascism as the answer to a crisis in the Western world and as irredeemably opposed to Western civilisation of the sort exemplified by Britain. Britain was described as having failed the ‘problem of labour’, and Fascism framed as a salvation ideology, which nations would either embrace or face decay. The perception of Britain as a decaying and feeble nation increased after the Great Depression. The consequence of this was a consistent underrating of British power and resolve to resist Italian ambitions. An analysis of popular reception of the Fascist discourse shows that the tendency to underrate Britain had permeated large sectors of the Italian people, and that public opinion was more hostile to Britain than previously thought. Indeed, in some quarters hatred towards the British lasted until the end of the Second World War, in both occupied and liberated Italy.
In times of national security, scholars and activists who hail from the communities under suspicion attempt to draw readers and listeners to the complexity of the world we inhabit. For those who campaigned against the SUS law in the 1980s, when young Black men were being routinely stopped in the streets, the wave of counter-terrorism legislation and policy that exists today will be very familiar. Similarly, recent discussions about the impact of drill music in the culture of young Black men has drawn questions around the ways in which they should be securitised, with senior police calling for the use of terrorism legislation against them. In this environment, when those who study and have lived alongside the communities who are at the scrutiny of the state raise questions about the government, military and police policy, they are often shut down as terrorist-sympathisers, or apologists for gang culture. In such environments, there is an expectation on scholars and activists to condemn what society at large fears. This volume is about how that expectation has emerged alongside the normalisation of racism, and how these writers choose to subvert the expectations raised on them, as part of their commitment to anti-racism.
through to the fraying relationship of the mid-1920s, this chapter considers a neglected precedent, that is, the first age of transatlantic memory diplomacy. Here, in short, is a revealing window on those early efforts to establish friendly Anglo-American relations before the arrival of mid-twentieth-century government agencies, and before the rhetoric and romance of the ‘special relationship.’ The well-known disagreements between Washington and London notwithstanding (over the peace settlement, German reparations, and, later, naval disarmament), this chapter
support of their respective superpower. 10 This is not surprising, given that the two Germanys developed very different relations to the State of Israel. On the one hand, West Germany agreed to pay restitutions for Nazi crimes to the State of Israel in 1952, and soon the bilateral relationship blossomed into what academic, journalistic and governmental sources generally refer to as the ‘special relationship’, attracting a rich and diverse body of scholarship. 11 On the other hand, East Germany did not pay any reparations to Israel, and soon adopted an officially