Are Irish People Xenophobic?

strokemyclover wrote: »

Yes

Modern Britain

There were race riots across the United Kingdom in 1919: South Shields, Glasgow, London's East End, Liverpool, Cardiff, Barry, and Newport. There were further riots by immigrant and minority populations in East London during the 1930s and Notting Hill in the 1950s.

In the early 1980s, societal racism, discrimination and poverty — alongside further perceptions of powerlessness and oppressive policing — sparked a series of riots in areas with substantial African-Caribbean populations. These riots took place in St Pauls in 1980, Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side in 1981, St Pauls again in 1982, Notting Hill Gate in 1982, Toxteth in 1982, and Handsworth, Brixton and Tottenham in 1985.

The report identified both "racial discrimination" and a "racial disadvantage" in Britain, concluding that urgent action was needed to prevent these issues becoming an "endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society". The era saw an increase in attacks on Black people by White people. The Joint Campaign Against Racism committee reported that there had been more than 20,000 attacks on non- Indigenous Britons including Britons of Asian origin during 1985.

The British Crime Survey reveals that in 2004, 87,000 people from black or minority ethnic communities said they had been a victim of a racially motivated crime. They had suffered 49,000 violent attacks, with 4,000 being wounded. At the same time 92,000 white people said they had also fallen victim of a racially motivated crime. The number of violent attacks against whites reached 77,000, while the number of white people who reported being wounded was five times the number of black and minority ethnic victims at 20,000. Most of the offenders (57%) in the racially motivated crimes identified in the British Crime Survey are not white. White victims said 82% of offenders were not white.

Racism in one form or another was widespread in Britain before the twentieth century, and during the 1900s particularly towards Jewish groups and immigrants from Eastern Europe. The British establishment even considered Irish people a separate and degenerate race until well into the 19th century.

Since World War I, public expressions of racism have been limited to far-right political parties such as the British National Front in the 1970s, whilst most mainstream politicians have publicly condemned all forms of racism. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that racism remains widespread, and some politicians and public figures have been accused of excusing or pandering to racist attitudes in the media, particularly with regard to immigration. There have been growing concerns in recent years about institutional racism in public and private bodies, and the tacit support this gives to crimes resulting from racism, such as the murder of Stephen Lawrence, Gavin Hopley and Ross Parker.

The Race Relations Act 1965 outlawed public discrimination, and established the Race Relations Board. Further Acts in 1968 and 1976 outlawed discrimination in employment, housing and social services, and replaced the Race Relations Board with Commission for Racial Equality. The Human Rights Act 1999 made organisations in Britain, including public authorities, subject to the European Convention on Human Rights. The Race Relations Act 2000 extends existing legislation for the public sector to the police force, and requires public authorities to promote equality.

Although various anti-discrimination legislation do exist. According to some sources most employers in the UK remain institutionally racist including public bodies such as the police and particularly the legal profession. It is also nearly impossible for persons subject to such institutional racism (who are normally economically disadvantaged) to seek legal redress, as in the UK public funding (legal aid) is not available at employment tribunals. The situation with the implementation of Human Rights law is similar. The Terrorism Acts, which came into law in 2000 and 2006, have caused a marked increase in racial profiling and have also been the basis to justify existent trends in discrimination against persons of Muslim origin (or resembling such) by the British police.

There have been tensions over immigration since at least the early 1900s. These were originally engendered by hostility towards Jews and immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Britain first began restricting immigration in 1905 under the Aliens Restriction Act. This was the first time that the United Kingdom implemented a policy that was designed to prevent the influx of immigrants,in particular it was aimed at those Jews who had fled persecution in Russia.

Before the Act Britain had had a favourable immigration policy, most notably throughout the Victorian Period. However,for the first time policy was enacted to prevent the wholesale entry of foreign migrants. Although the Act was extreme Britain maintained its asylum policy. This meant that any persons who had fled their country due to religious or political persecution could be granted asylum in the United Kingdom. However,such policy was removed in the period before the Second World War to prevent the wholesale entry of Jewish refugees leaving from the Third Reich. Although Britain's policy was restrictive it was one of the leading nations that helped solve the refugee crisis preceding World War Two.

Britain has also had very strong limits on immigration since the early 1960s. Legislation was particularly targeted at members of the Commonwealth of Nations, who had previously been able to migrate to the UK under the British Nationality Act 1948. Conservative MP Enoch Powell made a controversial 1968 Rivers of Blood speech in opposition to Commonwealth immigration to Britain; this resulted in him being swiftly removed from the Shadow Cabinet.

Virtually all legal immigration, except for those claiming refugee status, ended with the Immigration Act 1971; however, free movement for citizens of the European Union was later established by the Immigration Act 1988. Legislation in 1993, 1996 and 1999 gradually decreased the rights and benefits given to those claiming refugee status ("asylum seekers"). 582,000 people came to live in the UK from elsewhere in the world in 2004 according to the office of National Statistics.

Some commentators believe that an amount of racism, from within all communities, has been undocumented within the UK, adducing the many British cities whose populations have a clear racial divide. While these commentators believe that race relations have improved immensely over the last thirty years, they still believe that racial segregation remains an important but largely unaddressed problem, although research has shown that ethnic segregation has reduced within England and Wales between the 1991 Census and 2001 Census.

The United Kingdom has been accused of "sleepwalking toward apartheid" by Trevor Phillips, chair of that country's Commission for Racial Equality. Philips has said that Britain is fragmenting into isolated racial communities: "literal black holes into which no one goes without fear and trepidation and nobody escapes undamaged". Philips believes that racial segregation in Britain is approaching that of the United States. "You can get to the point as they have in the U.S. where things are so divided that there is no turning back."

The BBC has reported that the latest crime statistics appear to support Phillips' concerns. They show that race-hate crimes increased by almost 600 per cent in London in the month after the July 7 bomb attacks, with 269 more offences allegedly "motivated by religious hatred" reported to the Metropolitan Police, compared to the same period last year.

In 2007 racist remarks made by contestants on the Celebrity Big Brother TV series against Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty caused widespread outrage, not least in the UK with the British public phoning in to make Shetty the series winner and the other ethnic minority contestant Jermaine Jackson the runner up. Demonstrators in Bangalore burned effigies of the TV Channel's directors.