Phil Turner

Racist Tory politician Enoch Powell is well and truly nailed for his “politics of the gutter” in this triumphant celebration of Caribbean migration.

It comes as we hear words from Powell’s vile “rivers of blood” speech made in 1968 which whipped up hatred up over immigration, predicting that black people will gain the “whiphand”. Ten years before Powell was the minister who had initiated such migration to solve Britain’s post-Second World War labour shortage.

The acquittal last month of the last two defendants in the group of Asian men known as the Rotherham 12 is probably the most important victory in the fight against racism and fascism in Britain for decades. The impact of such a decisive triumph for anti-racists has not been felt since Southall in the late 1970s or the Bradford 12 in the early 1980s. It is a victory for the whole of the working class.

A fantastic show of strength and unity in Rotherham against the fascist Britain First last month showed how things are changing in the fight against racism as the refugee crisis intensifies.

More than 400 people joined the Rotherham Unite Against Fascism (UAF) protest under the slogan, “Enough is Enough — Muslim Lives Matter” following the shocking murder of Muslim man Mushin Ahmed as he walked to morning prayers in August.

Support is growing for a “People’s Inquiry” into the Rotherham sex abuse scandal.

Barrister Michael Mansfield QC has already agreed to help such an investigation after the launch of a trade union campaign calling for “Justice for the 1,400 – don’t let the racists divide us”. The justice campaign has been welcomed after the horrific extent of the abuse — estimated by the Jay report to be 1,400 victims over 16 years and so far only five convictions — shocked and angered people.

In a small village near Stonehaven in north east Scotland is a museum dedicated to the writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

The centre, near the farm in Arbuthnott where he grew up, is surrounded by the Mearns, the area Grassic Gibbon immortalised through his portrayal of its distinctive speech and culture.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pen name used by James Leslie Mitchell, a revolutionary Marxist until his death.

But now an exhibition in his home city belatedly shows off the best of his graphic and dynamic prints and etchings.

It is his prints, influenced by Futurism and the Vorticists, which are by far the most exciting.

A fine example is the 1932 lino print called Grinders, a striking monochrome image of two men sharpening knives which is clearly symbolic of Sheffield's steel industry.

The work has a real sense of rhythm typical of movements that revelled in the speed of modern life and the triumph of mechanisation.

The words of one steel union official summed up the anger as steel giant Corus announced that 700 jobs - more than half the workforce - were to go at its huge Aldwarke plant in Rotherham.

Workers arrived for their Monday morning shifts fearing the worst after a leaked TV news story the previous day ushered in the blackest day for the town in years. The steel meltdown revealed the brutal reality of the economic crisis in northern industrial towns like Rotherham.

During his life Thomas Paine was hounded from Britain, imprisoned in France and treated as a pariah in the US, his adopted country. Why should we celebrate Paine's life and work?

He was one of a fairly long line of British socialists or pre-socialists, radicals whom history has sought to erase in one way or the other.

Flying pickets from Cortonwood near Rotherham walked out when its closure was announced and brought the rest of the Yorkshire coalfield to a standstill. Pits in Scotland and Wales also had to be picketed out by Yorkshire miners as the strike spread nationally.

Another pointer is pay. Not since the 1970s have we seen the kind of strike activity breaking out among journalists as we have today. Four local newspaper chapels have now voted for strike ballots. This comes just two weeks after the pay victory at the Bradford Telegraph and Argus Group after only one half-day strike, and one of these chapels is not even recognised. The fight is being led by young, and in many cases trainee, journalists--just as it was in the 1970s when NUJ members were forced onto the picket lines.