Filed under: Free Rad!cals | Tags: book review, far right, guantanamo, terrorism, UK
Busy day today. Here is a second post, this time for FreeRad!cals, providing a book review of a rather fun piece of fiction I just finished. I used to read so much more fiction…
http://icsr.info/blog/Heartland
Heartland
Filed under: Radicalisation, Terrorism, UK
I’ve just had the pleasure of finishing reading Heartland by Anthony Cartwright. It is what I have been allowing myself by way of a break as I continue to plough through mountains of information about extremism and radicalization in the UK.
The book is a work of fiction (hence the break I referred to above), that explores in a wonderfully nuanced and sensitive way the issues around the BNP’s rise in the British Midlands against a backdrop of inter-racial tensions in the immediate post-9/11 period. Set in the fictional ward of Cinderheath – which is in the real city of Dudley in the heart of the Black Country – the book follows Rob, a young man who briefly touched minor celebrity as a footballer, but who is settling into life as a school P.E. teacher/assistant. His uncle is the local Labour councilor who is fighting a seemingly losing battle against a slick BNP candidate and his army of football thugs, as the local Muslim community builds a large mosque and people worry about the precedent set by the revelation that three local lads are in Guantanamo Bay (the very real “Tipton Taliban”). In the front of everyone’s minds, however, is football – with England battling their way through the 2002 World Cup (to no avail), while the country’s press are fixated on a local league game which is pitting a local Muslim side against a non-Muslim side.
Filed under: Free Rad!cals, Uncategorized | Tags: far right, radicalization, UK
My latest for FreeRad!cals, back where I cannot post very well, so follow the link to see where the links are I’m afraid. The article appears to have stirred up a bit of a debate, look forward to maybe hearing others thoughts on this.
Why is the Right doing so well in the UK?
by Raff Pantucci
Filed under: Leadership, Radicalisation, UK
I have been traveling around the UK the last few weeks. Two things appear to be atop everyone’s concerns, the “rise of the right” and the fact that the British government may be using the “Prevent” counter-radicalization and counter-terrorism program to spy on Muslim communities. I plan on dealing with each in separate posts, but first on the “rise of the right”.
For those who have missed it, the United Kingdom is finding it has an increasingly belligerent and noisy right-wing which is not only managing to make unpleasant speeches and protests, but are also able to win votes in elections. The far right British National Party has won a growing number of seats in first local elections, and most stunningly in the 2009 European Parliament elections it was able to secure two seats and a total of just under 1 million votes nationally.
