'Immigration' is set to be one of the most-used words in the run-up to the General Election -- at least if UKIP, large sections of the media and much of the current government has its way.
As international tensions affect relations between communities at home, an arts programme in Shoreditch is seeking to bring people from different backgrounds together.
As Ekklesia's 2007 report "When the Saints Go Marching Out', reissued in 2010 (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/11944) pointed out, and as others have subsequently affirmed, St George is not primarily "an English Saint", as popular assumption has it, but a Middle Eastern one with international, multicultural associations and a founding story about resistance to the persecutory impulse of Empire.
Nigel Farage has thrown out the latest UKIP member to provoke controversy through bigoted opinions. Farage says he wants to get rid of candidates with "extremist, barmy or nasty" views. But it is not individual candidates who are the problem. UKIP's official policies are extremely nasty, based as they are on an ultra-Thatcherite free-market extremism.
The Movement Against Xenophobia is a new campaign, promoted by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) and its allies, aimed at countering the vicious anti-immigrant discourse of mainstream politics in the UK.