The announcement that 600 aerospace workers are set to lose their jobs at Bombardier’s Belfast site is a devastating blow to the region’s manufacturing sector. The announcement came just a week after Thompson Aero Seating announced 500 redundancies, following 430 layoffs of mostly agency workers by the company in March.
The nature of policing in the United States is inseparable from the violent, racist history of capitalism in this country.
The Stonewall riots are one of the major milestones in queer history. The Stonewall Inn was a bar in the Greenwich Village area of New York, frequented largely by the poorest members of the LGBT+ people in the area. The police had a long history of conducting violent raids on the Inn and harassing the LGBT+ clientele. On 28th June 1969, the police once again entered the Stonewall Inn, with the intent of shutting it down permanently. They began to arrest people in the bar, but met resistance.
Historically, the image is put forward that our hands are clean, that Belfast never benefited from slavery, unlike Liverpool and Bristol. As I say, hypocrisy. I’ll give a few examples where well-known people, from both sides of the sectarian divide here, who engaged in and supported slavery.
