CounterpointStimulating debate with the British Council

Yesterday the local newspaper Telegraph and Argus launched a campaign to stop the English Defence League coming to Bradford for a demonstration.

EDL supporters plan to demonstrate in the city on Saturday 28th August. But will they be allowed?

Lawrence Lessig's article For the Love of Culture: Google, copyright and our future, written for The New Republic, provides a lucid and nuanced guide to the central challenge facing policy makers in this area: how to promote democratic access to culture, while at the same time supporting its creation.

What are the most pressing issues around the treatment and status of refugees in the contemporary globalised world? To answer this question you have to ask another: What is a refugee? In this podcast Peter Gatrell, professor of History at the University of Manchester, talks to Counterpoint about the far-reaching, often troubling answers that are given to this question by governments, institutions and people across all layers of contemporary society – and traces the long genealogies of the most ingrained and dangerous responses. The greatest challenge for the future? Returning a sense of agency, individuality and full humanity to non-refugees' perceptions of refugees.

The travails of ethnic Uzbeks in Southern Kyrgyzstan may have (briefly) brought Uzbekistan into the media spotlight recently, but Uzbekistan, from the outside, is not a place we know all that well. Uzbekness: from otherness to ideology, a paper by Hamid Ismailov - emigre poet, novelist and Writer in Residence at the BBC World Service - provides an insider's view.

In 2009 the Equalities and Human Rights Commission decided to take the British National Party to court over its whites-only membership policy.

The EHRC was also criticised by minority groups, saying the win was "hollow" because there was no clamour at all among minorities to join the BNP.

Earlier this year the BNP finally voted to change its membership rules to allow non-whites into the party, after sufficiently squeezing publicity from the court case.

Including highlights of our work in early 2010 and details of our summer and autumn plans, it's a bumper edition of Counterpoint news. Roll up Roll up....

As I said recently, various people have called for the new Muslim fundamentalist group Muslims Against the Crusades to be banned.

But under what pretense?

An Indian Muslim preacher has been banned from entering the UK for his "unacceptable behaviour", the home secretary told the BBC today.

The move is significant because it is the first ban by the new government and it signals that their approach is going to remain broadly similar to that of the previous administration.

A new radical Muslim group has sprung up on the scene calling themselves 'Muslims Against the Crusades' or MAC, as they sometimes refer to themselves.

It's likely that MAC are the latest incarnation of Anjem Choudhary's 'Islam4UK' which was banned under the previous government. This time however, he is nowhere to be seen.