The crisis of far right violence and fascism in Britain

Some 15,000 marched for fascist Tommy Robinson on July 27 (Photo: Guy Smallman)

The wave of far right violence is shocking and disgusting. It requires the most urgent response from anti-racists, socialists and the working class movement.

But it should not be a surprise. For a very long time Socialist Worker—but not just Socialist Worker—has issued a grim warning.

If you have official politics saturated with racism, scapegoating and officially-sanctioned Islamophobia then this will feed the far right and incubate a fascist core.

Violent racists will say that politicians claim to be concerned about the scale of migration and the behaviour of Islamists. But they do nothing effective about it. So the far right must solve these matters through their own actions.

It’s no pleasure to say we were right, and in many ways we now face the most threatening fascist challenge for a century.                                                 

The pollution of racism from the top has been constant.

The Conservatives ran a whole election campaign focused on the “Stop the boats” slogan that has now appeared on far right mobilisations.

But it’s not just the Tories to blame.

Less than two weeks before the explosion of mosque attacks and burning of hotels where migrants are housed, home secretary Yvette Cooper decided to write exclusively in The Sun.

She declared what the newspaper called a “summer blitz of immigration raids targeting workers in dodgy car washes and nail bars”.

Cooper’s article said, “I was shocked to discover the Conservatives had 1,000 civil servants working on the Rwanda Partnership. Not anymore. 

“We’ve moved staff instead into a new Returns and Enforcement programme to increase returns of those with no right to be here.”

The message was that instead of wasteful and frivolous anti-migrant programmes, Labour would unleash anti-migrant repression on the streets of Britain. If you’ve been thinking that there are lots of “illegals” who ought to be seized and expelled—you’re right.

Two days before the general election, Cooper went to support Labour candidate Sarah Edwards in Tamworth. 

Marking the visit, Edwards said, “Labour will restore community policing, control our borders, and close the asylum hotel.” This was a reference to the Holiday Inn in her constituency used to house refugees.

Cooper said in a video with Edwards that Labour would be “fixing the chaos in the asylum system, ending asylum hotels”.

So it was no surprise that the triumphantly-elected Edwards later rose in parliament to say, “In Tamworth, the Holiday Inn has been used for asylum purposes for years. The simple reality is that residents want their hotel back.

“The Holiday Inn should be for holidays, I therefore welcome the announcement that the Border Security and Immigration Bill includes plans to end asylum hotel use.”

She was speaking just as the far right began its attempted pogrom and mosque obliteration in Southport. And within days, a fascist-led mob smashed the Tamworth Holiday Inn’s hotel’s windows and tried to set it alight. Edwards duly condemned the methods employed to “reclaim” the hotel from refugees. But she made no apology for her earlier remarks or even acknowledged the obvious verbal connection.

Attacking accommodation for migrants and refugees is not unprecedented. In February last year, hotels for asylum seekers in Knowsley and Rotherham saw huge anti-migrant protests. Last weekend, fascists set fire to the same Rotherham hotel.  

Of course these most recent examples built on years of accelerating Islamophobia and anti-migrant racism.

Since the era of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s, Labour and Tory governments have rarely even pretended to offer significant improvements in working class people’s lives. Instead they have offered only varying programmes of austerity and cuts. 

At the same time they have presided of an orgy of enrichment for the top 1 percent who have become fabulously wealthy even as key services rotted and ordinary people saw their children’s futures trashed.

To deflect from the fury about gross inequality and fantastic elite privilege, successive governments whipped up racism over migrants and refugees. Either openly or quietly, people have been directed to vent their hatred against migrants and Muslims rather than the rich and the corporations.

The politicians’ useful tool to fracture opposition was bound to find a home in racism and eventually in networks dedicated to creating racist terror.

Islamophobia existed before the “war on terror” and the Tony Blair-George Bush war on Iraq. But it hugely accelerated as a cover for the endless assaults in the Middle East and wider.

Last week, as thugs chanted vile anti-Muslim slogans, they were entirely in keeping with the ideology of the “clash of civilisations” so central to imperialism in the 21st century.

And politicians of all stripes have denounced the mass marches for Palestine as nests of hatred and antisemitism. These magnificent mobilisations against Israel’s genocide have included many Muslims, and therefore the assault on them meshes with a wider Islamophobia.

The far right assaults are centrally about refugees, migrants and Islamophobia rather than being a pro-Zionist militia. But it was no accident that Tommy Robinson opened up the speeches in Trafalgar Square on 27 July with, “Not a Palestinian flag in sight—this is what our capital city should look like.” 

Attacking the Palestine movement is thereby absorbed into the Islamophobia of the far right.

It is more dangerous than when the fascist Tommy Robinson founded the English Defence League (EDL) 15 years ago.

It was a serious and thuggish anti-Muslim street force with links to the Nazi BNP. It held a long series of set-piece anti-Muslim demonstrations that sometimes crashed through the opposition and the police to rampage in the streets.

It took five years of remorseless work and a series of confrontations by anti-racists to hurl it back.

But the EDL could not even dream of the semi-spontaneous outbursts of murderous, racist thuggery that we are seeing in towns and cities across Britain.

In the 1970s the Nazi National Front sought to terrorise black people and create an openly fascist movement. It won big votes on some occasions, held large marches and encouraged murders and fire bombings.

But it could not organise the equivalent of the open mass assaults on mosques and migrant hotels we now see.

The other big difference is the existence of Reform UK. Nigel Farage’s far right party took four million votes at the general election. Under the election systems in Germany or Spain or France it could have 80 MPs.

And Farage played an important role in legitimising the hatred after the tragic Southport murders. He popularised the idea that the authorities were “not telling the truth” about the murder suspect. He added, “What I do know is that something is going terribly wrong in our once beautiful country.”

That’s the polite version of the far right’s “We want our country back” chant.

Farage now has to pretend that he has no link to the thugs. But even as he denounced attacks on the police, he adds, “Ever since the soft-policing of the Black Lives Matter protests, the impression of two-tier policing has become widespread.

“The majority of our population can see the fracturing of our communities as a result of mass, uncontrolled immigration, whether legal or illegal.”

It’s a cleaned-up version of Tommy Robinson’s creed.

There is no room for complacency—or panic. At the same time as the far right has roared into action, so too have tens of thousands of people who bravely come out to oppose them.

There are a series of linked tasks for the working class movement. The most urgent is to build the biggest and most determined united front to beat back the fascists and their allies. 

This is a matter of life and death for refugees and Muslims under attack, but it is also crucial to the unity and fighting ability of the whole working class.

We can’t ignore Reform UK. It will take sustained work to undermine its influence.

And crucially, there has to be a wider class approach. The racists feed off the crisis and decomposition of politics and the anger at the rotten system that wrecks so many lives.

The anger against that system can go to the left or the right. We have to direct it leftwards.

The puny methods of the trade union leaders and Labour MPs won’t cut it in the face of a society of mass hardship and poverty, the sense of no future, war, environmental collapse and oppression

There is an appeal that Donald Trump often employs to fire up his audiences— “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

It’s a clever call that goes beyond the details of economic programmes and touches on the sense of duplicity and lies by the elite.

We do not have a shred of sympathy for those racists who are raging through the streets. They are our implacable enemies who we will oppose and confront.

But among them are not just hardened fascists. Some are also part of a particularly twisted version of a wider sense of deep fury at the system.

As well as taking on the fascists and Reform UK, we need to confront capitalism. United class battles and the creation of larger revolutionary socialist forces have to offer a real retribution against the people at the top.