Some 800 people attended to get organised
A queue ran down the high street from EartH in Dalston, east London, on Monday night.
Many in the queue had been to the Hackney nightclub before. But the Women Against The Far Right (WAFR) launch in London that night was the first political meeting many had joined.
Cody was one of the over 800 people who came to get organised against the far right. “What we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks is really frightening,” she told Socialist Worker.
“Watching the scenes of Belfast on fire and the riot in Southampton just made me feel like I have to be brave, get up and do something.”
Sofia agreed, “I’m here because of the increase in far right protests. Even in a very multicultural city like London, we’ve seen them intimidating refugees outside hotels and in our communities.
“They seem to be getting more and more organised. So, we need to be even better organised than them and more tightly linked up.”
The launch came after the racist pogroms in Belfast, in the north of Ireland.
Fiona Ferguson from socialist party People Before Profit (PBP) had flown in from Belfast that morning. “This past week has changed Belfast forever,” she said.
“But the community response to the rioting in Belfast is something that many of us will never forget.
“They plugged the gaps that the state could not. They organised evacuations, food deliveries and they opened their homes.
“Immediately, there were hundreds of people on WhatsApp in every corner of the city going out and doing the work of looking after their neighbours. It was the very essence of solidarity.”
She explained that “the far right riots were never about protecting women and children.”
Sarah Kilpatrick, president of the NEU education union, said years of cuts and privatisation have created fertile grounds for fascism and racism to grow.
They have “repressed the aspirations of the working class, limited the ambitions of the working class and stifled the education of the working class,” she said.
Samira Ali is the national organiser for Stand up to Racism (SUTR) and co-convener of WAFR. “We were horrified to see the far right pogroms that took place on the streets of Belfast last week,” she said.
“For days, we saw people’s houses being burned down, migrants forced to flee from their homes and racist violence happening across Belfast.
“We’ve also seen similar scenes here. In Southampton, we saw another horrific attack whipped up for racist gain.”
“These are being whipped up by the likes of Nigel Farage and supported by and attended by Tommy Robinson.
“They all have the backing of the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk. He wants to tell us that it’s migrants, refugees, black people, trans+ people, that are to blame for the problems in society, not people like him who are leeching off the rest of us.
“But we’ve also seen such brilliant resistance on our streets—and we’ve proven that we can turn the tide.”
The anti-racist response to the far right pogroms in Belfast showed just that. Around 20,000 people joined a United Against Racism demonstration in Belfast—the largest anti-racist mobilisation in the city’s history—and 2,500 turned out in Derry.
Sophia Beach from WAFR said urged the crowd to call out the weaponisation of women’s safety by the far right. “The men that make me most terrified are not the men who are facing deportations, but the men who are calling for them,” she said.
“WAFR is essential. We are about the politics of unity, about the politics of mass mobilisation and about the politics of militancy.”
At a time when racist ideas are becoming more prevalent, the meeting showed that there are also thousands ready to fight back.
WAFR aims to turn that anger into organisation across Britain.
The new developments and continuations in the far right
Plus: far right outnumbered in Glasgow
Farage under pressure from Restore Britain
