Labour leader Keir Starmer meeting police chiefs (Photo: flickr/Number 10)
We can’t beat the new surge of fascist and far right violence by supporting the police or demanding more police powers. And the answers won’t come from the government.
Expecting the state to hurl back Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and Islamophobia is the direct opposite of what’s required.
Keir Starmer last week announced his government is setting up a new task force to take on rioters.
Britain, he said, is “a country that will not allow understandable fear to curdle into hate in our communities, and that will not permit under any circumstances a breakdown in law and order on our streets”. Note, by the way he said “understandable fear”—another version of “legitimate concerns” used as a code to target Muslims and migrants.
But the main issue is that Labour is using fascist violence in an attempt to legitimise the present anti-protest repressive powers and to call for more of them. Introducing his new police unit, Starmer said it was, “A response both to the immediate challenge, which is clearly driven by far right hatred. But also all violent disorder that flares up.”
It’s guaranteed that if people now call for the repeal of the battery of anti-protest laws introduced in the last few years, Starmer would say they are needed to deal with the far right. And most trade union leaders and Labour MPs will go along with him.
Of course if fascists attack a police station, as they did in Sunderland, the cops are not going to urge them on. And there will now be a judicial crackdown on some of the far right. But the state’s real targets are the left, Muslims, anti‑racists, environmental campaigners and other anti‑capitalists.
Look at who the law is actually hitting at the moment.
This summer the courts have imprisoned 26 people for nonviolent action over the climate crisis. Some have received sentences of up to five years in jail.
As Just Stop Oil said, “This clampdown is a coordinated move from the state to crush effective, disruptive climate action through aggressive, repressive policing and sham trials conducted by highly motivated judges.”
The courts will soon deal with Palestine solidarity activists who face very serious charges under public order or anti‑terror laws. And there would have been far more were it not for the millions-strong movement against the Gaza genocide.
There’s nothing new in this. Infamously the Public Order Act of 1936 that was supposedly introduced to deal with Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts was only rarely used against Nazi-lovers.
Instead it provided a weapon to use against the left—pickets, strikers and anti-war activists.
British-Trinidadian black nationalist Michael X was one of the first people charged under the 1965 Race Relations Act—for “stirring up hatred against white people”.
Who wants to trust the cops, saturated in racism and sexism, to defend Muslims or any other oppressed group? Who wants the state to decide when it’s appropriate to arrest someone?
The police, who harass and sometimes kill black people, have not become anti-racist.
Then there will be possible non-solutions from the government such as banning the English Defence League. It’s an organisation that anti-fascist agitation hurled back a decade ago and doesn’t now exist. And even if it did, its followers would just reform under a new label if it were banned.
Relying on the police and the state also reduces anti‑racists’ role. It tells them they are at best a sideshow to the main enforcers of anti-fascism. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky described how individual terrorism “reconciles the masses to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission”.
The same process is true of looking to the state.
When the fascists come to attack a mosque, the place of all anti-racists is in the front rank confronting the Nazis, not cowering behind the police lines or hoping the state seizes fascists agitators in dawn raids.
We don’t want more powers for the cops and new laws. We want more of the anti-racist agitation we saw last weekend.
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