On the Stand Up To Racism demonstration in March this year
The magnificent anti-racist mobilisations against the surge of far right violence have to be the launchpad for a transformation of British politics. We say no more fascism, but we also need a war on Reform UK, Islamophobia and state racism.
No more media witch hunts against refugees and Muslims, no more politicians’ attacks on refugees. Instead, let’s fight to tear down the borders and dismantle the anti-immigration laws. And that means confronting both Labour and the Tories.
The wave of far right violence is shocking and disgusting. But it should not have come as a surprise.
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. The Tories ran a whole general election campaign focused on the “Stop the boats” slogan that 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, Labour home secretary Yvette Cooper decided to write exclusively in The Sun newspaper.
She declared what the newspaper called a “summer blitz of immigration raids targeting workers in dodgy car washes and nail bars”. It was a direct acceptance of racist scapegoating.
Since the era of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s, Labour and Tory governments have rarely even pretended to make 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 which has become fabulously wealthy even as key services rotted and working 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.
Islamophobia existed before the “war on terror” and the Iraq War. But it hugely accelerated as a cover for the endless assaults in the Middle East and beyond.
And politicians of all stripes have denounced the mass marches for Palestine as nests of hatred and antisemitism. These great 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 fascist 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 absorbed into the Islamophobia of the far right. And those who have fought against Israeli genocide have been and will be crucial to building the anti-racist movement.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage played a key 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.
Even as he denounced attacks on the police, Farage added, “Ever since the soft-policing of the Black Lives Matter protests, the impression of two-tier policing has become widespread.
“The fracturing of our communities is a result of mass, uncontrolled immigration.” It’s a cleaned-up version of Tommy Robinson’s creed.
There are a series of linked tasks for the working class movement. One is to keep building the biggest and most determined united front to beat back the fascists and their allies.
A great start has been made in the last fortnight. It must be maintained.
And 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 can go to the left or the right. We have to direct it leftwards.
The puny methods of too many 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. We do not have a shred of sympathy for those racists who have raged through the streets.
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.
That has to be met by a militant workers’ movement—battling over the attacks on working class people. The root of all the horrors spewed out recently is capitalism—which spawns racism and fascism.
Anti-racist organisation, united class battles and the creation of larger revolutionary socialist forces can offer a real way forward against the people at the top.
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