By Jeremy Dewar
Up to 150,000 racists attended the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march and rally in London last month. They were mobilised by known fascist thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, and a variety of far right outfits. This is an alarm call for the whole working class movement. The fascist menace has arrived.
To those who say, they weren’t all far right, some were ‘only’ against immigrants, we say, wake up! The majority had been active throughout August, protesting outside refugee hotels or spreading the ‘Raise the Colours’ campaign, designed to scare Black, Asian and migrant families in their own neighbourhoods.
Whatever reactionary ideas these racists came to London with on 13 September, they left with those ideas reinforced and new ones – about Muslims taking over Britain, about British culture being under attack – planted in their skulls. This four-hour jamboree was a platform for many of Britain’s, Europe’s and the USA’s most divisive politicians.
Mainstream pundits were also quick to point out that many on the demo were working class and there were few arrests for violence. Yes, in Britain any demo that size would have workers on it. But the organisers certainly were not. The state of the art audio-visual equipment and the appearance by Elon Musk indicates serious money lay behind the event.
As for the relative peace, the far right are not stupid. They have learned from the long sentences handed down after the pogroms of 2024. This summer they chose to build more slowly and quietly, but violence will be unleashed – against ethnic minorities, against LGBT+ communities and eventually against the workers’ movement – as sure as night follows day. Indeed, this is what the follow-up ‘March of the Pink Ladies’ was designed to achieve, to soften their image while retaining their violent rhetoric of hate.
New racist formations
The most prominent outright fascist organisations in Britain today are Britain First, Patriotic Alliance and the Homeland party. They have been behind most of the anti-asylum hotel campaigns and the hoisting of Union Jacks and flags of St George. They will have grown and drawn a periphery of racists around them this summer.
The leaders of these hate groups share a common history with Robinson in the British National Party and English Defence League. But Robinson has chosen to join Ben Habibi’s Advance UK party, a split from Reform, calling it ‘a political home for patriots’. Advance UK spreads the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory that Muslims are out to drive Christians from Europe and North America. It already claims to have 35,000 members and £320,000 in donations.
The movement is fluid and has many links with Farage’s Reform UK. One Kai Cunningham was briefly a Reform candidate, while openly fronting White Vanguard, a violent supremacist youth organisation. Not the brightest button in the box, Cunningham told the crowd in London, ‘Islamic Muslims are the foot soldiers for the Jews,’ combining Islamophobia with antisemitism.
Time for action
Shamefully on our side, we are lagging behind. First the official labour movement has been effectively absent. Labour leaders like Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer tried to join in the racist flag campaign and increase the intimidation and deportation of migrants. The unions have long outsourced their anti-racist work to Stand Up To Racism, without mobilising their members to confront the far right.
Despite heroic resistance by some of their members, the Socialist Workers Party leaders of SUTR refuse to shift from their failed strategy. Lewis Nielsen insists that the key arguments are to call everyone on a far right march a ‘Nazi’ and to dismiss any complaints about poor housing, crumbling services and low pay as excuses for racism.
The movement was able to fumble along with this approach when right could only muster a couple of thousand thugs on the streets. But when they can outnumber the anti-fascists by 10 to one or more, SUTR’s arguments are clearly worse than useless.
Calling the softer racist elements Nazis is more likely to alienate and harden them than disillusion them. Failing to engage in arguments about who is to blame for the lack of council housing or hospital waiting lists leaves them vulnerable to the far right’s racist scapegoating.
Even the Black Bloc’s self-isolation, only protecting their own part of the demonstration, is stuck in the past.
United front
What we need is a workers’ united front against fascism. On every housing estate, in every workplace and school, we need to organise groups to take on and patiently defeat the racist arguments, not afraid to point the finger at the Labour government and union bureaucrats. We need self-defence units, who can drive racist gangs off the streets.
But most of all we need a new party that can lead the fight for a socialist solution to the crises facing all workers in Britain.It’s harder to be a racist if you’re on a picket line next to an African nurse, or on a housing demo alongside a Romanian tenant. That doesn’t mean you don’t still need to fight racism at the same time. It just gives you the best conditions to win.
