The 13 September London demonstration, called by Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, was a wake-up call for socialists and the working class movement.
After weeks of hounding asylum seekers, surrounding the hotels they are forced to live in, and raising the union and St George flags in an act of intimidation, 150,000 racists responded to the far right’s call to listen to far right leaders and conspiracy theorists from across the world.
Meanwhile an active minority, led by real fascists, infiltrated the 20,000-strong Stand Up to Racism counter-demo. They taunted and molested anti-racists, whom SUTR had taken no precaution to protest.
Labour and the unions
The Labour Party’s response was to mimic the right’s policies, move refugees from hotels into army barracks and deport thousands, often to warzones and authoritarian regimes.
They threaten to make it even more difficult for migrants to attain UK citizenship. This will only embolden the racists, who will see Starmer and Mahmood’s capitulation as vindication of their campaign.
The Labour leadership should be condemned for this cowardice. The trade unions are right to review their relationship to the party, as Unite and Unison are already doing, and take active steps to replace it with a new working class party – one that fights the enemy, instead of pandering to its prejudices.
However, the trade union leaders have done little better. The TUC and SUTR have launched the Together Alliance and promised to mobilise tens of thousands on the streets of London on 28 March, the UN’s anti-racism day. A host of trade unions, along with progressive celebrities, faith leaders and NGOs immediately signed up.
Of course there is nothing wrong with a big anti-racist demo, but it is not a strategy to defeat Reform and the far right. Yet that is what the TA demo is being billed as. There are no supplementary actions. It is a one-off mobilisation, after which participants will simply go home. Even the TUC ‘Resource Pack’ offers little more than a plea to join your local SUTR group.
Roots of the far right
The problem with the Together Alliance goes far deeper than this, however. It poses as a cross-class alliance, a popular front that can rid society of racism and fascism. But racism and fascism are the direct product of capitalism. If we are to root out racism, we have to confront capitalism.
The system that condemns all workers to exploitation, does so unequally. The international division of labour condemns the majority of humanity, black and brown people in the semi-colonies, to super-exploitation. To divide the working class, the ruling class grants privileges, however small or unequally applied, to the ‘native’ workers to buy their loyalty. This is the material basis and purpose of all racist ideologies.
As capitalism falters, profits become thinner and competition fiercer. Each nation seeks to scapegoat minorities and migrants, while they ratchet up the rate of exploitation. In an effort to divide the working class and crush resistance, the boss class draws on racism and stokes nationalism with campaigns like Brexit, which blamed Europe for Britain’s crumbling welfare state.
In the current crisis British imperialism is also preparing the working class for war by promoting nationalism. Shamelessly our union leaders endorses the rapid and accelerating arms spending, but the end result is mass destruction, of the working class and oppressed peoples included.
Part of that preparation is the dissemination of right wing ideologies and passing of discriminatory laws, promoting male, heterosexual and white supremacy. This is what is normalising far right ideas.
The aim is to infiltrate these alien ideas into the working class and prepare them for cannon fodder – and they are prepared to ‘tolerate’ the growth of fascism in order to break our resistance to poverty, war and racism. Our task today is to prevent the spread of racist and fascist ideas in the working class.
This requires a workers’ united front, rooted in the workplaces and communities, which can push back against racist and far right myths every day, isolating the hardcore and shoving them off our streets and out of our workplaces. This is the new direction anti-racists and socialists need to take.
Popular Front or Workers United Front?
The problem with the Together Alliance is that it limits its slogans, its message, even its forms of action to what is acceptable to its sponsors. Celebrities, charities, faith leaders are middle class or even outright capitalists. Their complaint is not with capitalist system, only the way it is administered. So they demand action is limited to once in a while, and above all remains peaceful and legal.
National Education Union leader Daniel Kebede, supposedly on the left of the TUC, has reinforced this message by calling for ‘a non-violent counter to the hatred that manifested itself on our streets this summer’ (SUTR TU Bulletin, Autumn 2024).
From Newcastle to Bristol, increasingly frustrated anti-racists and trade unionists have sought to break from this pacifist model of accepting police restrictions, to occupy their gathering points and drive the racists off our streets. But SUTR, led by the Socialist Workers Party, refused to join in, encouraging protesters to listen passively to endless speeches while the far right maintained their blockade of hotels.
Now all energies are being directed into the One Big March. SUTR’s message is to ‘organise the maximum unity and mobilise the anti-racist majority’. This is reckless complacency. Our ‘majority’ is rapidly evaporating before our eyes. We need to make inroads on the racists’ growing minority.
The 150,000 who attended Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ demo, though not all fascists, had gone out, night after night, for weeks on end, to intimidate refugees. They are not going to be swayed by TA’s slogans of ‘Love. Unity. Hope.’ But they could be won over by patient argument, showing where the real responsibility for homelessness and dereliction, waiting lists and youth unemployment lie.
The union leaders understand this reality. According to an unpublished Unison survey of members, a third – and a quarter of activists – are considering voting for Reform. Activists in Manchester report that the busworkers’ whatsapp group set up to help run their recent strike is bombarded with tropes taken from the far right.
The infiltration of right wing ideas into our unions is proceeding with virtually no resistance from the general secretaries. Fran Heathcote of the PCS union even told rank and file members, who were organising to discuss what to do to stop the growing support for Reform in the workplace, they had ‘no right’ to hold such a meeting!
Yet Heathcote, Graham and others will be speaking at today’s conference, with absolutely no demands placed on them to organise an anti-racist campaign, or mobilise their members to defend their communities. They are quite content to keep within the guardrails set by Together. The last thing they want is a campaign that might lose them valuable members.
What is needed?
SUTR and the SWP must stop shielding the union bureaucrats from criticism and demand they organise workplace and community resistance. If they won’t, we must do it ourselves.
We need a thoroughgoing, cross-union campaign that answers the racist lies and myths about the cause of the NHS waiting lists, the slums and lack of council housing, the growing youth unemployment, and asks why these millionaire racists are protecting the real culprits, the capitalist system itself.
Some of SUTR’s factsheets are useful starting points, but they are left on the stall table, not used to start arguments with the racists. We must learn the old lessons about how to beat the racists, not just call them out in a shouting match.
And when the far right invade our towns and cities to spread fear and hatred, we need to promote and organise self-defence associations, with workplace and trade union mobilisations that can not only protect our counters with stewards, but also when the chance arises go on the offensive and drive them back into the gutter.
If we can isolate the hardened racists, we must push them out of the unions and demand their sacking, with strike action if necessary. This has happened before, in Hither Green Job Centre in the 1980s for example. This will pit our movement against those union leaders, who prize the dues paid by these racists and shrink from any ‘unlawful’ activity.
This is what a workers’ united front looks like in practice. It is not an adjunct to the popular front of Together, it is diametrically opposed to the popular front.
But on its own, the united front is not enough. We need a working class party that can lead the fight for socialism, with intransigent antiracism and antifascism at its heart. If anything can be salvaged from the seeming wreckage of Your Party, this must be one of its top priorities.
Only a party that offers the real hope of socialism, not simply the word ‘Hope’ on a leaflet, can unite the majority of the working class against Farage, Robinson and the rest of the millionaire racist scum.
