By Andy Yorke
Scenes of Union and St George flag waving protesters camped outside of asylum hotels, with placards demanding, ‘Clear them out’ and interviewees declaring, ‘I don’t care where they go, just not here’ have dominated mainstream and social media.
True, not all of them are fascists, let alone ‘Nazis’ as Stand Up To Racism absurdly labels them. But there are organised fascists vying for leadership and recruits. If they are allowed to fester, a hardened racist movement could grow bigger and meaner.
The task to stop them is made far more difficult because the media, Tories and Reform are all fanning the flames of anti-immigrant racism, with Labour limping along behind. Firestarter in chief is Reform leader Nigel Farage with his ‘law and order’ campaign linking crime to immigration.
His demagogy has sent the anti-immigrant thermometer to a record high, with constant racist references to an invasion of ‘fighting-age men’ and the need to protect ‘our’ women and girls from the ‘culture’ these immigrants bring—this from the most misogynistic of British politicians.
On 26 August Farage relaunched Reform’s immigration policy, ‘Operation Restoring Justice’, promising if elected to deport all 600,000 illegal immigrants, five planeloads a day. He rejected this as unrealistic last year, but Trump’s election has changed the calculus of what is possible.
The four-page ‘operation’ plans a UK deportation command with sweeping powers to detect and arrest ‘illegals’, with mass detention camps replacing hotels. The whole slew of international human rights laws would be ‘disapplied’, the Rwanda plan revived, and bribes and deals given to Iran and Afghanistan to take them back.
The aim is to scare off migrants from coming, terrorising the immigrant community in the process, and no doubt spilling over into attacks on Palestine solidarity, Black Lives Matter and the left.
Farage’s strategy
Farage has always walked the line just to the side of fascist violence, most famously when he claimed that the police weren’t telling the full story about the Southport murders. He was on the defensive then, but he’s on a roll now, promoting the asylum hotel protests and the ‘raise the colours’ campaign.
In his usual tactic of doublespeak, he argues that the justified anger against migrants is so great that there could be ‘civil disobedience on a vast scale’. Oozing with cant, he warns, ‘I think there is now a genuine threat to public order, the very last thing that we want’.
That is precisely what he wants! Farage plays a double bluff game: denying Reform has anything to do with the far right, but in reality encouraging the asylum hotel protests (organised first by Homeland, a split from Patriotic Alternative) and the flags campaign (initiated by ex-EDL, taken up Britain First).
With one foot resting on the street and the other on the press, Farage has worked relentlessly on Labour’s weak points, pulling Tories, like Kemi Badenoch and the vile Robert Jenrick behind him, knowing they can never outflank him on the right.
The outrageous has become the thinkable, normalised by a willing media. The BBC is terrified of looking ‘woke’ while GB News and bulk of the print media are owned by Tory magnates, who need an effective right wing movement to scapegoat migrants and other minorities. How else can Farage get his tax-cutting, welfare-slashing, defence-hiking, NHS-privatising programme voted in?
Them and us
That’s why the Tories are in trouble; they can’t do this dirty work. After two election debacles, the hapless Badenoch is overshadowed by Farage, while her leadership rival Robert Jenrick calls for an electoral alliance with Reform. Farage has proved his worth as a battering ram to recast the Tories.
He has also shredded the Labour government’s asylum policy. Keir Starmer is being judged for having failed to ‘smash the gangs’, itself a carbon copy of the right’s rhetoric. Now his promises to cut the asylum backlog and end hotel accommodation by 2029 look unsustainable and will lead no doubt to further concessions.
Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s new party gives the left a chance to develop an integrated anti-racist and anti-fascist strategy. But that will mean defeating Corbyn’s preference for limiting immigration with a racist points system.
But without waiting for that, we must start organising now in every community with a strong anti-racist message, backed by a struggle around the real needs for jobs, housing and services, using anti-capitalist arguments and socialist policies. That way we can expose Farage, while building a fighting alternative to Labour.
