ACROSS the richest countries there is a growing menace of anti-immigrant, far-right and even fascist forces.

Alles fuer Deutschland (AfD) has won a regional election in Germany. This is a party so right-wing that even other prominent far-right parties do not want to be seen to be collaborating with it.

One of those far-right leaders, Marine Le Pen, is leading in French opinion polls ahead of the presidential election in 2027. One of the antecedents of Georgia Meloni’s ruling Brothers of Italy were described as neofascists.

Clearly, the AfD’s success in Saxony-Anhalt was not an isolated incident. It is part of a widespread and growing trend. Britain is not immune from it, with the emergence electorally of both Reform UK and Restore. If we are not vigilant, Britain could also be joining the list of countries where the far right is forming governments.

One important feature of the current international situation is the specific role of the United States. A sober assessment of the Trump presidency is that this too is a government of the far right; racist and anti-migrant, corrupt and belligerent, violent and contemptuous of the norms of liberal democracy. Maga is its grassroots movement and Ice literally provides the shock troops for his war on migrants.

Furthermore, the US plays a key role internationally in promoting all these rightist forces, as part of its spurious campaign against what Donald Trump’s administration describes as the “civilisational decline” of Europe because of immigration. This is supplemented by a network of multibillionaire tech bros and crypto bros, who sometimes vie with each other over which rancid outfit to back with their huge donations.

The current situation in Britain clearly fits into this overall pattern. Despite the very welcome “Burnham bounce,” Reform UK is still neck-and-neck with Labour in the polls, while Restore Britain’s polling is also in single digits.  

Because of the peculiarities of the current multiparty constellation, combined with a single-member first-past-the-post system, Reform UK only needs to creep back up in the polls by a few points to be the potential largest party at the next election. 

To combat this menace, we must try to understand where it comes from. Many will want to begin with the effects of the global financial crisis and the austerity that followed in 2010.

But that would be reductive and false.

Far-right and fascist forces have existed in many countries almost continuously since the end of WWII. In this country, we had the National Front, the British National Party and even the White Defence League decades before their modern equivalents.

All of these were a serious menace to black people and migrants in particular. Before that of course was Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and their murderous attacks on Jews.

Unfortunately, we have suffered the existence of these groups over around a century now. But it is undoubtedly true that these reactionary groups thrive in times of economic hardship, such as the Depression of the 1930s and the current period of austerity which began in 2010.

This is crucial to understanding the growth of the far right. General conditions of hardship apply to the population as a whole. Only the mega-wealthy thrive. Everyone else — workers, pensioners, the unemployed and small businesses — all experience stagnant or declining real incomes.

Real average weekly earnings for full-time payrolled employees were £516 in March 2008. They have only risen to £531 in July this year. Part-time, self-employed and marginal workers are even worse off. We all experience the general economic stagnation through declining public services and private sector rip-offs. Governments have added to the burden, with student loans, housing shortages and rip-off charges by banks and privatised utilities. In that sense, there is no special category of “the left behind.”

This connection of growth of the far right to economic crisis highlights a fundamental truth about its character. The far right and the fascists are not anti-austerity, either historically or currently. They are anti-union, anti-taxation, anti-public services. They actually support austerity on steroids. There is a complete dovetail with the material interests o their billionaire backers.

What they are is anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and anti-refugee. That is, they use racism in a cynical way to exploit those ground down by austerity to turn their hostility away from those implementing austerity and the big businesses benefitting from it, and turn that anger towards all the scapegoats.

This scapegoating is a classic diversion away from the reality of depressed living standards and towards shifting the blame on to a fantasy of imagined discrimination. So, the effects of successive governments abandoning council housebuilding and allowing private developers to hoard land becomes, “all the asylum-seekers go to the front of the housing waiting lists” or similar rubbish.

This is repeated endlessly, whether it is jobs, schools, healthcare or wages. It is designed to be a battering ram against any rise of socialist answers to the crisis, and to replace potential unity around those answers with division and violence.

Therefore, our response must be two-pronged. There is a desperate need to end austerity, to improve the lives of the broad mass of the population. There is an equally strong need to oppose this racism and xenophobia wherever it raises its ugly head. We need to row with both oars to steer society away from this menace. With just one, we will go around in circles.

So, when Chancellor Merz in Germany announces a tightening of immigration and citizenship laws in response to his party’s rout in the regional election, this is exactly the wrong response. It simply reinforces the AfD’s lie that is migrants who are to blame for the economic crisis in Germany, not the government’s own policies. It is a continuation of the policies of austerity, racism and war that led to the electoral disaster.

The current British far right is more of a menace than past organisations like the National Front. The internet means that they can mobilise quickly to menace immigrants, asylum-seekers and black people. Even more importantly, they are getting big money from US far-right billionaires like Elon Musk.

The task of combatting the far right and the fascists is an urgent one. It is a task for the entire labour movement and all the oppressed who are in the firing line. We must fight the conditions which give rise to the racist thugs by offering a real alternative. And we must not allow ourselves to be divided, which means confronting the racism head-on.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and mother of the House of Commons. She writes this column fortnightly.