FAR-RIGHT riots in multiple towns and cities, including the capital, show that Tuesday night’s disorder in Southport is not an isolated phenomenon.
Across Britain there are angry, violent racists ready to use Monday’s horrifying attack on children as an excuse to create chaos and promote hatred of immigrants, Muslims and black communities.
We see now how ridiculous were claims from the last government that the mass peace demonstrations for Palestine were “hate marches.”
Not once during these enormous rallies, gathering hundreds of thousands of people, have we seen shops attacked, police assaulted. The threat of violence and the politics of hate are the domain of the right, not the left: and those peddling the lie that mass solidarity with Palestine represented an extremist takeover of London have actively fuelled the fascist eruptions of recent days.
Ministers are cynical and will not advertise the contrast. It is more likely that Keir Starmer uses his meetings with police chiefs to call for harsher policing across the board.
Campaigners have been calling on Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to repeal authoritarian policing legislation passed by the Tories: fascist violence may become an excuse not to.
We must distinguish between the necessary serious crackdown on far-right violence and any attempt by the state to attack our rights of assembly and protest.
This is especially the case because it is not, and never has been, the police who will stop the fascists. The strength of the anti-racist movement in our country must be clear on the streets and in communities too.
Building that movement, and reaching into social layers where anxiety and fear make people easy prey for fascist propaganda, means being frank about the failings of our Labour government and the nature of its election win.
The Prime Minister has not been frank. He claimed, on election night, that his victory was down to having changed the Labour Party: ignoring the actual decline in the Labour vote.
Those pointing to Labour’s very weak performance, the fact that it is less popular than when it lost elections under Jeremy Corbyn, have been accused of sour grapes; a win is a win, the mantra goes, and relief at an end to Tory rule — and at the positive contrast to the last government on pay, rail renationalisation and workers’ rights — can be expressed in a reluctance to face up to the fragility of the Labour majority.
The riots should be a wake-up call. It matters that we have an unpopular government, empowered by the idiosyncrasies of the electoral system rather than a wave of public enthusiasm.
The anti-system feeling that drove Brexit and for a time a mass socialist movement still runs deep, and very few people see Labour as likely to address Britain’s economic and social malaise.
That is a contrast to the Corbyn period, where in 2017 Labour managed to buck a decades-long decline and raise its vote almost everywhere — north and south, in town and country — including in regions where Reform UK is currently nipping at its heels.
Only the left can defeat the right. We need to rebuild a mass politics of hope: and that means campaigning around demands, including an end to Rachel Reeves’s austerity plans and higher taxes on the rich and big business, to fund an interventionist industrial strategy delivering high-quality jobs and to fix failing public services.
The savage cuts being imposed by local authorities also require co-ordinated resistance, and campaigns against them rooted in the community have a power to unite people of all faiths and races that will leave the fascists high and dry.
The anti-racist struggle has to be top priority now. But it is inseparable from the wider struggle for peace and social justice. A militant left with real answers to people’s real problems, active and visible in every community, is the front line against fascism.
