THIS weekend thousands of trade unionists and anti-racism campaigners are taking to the streets to break down walls of mistrust and fear in communities and build unity and cohesion.

Where far-right mobs have gathered in recent weeks to target so-called “migrant hotels,” local residents, trade unionists, political and faith leaders are working to combat the scapegoating of asylum-seekers and to tackle the atmosphere of fear.


In west London, Stand Up to Racism Hillingdon is hosting a family event today from 12-3pm with children’s activities and music at Uxbridge Quaker Meeting House. The “Unity Day” highlights the vital role migrants play in local communities — from teaching at Brunel University, to driving the U4 bus and Elizabeth Line trains, to treating NHS patients at Hillingdon hospital.

Hillingdon Trades Council has been busy for weeks leafletting housing estates and shopping centres and, most importantly of all, speaking to local residents about the real problems of low wages, rising rents, food and energy prices faced by working people.

The far-right’s drive in the summer of 2025 to demonise asylum-seekers, migrants and refugees holding them responsible for every social blight from crime to shortage of housing and health care has been boosted by politicians from Labour, Conservative and Reform UK competing in an anti-migration Olympics.

We must build a united front of anti-racists and anti-fascists from trade unions, tenants’ associations, community organisations, local councillors and faith groups in every community in Britain today.

Because fascist provocateurs and far-right opportunists didn’t invent the lies used to demonise asylum-seekers and refugees.

The lie that people in small boats cause homelessness in our society has been spun for decades by politicians from ruling political parties, both Tory and Labour, who presided over a failure to build council housing, or to control rents and property speculation.

The political narrative that Britain is being invaded by people in rubber dinghies didn’t originate with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. It is a staple of front-page headlines in press and broadcast media.

The myth that migrants are the cause of Britain’s housing crisis, or lack of public facilities such as health centres, libraries, schools, sports grounds, or the reason for the scourge of low-paid, exploitative work in the British economy, was created by the political establishment to distract attention from the reality, that Britain’s social problems are a deliberate outcome of the policy of successive British governments.

Since 2010 successive British governments, first the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition under Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, then a succession of Tory crooks (May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak), and now their spiritual heirs Starmer and Reeves have loyally carried out programmes of massive austerity while cutting wages to hike profits and boost billionaires.

Britain’s housing crisis — sky-high rents, overcrowding, street homelessness and rough sleeping — takes place alongside the rise of gleaming tower blocks and shiny, mainly uninhabited “luxury” apartments.

Those luxury tower blocks weren’t built to house people. They were built as speculative investment vehicles and bought off-plan by oligarchs and property investment funds who invest in misery and homelessness because it is profitable. It is good business.

When government ministers and opposition politicians claim homelessness is caused by refugees in small boats, we remind them that homelessness is the business model of the British state, which is to inflate asset prices and charge sky-high rents to workers who need somewhere to live.

This is what late capitalism looks like. Working people of all races, nations and backgrounds treated like rats in a laboratory experiment, restricting our space, subjecting us to stress.

Over 50 years ago, Jimmy Reid made the “rat race” speech in his address to Glasgow University students on alienation. He told them: “Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings.”