2025 has hit us like a juggernaut. From Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute livestreamed to the world just days before Holocaust Memorial Day when we pledge “never again” and remember the millions murdered by the Nazis, to the AfD, a fascist-led party, winning 21 per cent of vote in Germany just weeks later, we find ourselves in a new phase of the growing threat of the far right internationally. 

This year’s annual Stand Up to Racism and TUC-backed trade union conference on Saturday March 1, “Countering the Rise of the Far Right”, is far from a run-of-the-mill event. Instead, 2025’s event is an emergency conference to come together across unions, sectors and workplaces and urgently discuss building strong and active anti-racism and anti-fascism rooted in the organised working class.  

The conference will hear from general secretaries and national speakers from nine trade unions and the TUC, alongside trade union and anti-fascist speakers from Germany, journalist and historian Taj Ali, film-maker Felipe Bustos Sierra, who directed Nae Pasaran and will be showing a preview of his current project, Everybody to Kenmure Street, which explores the mass action in May 2021 that stopped a deportation in Glasgow.