TRADE unions are stepping up to the mark, calling on branches to make contact with threatened communities and throwing down a gauntlet to government to change course or risk catastrophe.
The labour movement is built on solidarity and collectivism, and can play the leading role in combatting the hatred and division promoted by far-right thugs whose wave of riots must be stopped.
These racists are attacking working-class people, in their places of worship and their places of work. The hotel worker from the Rotherham Holiday Inn telling of their terror as they piled fridges and furniture against doors in case the baying mob broke through is a victim, as are the refugee families, including children, huddled inside as their would-be killers tried to set the building alight.
The fascists must not be allowed to get so close. Trying to torch a building with people inside is attempted murder and those caught doing so must face the most serious consequences.
The Prime Minister says a “standing army” of specialist police officers will respond to such disorder. It is true the police protection for asylum-seekers placed by our government in hotel accommodation in Rotherham and Tamworth looked inadequate.
But tougher policing will not resolve this crisis — nor, with the government’s focus merely on “disorder” rather than fascism, can we guarantee it will not be used against those rallying in defence of threatened communities, as it has been so often in the past.
The mobs’ targets are not accidental. Nor are they linked to the tragedy seized on by fascist ringleaders to initiate the riot wave. Anonymity usually provided under-18s in the British legal system was waived in order to quash the lies that the Southport attacker was a Muslim, or arrived by small boat. We now know he was born in Britain and comes from a Christian background: but the violence has just gathered pace, and its targets remain the same, refugees and Muslims.
That is the clear result of years of ruling-class demonisation of these groups: the hysteria over “stopping the boats,” the treatment of asylum-seekers as less than human that encourages thugs to do so too. The association of Muslims with terrorism, the smears against Palestine solidarity demos as “hate marches,” it all has consequences that we see in towns and cities across Britain today.
We must counter the wave of hate with a wave of solidarity: the “community and trade union-led response” to the riots called for by RMT leader Mick Lynch, the call from the CWU’s general secretary Dave Ward for branches to reach out proactively to offer support to those who have been or may be targeted, will meet an enthusiastic response — as we’ve seen from the inspiring mobilisations of locals for the clean-ups where the violence has struck.
But we also need a political shift. Unite leader Sharon Graham hits the nail on the head with her appeal: “Division and blame are the bosses’ game. It’s time to look up, not down.”
It is those at the top who have gutted our communities, offshored jobs, hollowed out public services and stolen more and more from working-class people each year — for what else is a 45-year decline in wages as a share of GDP, as the share taken in profit and rent has steadily risen, but wage theft on a colossal scale?
Graham points to the real villains: “When 50 families in this country have more wealth than 30 million of their fellow citizens, something has gone badly wrong.”
Unite’s demand that the government drop its neoliberal “fiscal rules” and take the opportunity it has to invest in industrial and public service renewal is one the entire labour movement can unite around.
If we can’t force a change, the grievance and resentment that fascism thrives on will continue to build.
