A NEW wave of anti-refugee protests is threatening asylum-seekers held in hotels a year on from the violence that followed the horrific Southport murders.

Lucy Connolly was released on Thursday after jail time for incitement to racial hatred, having posted on social media on the day of the Southport killings (whose perpetrator was not an asylum-seeker or immigrant) “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” Last August’s would-be pogroms did see brutes try to set hotels alight with refugee families inside.

Connolly has become a cause celebre for the right. She says lawyers for the Trump administration in the United States want to speak to her. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is set to testify about the Connolly case, and how it supposedly illustrates the crackdown on free speech in Britain, before the US Congress.

That underlines the active role of the United States in encouraging the British far right. It nurtures its preferred political forces beyond diplomatic norms: Vice-President JD Vance using a holiday here to host hard-right Tory Robert Jenrick and Farage himself is evidence of that.

The Trump regime exerts pressure both directly on governments and by fostering its ideological allies in other countries. The approaches intertwine, as we see currently in France.

The US ambassador’s allegation that anti-semitic outrages are on the rise there, and that this is linked to Paris’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state, is interference in French domestic politics aimed at forcing French foreign policy back into line.

Washington has also attacked Keir Starmer’s government for proposing to recognise Palestine. The smear that support for Palestine is rooted in hostility to Jews is familiar here.

How the left should respond to that narrative is again a hot topic given MP Zarah Sultana’s correct assessment, as she helps found a new party of the left, that Labour’s 2018 adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-semitism (whose own author Kenneth Stern has slammed the way it has been “primarily used... to suppress and chill pro-Palestinian speech”) was wrong (as the Morning Star said at the time).

How is that relevant to the rise of the far right?

First, the Trump project aims to dismantle previous rules of engagement at home and abroad. The deployment of National Guard troops to police cities (initially to suppress protests in solidarity with immigrants) comes from the same stable as openly endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza: the old rules don’t apply.

Second, Palestine solidarity is arguably the most dynamic factor in left politics in Britain today, the immense mass movement putting huge pressure on Labour to break with Trump and overlapping hugely with support for a new left party.

Our government shows an inclination to roll over before Trump (hence one-sided trade deals including agreement to make a cash-strapped NHS pay more for medicines) and to appease the far right, echoing the latter’s rhetoric about small boats and deportations.

Tackling the rise of hysterical anti-refugee politics, often co-ordinated by full-on fascists, is impossible unless we confront the active support this gets from the most dangerous country on Earth.

Championing Connolly, who called for hotels to be set on fire with people inside, is no joke. It is extremist.

But Labour cannot fight back without calling out the Trump administration’s outrageous behaviour, which risks bringing into question our whole relationship with the US — just as complicity in Israeli war crimes is driving unprecedented opposition to the founding assumptions of British foreign policy.

None of these issues can be neatly separated. Fighting the far right means confronting its global lodestar, the Trump White House. Doing that means a much more thorough-going confrontation with the British ruling class: and the US connection can be turned into its Achilles heel.