Don’t let the far-right seize the agenda

With hope and solidarity, we can fight back and win, argues Alex Burt.

The British far-right are on the march. Emboldened by the political class parroting their talking points, we are seeing a significant escalation of far-right activity and all the violent bigotry that comes with it. The last week has seen protests escalating into riots and pogroms, showing the ugly and violent reality of resurgent extreme right organising in 2024.

To socialists across the country and the wider labour movement, this should be seen as a major, perhaps even existential threat. The threat of fascists pitting working class people against each other along ethnic lines threatens only to reinforce the position of the ruling class. However, support for the far-right is often based in mostly white, working-class communities where in the absence of a strong leftist movement, demagogues and provocateurs direct anger away from the capitalist class and towards migrants and minorities. 

Perhaps most clearly, that can be seen in the way Reform UK and the Conservatives have spoken and governed in regards to migration and diversity. From 2010’s hostile environment to the legal cap on migration promised in 2024, demonising migrants and migration has been a central pillar of Conservatism. Reform has, unsurprisingly, gone much further with fantasy policies such as ‘net zero migration’ and threatening to use the Royal Marines to drag small boats back to France. Lee Anderson, formerly a Tory but now Reform MP for Ashfield, accused Sadiq Khan of being “controlled by Islamists”.

In the absence of a major party making a positive case for diversity, these talking points have evolved into ‘political truths’. Every crime by a migrant or a Muslim is now a symptom of uncontrolled immigration, every small boat crossing a security issue rather than a humanitarian one. The discourse on migration has become hijacked by Farage and the populist right, and in turn is held captive by the far-right talking points that they in many ways represent.

Politicians such as Farage act as a ‘respectable’ mouthpiece for the politics of racial grievance. A former City of London Commodities Trader and self-described Thatcherite will simply be more acceptable than Nick Griffin could ever have dreamed of and as a result the far-right attach themselves to him, whether he likes it or not. It gives them a mainstream base to organise their hate and spread it far and wide. The controversies surrounding racist Reform candidates shouldn’t be a surprise: scratch the surface and it has a member base similar to the BNP, just with more respectable leadership. 

Despite their controversies, Reform did very well with a parliamentary base of five seats. The politics of the populist right, acting as a vector for the far-right, clearly struck a chord with a section of the population. Worryingly, all five seats they won rank in the top half of most deprived constituencies. Although four were previously Conservative strongholds, Farage’s message throughout the election campaign and its aftermath was clear: Reform are coming for Labour in the red wall. Ashfield has already fallen and more will follow if we do not tackle the problems of class.

The far-right thrive off grievance politics. Where this strikes a chord is with voters who do not feel listened to, who have felt decline in their communities and who are looking for something to blame. Having grown up in Boston – formerly Tory, currently Reform – I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes. A town hit hard by deindustrialisation was always going to be fertile ground for these arguments to land. 

Rioting fascists are not going to bring about a far-right government. Disenfranchised, disengaged, working class white people might, if we do not replace infinite growth with redistribution and class-based politics. British politics and society is working for a vanishingly small group of people and more are beginning to look for alternatives outside of the traditional centre ground. Labour’s majority in the election is vast but thin and traditional electoral logic will not apply in 2029, just as it didn’t when we overturned the 80-seat Tory majority from 2019. Labour in government will have work to do.

This does not mean abandoning minority communities. Britain is a diverse country, and Britain’s working class is just as diverse. We gain nothing when we parrot the far-right’s talking points; it gives legitimacy to their grievances and fuels the fire of division. Instead, we must make clear that it is not the migrant or Muslim that have impoverished communities, but neoliberalism. The average concerned Reform voter will always have more in common with a Muslim neighbour than the privately educated Farage and that is a message we must not let be drowned out by the bigots who seek to divide us.

The fundamental reality is that the social contract that gives the British ruling class its legitimacy has broken down. Stagnation and managed decline are the reality of all too many communities. For all of Starme’rs vigour in the first month of government, there’s too little spending the money needed to fix fourteen years of austerity and underinvestment. Indeed, the promise of further austerity under Chancellor Rachel Reeves would only further sow discord and depression in working class communities that the far-right will exploit. 

The antidote to hate is hope. And hope is in short supply from the centrist Starmer leadership. Instead of austerity, ‘difficult choices’ and supply-side reform, let’s start tackling the problem head on. Billionaire wealth in this country has skyrocketed, the money is there if only we are brave enough to stand up to the wealthiest in our society. No one makes it alone: wealth is built by communities and its benefits should be shared within them.

If that spirit is lost on our leadership, then we must take these messages to the streets and to our communities. Let’s organise to protect mosques, businesses and whatever/whomever the far-right may target. Let’s march against them and show there is a movement that will not be cowed by violence and thuggery. But most importantly, as the violence settles and those involved are charged, let’s get organised with a message of hope to our communities. Poverty is not inevitable. Decline cannot just be managed – it must be reversed. There is a world out there to be won, if only we could be bold enough to seize it. The far-right offers hate. With hope and solidarity, we can fight back and win.

Alex Burt is a Labour Party and Momentum member in Leicester South, currently serving as Youth Officer. They also chair their university Labour Society and Leicester Young Labour.

Image: Migrants welcome here GJN banner. Author: Global Justice Now, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Labour Hub Editors

Thoughts for anti-fascists

By David Renton

August 5, 2024

Labour Hub Editors

This weekend will feel awful, but once we’re through it, there are things the left could do to turn the situation around.

The reason why things will feel bad is that Tommy Robinson has rebuilt his street movement, back to where it was in 2018. Robinson has his social media accounts back (thanks to Elon), and we’re back to a situation where he can mobilise around 15-20,000 people whenever the mood takes him.

To make things worse, this time, he or his followers have been calling local mobilisations rather than relying on the sterile environment of central London rallies. We’ve seen the results this week in Southport, and last night in Sunderland.

Between now and the end of Sunday, Robinson still has another 28 local rallies planned – if all happen (many won’t) at least two-thirds of those that do are likely to go unchallenged by anti-fascists. Tonight and tomorrow there will be several more cities go like Sunderland yesterday (a crowd, unchallenged as it attacked Muslim men, and started fires) and fewer Liverpools (where the Robinson supporters were outnumbered and forced to retreat).

Anyone who’s serious about anti-fascism knows the weakness of our tradition over the past four years: in the main cities, where there were groups, they are weaker now than they were in 2020. Anti-fascists have picked up many bad habits that would take a lifetime to unlearn (protesting at a mile’s distance from the threat, militant-sounding slogans with nothing behind them). But rather than dwelling on the bad, I want to focus on the positives – the objective weakness of our enemies, the relatively small number of things we would need to do differently to make anti-fascism work again.

It helps enormously that the main far right group is led by Robinson. Charismatic he may be, experienced, a genuine ‘name’, all of that is true. But he is also, very obviously, leeching off his own supporters – monetising his relationship to them, while having no idea at all to build beyond this point. Ally with fundamentalist Christians, sell his contact list to Reform, cast big moon-eyes at Kemi Badenoch if she won the Conservative election – he would be happy to do any of these, and may well make fumbling steps towards all of them at once, even though they point in opposite directions, make his politics incoherent, and the further he goes down any of those routes the more certain is it that he’ll set one faction of his followers fighting against another.

Further, part of why Robinson’s crowd seems bigger than the left’s is that he can concentrate all his forces (he has no competitor on the street right) while the far left is, quite rightly, trying to do many different things at once: march for Palestine, take direct action against arms companies, occupy universities, protect trans people, etc. Anti-fascism comes quite a long way down our list.

At a certain point, this spreading of left-wing forces can be turned to our advantage. There are many people who also identify with anti-fascism who will be willing to defend a mosque from attack, so long as you have a group of people in your town who are willing to take this work seriously. Leaflet the anti-war marches, that’s where anti-fascists can find a base capable of outnumbering the far right.

Finally, we’ve had examples in the past few weeks of anti-fascism working. France is the best case – where a genuine unity attracting Socialists, Communists, Greens, Trotskyists, and the sorts of people who 20 years ago might have had half an eye on George Galloway – combined to defeat an electoral far right which has spent 40 years doing that and nothing else.

There are all sorts of lessons you could draw from that experience: if you want to make unity work it has to be a deep unity, a visible convergence of people who are publicly setting aside their differences; it can’t just be one national network that’s done the same things for 20 years with diminishing returns. But even if people don’t learn those lessons, it’s enough for the moment that we can say that people outside Britain have faced similar problems and they’re holding the line.

In France, they stopped an almost certain far right government. We have our own threat and, like them, we can defeat it.

David Renton is a barrister and the author of Against the Law: Why Justice Requires Fewer Laws and a Smaller State, which was published by Repeater in 2022 and of Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, which was published by Routledge in November 2022. This article was taken from his blog Lives; Running and was originally published here.

Image: Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson). Author: Shayan Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.