The Biggest Far Right March in British History
Worried? Do something…
Yesterday I watched more than 100,000 people parade through London wrapped in the flags of England and the United Kingdom, which they were using as a badge of hate. Though the majority were peaceful in their actions, they were mentally at civil war with our multi-ethnic society, and with our democracy.
I’m not going to mince words. This was a crowd of white supremacists. When a minority of them attacked the police — the inevitable result of consuming the eight cans of lager before midday — their actual target was a small leftwing anti-racist demonstration that had assembled at the other end of Whitehall.
Whatever your politics, if you are not worried about what happened on 13 September you need to wake up fast. This was the biggest far-right demonstration in British history. It was backed by the richest man in the world.
And though this was only the radicalised, extreme mass base of the Reform voting electorate, the sentiments they were expressing resonate widely.
They want to sink refugee boats in the channel and let the children drown. They want to ban Islam and shut down Mosques. They want the total deportation of all “illegals” — which means hundreds of thousands of people with the legal right to remain in Britain: our neighbours and our friends. They want, as one of them put it on camera, to “assasinate Keir Starmer”.
In this situation, anyone on the left who thinks the main problem is Keir Starmer needs their head examined.
There are calls now for a wider anti-fascist alliance. Up to now the defence of asylum hotels has been organised by the SWP-led Stand Up to Racism, whose demo was attacked yesterday. We certainly need something broad, which can mobilise not only protests but in defence of democratic values and anti-racist culture.
Militant Democracy
But when fascism becomes a mass movement, you need something more. In How To Stop Fascism, I proposed three principles appropriate to moments like this: a militant democracy, an electoral alliance of the centre and the left, and the fight for an anti-fascist ethos.
Here is what each of those principles means in the aftermath of yesterday. Militant democracy means using the power of the people, mobilised through the state, to prevent the fascists undermining the rule of law, spreading disinformation and intimidating minorities.
Anyone on the far left who says “don’t rely on the state to stop fascism” needs to explain where the dogs, cells, batons, pepper spray, surveillance cameras, courts and prison cells are going to come from to deal with these violent thugs as they attack vulnerable people in their hotels and homes. That’s right — as last year’s racist riots showed — without the democratic state we are defenceless.
And it is not the job of a democracy to let itself be overthrown or undermined without a fight. That’s why we need two things urgently: tough, active policing against the racist mobs who will now be emboldened to attack migrants; and for Ofcom to shut down any social media platform that permits incitement and hate speech.
To meet the threat of a Reform government, we need Labour to get its act together and start delivering changes that immediately benefit all working class people.
In the process, while speeding up the removal of failed asylum seekers, and moving others from hotels into more hospitable community accommodation, Labour has to make the case front and centre for the tolerance of genuine asylum seekers and intolerance for hatred.
It has to go out and celebrate the tolerant multi-ethnic society that has allowed a Muslim to become Home Secretary and a black Caribbean man to become Deputy Prime Minister. We have, in short, to conduct an unflinching defence of difference.
As for the anti-fascist ethos, it is time for the progressive majority — who are the ultimate object of hate for many of those who turned up yesterday — to stand up and express our values. I am sick of being told people like those who marched yesterday represent “the working class”.
They were 90% male, more than 99% white, overwhelmingly mobilised from the small towns of southern England and the West Midlands, and heavily concentrated in low-skilled employment.
That is no longer what the British working class looks like — either in big cities like London or even in the small towns many of them come from. Nor is it what the average football crowd looks like anymore. This is a self-selected subculture, not a class and it is bound together by hostility to the rest of us.
Walking among them I heard routine, sick racism (the n-word and the p-word), but not only that. They are mentally hostile to everything progressive: they hate trans people, feminists, lefties, queers (they don’t use the term ironically).
They came to my neighbourhood of London — near Waterloo station — and barrelled drunkenly around streets that on a normal Saturday would be full of parkour kids, skaters, students and ordinary working people of all colours, just chilling in the cafes by the Thames.
There is no persuading most of them. These are not the disgruntled ex Labour voters or ageing former Tories that the pollsters find among Reform voters. These are white supremacists mobilised by a convicted criminal — and you don’t persuade them, you politically defeat them and you demobilise them.
There is only one positive takeway from yesterday. While there were a hard core of people out for, and capable of, violence — mainly “fighting age”men in affinity groups formed around work, football or friendship — the vast majority were not only passive but hapless.
They had no organised relationship to Robinson, or to each other. There were no contingents on the march. Interestingly, there were very few home-made placards, and only three slogans: Keir Starmer’s a Wanker, I’m England til I die, and Oh Tommy, Tommy.
In addition, many of them had no idea what happens on a demonstration and, on reaching Parliament Square, went straight home, or to the pub rather than listen to Robinson and his bizarre rally, which lasted five hours.
What this tells me is this: people mobilised by social media can turn up in large numbers, but they’re still atomised. They don’t yet have a local organisational presence, apart from around the hotel protests. And they don’t really have a political project, apart from voting Reform and fantasising about civil war.
Preventing this movement from cohering into a stronger organisational form is a legitimate and immediate aim for all democrats.
You do it simply by upholding the rule of law: smash a window, go to jail; incite people to torch a hotel; go to jail; join a proscribed organisation, ditto. You also do it by forcing Reform to keep the fascists out of both its conferences and its periphery.
There was very little active support for Farage on that demo: though most of its participants will vote Reform, it is Robinson, the convicted criminal and explicit racist, they worship.
If you are shocked that there are 100,000 fascists in Britain, don’t be. Eight hundred thousand voted for the BNP in 2009, and we’ve had more than a decade of relentless racist propaganda from the tabloids and social media since then. Those of us who study and monitor the far right told you this was coming.
The first and most practical step we can take is for the mayors of major cities and regions to call mass solidarity demonstrations, or maybe stage cultural festivals, where we can celebrate our successful, multi-ethnic and multi-national society and demonstrate to these haters that they are a minority.
The strategic need is clear: the Labour government must deliver to, and politically mobilise, the vast majority of working class people who are progressive. If we deliver, we can win over some voters who are currently backing Reform out of distrust of politics, and we can keep Reform out of power through electoral alliances and through mobilising the youth vote.
The United Kingdom is at a fork in the road. The people mobilised yesterday really believe there will soon be a white revolution that sweeps Labour from power and people of colour out of our society. We need the strongest possible action across society to deflate and stabilise any crisis they try to create.
Thanks for reading. More at The New World and Conflict & Democracy.
