SATURDAY’S “Give us our Country Back” demonstration in London should not be accorded too much publicity. Nor should its size be exaggerated. It was bigger than the counter-demonstration organised by Stand Up to Racism and supported by trade unions and Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Campaign but very considerably smaller than many trade union and peace demonstrations held over the past two decades.
Yet we should not ignore it either. It was organised by fascists and its populist slogan apparently effective. As the present government presses ahead with cuts — hospitals and roads are the next targets — the crisis of social provision can only get worse. More damaging still, Labour’s standing as a party of and for working people will be further discredited.
In this context one thing should be remembered. “Give us our Country Back” is a slogan that could be read in two ways. On this occasion it was directed against refugees. But it could also be “our country” — Britain as it was just 20 or 30 years ago — with a relatively viable NHS, good social services, at least some public-sector housing, effective public-sector education and still even a significant number of jobs in manufacturing.
And, no less important, a country where working people were organised in their communities to defend them — through trades union councils and tenants’ associations and with important support from local shop stewards’ committees.
Working people, so organised, supported the miners, stopped industrial closures and destroyed the poll tax.
So “our country” could — and in fact should — signify what was achieved by previous generations of working people. Still for many this is what “our country” does mean.
It is also defines the challenge facing the present Labour government. Will it be seen to defend this heritage? It has already failed on the “two-child” benefit policy. The next will be bigger.
These are massive the cuts associated the £20 billion “hole” discovered in the inherited Tory budget and highlighted by the IMF just two weeks ago.
Labour governments have a habit of destroying themselves by obeying IMF diktats. It this case it would be worse. Labour has to show it will “give us our country back” in the real sense of defending what has been gained through past struggle and now cut back to the bone in the interests of the rich and powerful.
If we are to resist the advance of the far right, as seen across Europe, a movement has to be mobilised to do this. Labour has to be won to be part of it — and not place itself on the other side.
But its heart has to be, as before, in the trade union movement and in local communities to build the resistance through trade union councils and local organisations that bring our diverse communities of working people together.
In the 1930s, when fascism threatened previously in Britain, it was such local organisation that ensured that Oswald Mosley was defeated. This is needed again.
Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour leadership have to make up their minds where they stand on this. Will they push ahead with cuts ? Will they, over the next five years, spend the extra 0.5 per cent of GDP on arms, to which Starmer has committed himself — a demand that amounts to the biggest part of the £20 billion cuts now demanded.
Or will they say No: we want our country back after 14 years of Tory misrule. If we are to see the back of the like of Tommy Robinson this type of leadership is what is needed — to create a movement of working people committed to unity, anti-racism and ultimately to the exercise of working class democracy.
