THE fatal shootings of five people, including two refugees and two security guards, near Dunkirk are inseparable from the rise of anti-immigrant hate across Europe.
This hatred is promoted by far-right groups which are everywhere growing stronger — but is not only indulged but reinforced by governments.
It would be complacent to imagine this could not happen here. In recent years we have seen the fascists of Britain First stage posturing “patrols” of patches of coastline, supposedly to guard them from desperate refugees. During the election, a Reform UK activist campaigning to elect Nigel Farage in Clacton had to be diplomatically disowned after a journalist recorded him calling for asylum-seekers arriving in small boats to be shot.
The wave of racist violence in some British towns in August owed more to years of Conservative “stop the boats” rhetoric than to the fictional foreign puppetmasters cited by conspiracy theorists.
Those riots were brought to a halt by huge anti-racist mobilisations that showed the fascists they do not speak for the majority. But, though the great demonstrations organised at community level won the grudging acclaim of police and even the right-wing press, no political lead was given by the new Labour government.
On the contrary, Labour discouraged MPs and councillors from taking part.
Since the riots, Keir Starmer has doubled down on the anti-immigrant narrative, claiming the international refugee crisis is a “global security threat similar to terrorism.”
Labour boasts it deports people faster than the Tories did and its Prime Minister states he will look to far-right Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni for tips on how to keep refugees out.
Pandering to racists has done nothing to improve the party’s own standing — it trails the Tories in the polls just five months after their worst ever defeat — but allows far-right propaganda to go unchallenged. Support for Reform UK continues to rise.
People turn to superficially anti-system parties because the system continues to fail them.
Some in the trade unions indulge ministers who plead that Labour cannot undo the damage of 14 years of Tory rule overnight: of course it can’t, but the problem is too many of its policies avoid addressing that damage at all.
Countering Reform UK must involve publicly confronting it over its largely Thatcherite economics, support for privatised healthcare and slashed public spending.
But Farage’s party shows growing tactical flexibility on issues that strike a chord — protesting at cuts to the winter fuel payment for example, and recently demanding the nationalisation of Thames Water.
Labour, punishing pensioners and stating that people will just have to accept water bills rising (because international “investors” won’t fix the sewage system unless guaranteed a lucrative return) is politically inept by comparison, so convinced by its own dogma about “tough decisions” impressing headline writers that it courts unpopularity.
The labour movement is waking up to the need for a co-ordinated strategy to unite the working class on an anti-racist basis: this was the theme of the important TUC conference of December 4.
That has to involve ensuring unions, not right-wing rabble-rousers, are the voice of public anger over Labour’s real failings: and Unite’s street mobilisations against winter fuel cuts are an essential part of denying this territory to Farage.
It must also, as National Education Union leader Daniel Kebede argues, involve direct anti-racist mobilisation on the biggest scale possible. As he said then, it is unlikely the riots would have got off the ground in August had counter-demonstrators outnumbered “Tommy Robinson’s” marchers in July.
Giving ground to the far right is dangerous. Lethally so, as we have just seen in northern France.
Ensuring such atrocities are unthinkable in Britain means building on the spirit of the August anti-racist mobilisations across every workplace and community, leaving the fascists with nowhere they feel safe to spread their poison.
