WHEN it comes to fighting the far right, the labour movement’s biggest problem could be the Labour Party.
Tomorrow we mobilise against admirers of race-baiter “Tommy Robinson.” The far right want to terrorise black and Muslim communities.
We must stand up to that: people under attack because of their race or religion must know they do not stand alone. Robinson’s thugs want to give the impression they speak for the majority: they do not.
As National Education Union leader Daniel Kebede told December’s TUC anti-racism conference, the far right are emboldened when they are not outnumbered, and the relatively small size of counter-demonstrations in the early part of last year is one reason violent racists felt confident enough to launch a wave of riots last August.
Huge community mobilisations against them that month defused the terror then. Now they are back for more. The return of Donald Trump in the United States has given a shot in the arm to far-right forces everywhere, and the world’s richest man Elon Musk combines Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration with championing far-right parties in Germany and Britain.
But Britain is not pro-Trump nor pro-Musk, and we should turn their support for Reform UK and forces even further right into a problem for those groups. They are not stirred by love for their country but agents of a US-based movement that fawns on giant corporations and is hostile to working-class interests.
But exposing their hypocrisies and lies runs up against the problem of the Labour Party — or, more precisely, of the Keir Starmer government.
Defeating the far right depends both on confronting them on the streets and on addressing the grievances they exploit: years of falling living standards, worsening public services and a cumulative loss of legitimacy by Establishment politicians seen as a dishonest, self-interested elite.
Our government is actively worsening those grievances. The scale of Britain’s social crisis is undeniable. In the capital alone, the number of rough sleepers has risen by a quarter in a single year. We have a housing crisis, an NHS crisis, an infrastructure crisis afflicting schools, hospitals and transport.
Yet Labour are actively driving poverty: cutting winter fuel payments, maintaining a cruel two-child benefit cap. At the same time, they lick the boots of the super-rich, promising to soften any bid to make non-domiciled billionaires pay tax.
One sector, water, combines both. Labour refuses to nationalise water, despite overwhelming public support for doing so. It is enabling a steep rise in water bills that will be imposed on millions of households, by infamously crooked water companies that everyone knows continue to poison our rivers while paying their executives absurd salaries and showering dividends on shareholders.
People are really angry about water. Polls showed last year more than half the public cited the scandal as a reason to vote out the Conservatives. These people will turn against Labour too, now it is facilitating this racket.
And not only is Labour doing everything to discredit itself in working-class eyes, it lends legitimacy to the far right. Starmer cosies up to Trump. He pledges to outdo the Tories in deporting refugees. His government’s open support for accelerating NHS privatisation makes it much harder for unions to attack Nigel Farage for wanting that too.
The answer has to be a more combative labour movement. Those rightly angry at Labour’s attacks on the poorest will not trust the left unless it is seen to be fighting back. Those tempted by the anti-Establishment posturing of the right must be given a real anti-Establishment movement, one challenging the unjust distribution of wealth and power in our society, to get behind instead.
It’s essential to march against Robinson. But defeating his poisonous politics means being ready to march against this government’s attacks on our class as well.
