Confronting Britain’s far-right problem

There are moments when the flood tide of history threatens to overwhelm individuals and organisations, rendering them almost powerless.1 There are other moments, when, with sufficient clarity, a willingness to strike out in a new direction and a modicum of revolutionary élan, the tide can be turned. Such a moment was reached in Britain in summer 2024.

On 29 July, three children were killed at a multiple stabbing at a dance studio in Southport, Merseyside. Within hours, misinformation spread online stating that the perpetrator was Muslim or an asylum seeker or both. By the following night, a far-right mob had gathered to hurl bricks and bottles at a mosque near the site of the stabbings, clashing with police. Over the following six days, racist riots spread across much of Britain and to Belfast in the north of Ireland, many targeting mosques or hotels believed to be housing asylum seekers.

The riots were not spontaneous outbursts. They were initiated and directed by a network of far-right individuals and groups via Telegram, X and other platforms.2 Alongside right-wing football supporters’ “firms” and the remnants of the Football Lads Alliance3 were supporters of Patriotic Alternative, National Action, the British Movement, Britain First and the Ulster Defence Association. They were joined by shadowy networks such as Terrorgram, a collective of Telegram social media channels proscribed earlier this year, and Active Club England, an offshoot of a US-based neo-Nazi outfit. Joe Marsh (also known as Joe Butler) and David Miles, two Patriotic Alternative activists, were pictured at Southport. Matthew Hankinson, who recently served jail time as a member of the proscribed group National Action, posted from the scene on X.4

Rioters chanted the name of the fascist Tommy Robinson, along with that of Reform UK MP Nigel Farage. Farage steered clear of endorsing the riots but claimed on GB News he was “just asking questions” when querying the identity of the Stockport attacker. Both Reform and Elon Musk challenged “two-tier policing”, alleging far-right protesters were treated less fairly than those on the left.5 However, it was Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who emerged as the key spokesperson for the rioters. He had first gained a significant following as de facto leader of the fascist English Defence League (EDL) from 2009 to 2013.6 Even before the Southport attacks, on 27 July, he had attracted tens of thousands of racists to a mass demonstration in Westminster, massively outnumbering a Stand up to Racism (SUTR) counter-protest.

Now the movement around Robinson gathered pace and confidence. On 4 August, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, about 1,000 racists smashed their way into a hotel housing refugees, setting it alight, again chanting Robinson’s name. A couple of hundred SUTR activists were forced to retreat from the mob. Another hotel in Tamworth, Staffordshire, was attacked with petrol bombs, with a small group of anti-racists withdrawing in the face of the riot. In Belfast, loyalist paramilitary groups were seen alongside fascists from the south of Ireland. A riot ensued during which a Syrian-owned shop was torched. At many other protests around Britain, anti-racists were outnumbered.

The riots evoked memories of the 1960s and 1970s, when groups such as the fascist National Front targeted black and Asian people in violent attacks, before eventually being pushed back by the mass mobilisations associated with the Anti Nazi League and Rock Against Racism.7 In some ways, the scale of the threat was better captured by comparison with the 1919 race riots. Back then, demobilisation after the First World War helped spark mutinies in the armed forces, along with a sharp rise in labour unrest.8 However, in port cities, there was also tension between white seamen and their non-white counterparts, who had been drawn into the workforce amid wartime labour shortages, albeit underpaid and often in subordinate roles, and now found themselves out of work. With the armistice signed, shipping companies increasingly gave preferential treatment to white seamen, both British and foreign.9

In January 1919, there were reports of clashes between black and white sailors at Broomielaw, Glasgow, with a crowd following black sailors to their lodging-house as they sought refuge.10 The following month, on Tyneside, a trade union official incited a mob of white seamen against their British Arab counterparts.11 The Arab community fought back, and 12 were arrested in the clashes. In Liverpool, black workers turned out of jobs and their lodgings came under attack from gangs of unemployed whites. By summer, after a series of clashes, a 24-year-old black man, Charles Wotten, who had been discharged from the navy, was lynched, beginning a wave of terror, with gangs, thousands-strong, roaming the streets attacking any black people they could find and burning their boarding-houses. In Cardiff and Newport, where some of the worst violence was witnessed, a week of anti-black riots left several dead. Unrest also spread to London, which saw attacks on black people and the Arab and Chinese communities.

The lynch-mob atmosphere would be encouraged by the local and national press, along with statements by politicians and police decrying “sexual relations” between black men and white women. The Ministry of Labour consciously declined to inform black seamen of their right to an “out-of-work donation”, while the police and courts often penalised those who fought back against racist attacks. It is worth noting that many of those drawn into the mobs attacking black people were not seafarers or dockworkers directly engaged in competition for jobs, but came from a range of unskilled urban occupations, often motivated by a mixture of racism and wider social discontent.12

In summer 2024, the prospect of a similarly violent racist movement spreading throughout the country had become a real danger. A piece in Socialist Worker set out the stakes:

There must be tens of thousands on our side the next time Tommy Robinson holds a national march. That requires the trade union leaders, the independent MPs, all the anti-racist campaigns, and the Labour left to throw themselves into building the movement… The millions who have marched against Israel’s crimes are a key component of the movement that can smash Robinson and Reform UK. We have done it repeatedly before—we need to do it again. The far right looks strong because it is not challenged extensively enough on the streets. But anti-racists are a much larger force if they can be mobilised. We can win.13

A new wave of riots planned for 7 August—mostly outside offices of charities, solicitors’ firms and advice centres linked to immigration—offered a test for anti-racists.14 It was on that day that the tide began to turn. Tens of thousands of activists mobilised, mainly behind the banner of SUTR, defying not just the threat of the fascists, but also the politicians and police urging protestors to stay at home. In the face of this movement, most of the threatened far-right mobilisations melted away and, where the racists turned up, they were heavily outnumbered. In Bristol, a SUTR protest was attended by 7,000, in Walthamstow, East London, even more. Thousands came out in Finchley, north London, in Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, Sheffield and Brighton; hundreds in other towns and cities.15 A SUTR day of action on 10 August saw even larger crowds of anti-racists, including a protest of thousands outside the headquarters of Reform UK and 15,000 at a Unite Against Racism gathering in Belfast.16

The nature of the threat

It is no exaggeration to say that, had anti-racists not mobilised in force, we would likely now be seeing pogroms directed against Muslims and refugees across Britain. Fascist street movements characteristically bind together petty-bourgeois elements, such as small businessowners, shopkeepers and self-employed professionals, along with disorganised and demoralised groups of workers and the unemployed. They direct the resentments of such groups against those falsely depicted as perpetrators of their misfortunes—whether Jews, Muslims, migrants, LGBT+ people, or the “woke” left—while holding out the prospect of a renewed national community, purged of “alien” influences.

Their growth, and their ability to draw in new layers of activists, while transforming softer racist elements into convinced fascists, rests on their capacity to intimidate, to rule the streets, to successfully attack their targets. Leon Trotsky’s celebrated discussion of fascism emphasises the role of public processions and mob violence in giving cohesion to the heterogeneous rabble mobilised by the movement:

It is [the] disillusionment of the petty bourgeoisie, its impatience, its despair, that fascism exploits… The fascists show boldness, go out into the street, attack the police… The petty bourgeoisie is economically dependent and politically atomised… Fascism unites and arms the scattered masses. Out of human dust, it organises combat detachments. It thus gives the petty bourgeoisie the illusion of being an independent force.17

Hitler, amid the gruesome antisemitic fantasies in Mein Kampf, expressed a grudging admiration for social democratic agitation during Germany’s stormy interwar years, writing, in words even more suited to his Nazi party as it approached power:

[T]he gigantic mass demonstrations, these parades of hundreds of thousands of men…burned into the small wretched individual the proud conviction that, paltry worm as he was, he was nevertheless a part of a great dragon…18

Britain’s fascists, of course, remain far from state power. Attaining it would rely on a social crisis reaching a point at which the capitalist ruling class could no longer rely on regular state repression, along with economic compulsion, to achieve its aims. It is a gamble for them to lean on fascist forces to control the streets—even more so, a fascist dictatorship capable of “uprooting all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society…holding the entire class in a state of forced disunity…[smashing] all independent and voluntary organisations…”.19 The context for Benito Mussolini’s rise to power, or that of Hitler, also involved ruling classes seeking to overcome resistance from working classes that had pushed their countries to the brink of revolution, in Italy in 1919-20, Germany in 1918-23. Again, the limited workers’ activity in Britain today is eclipsed by those titanic struggles. Nonetheless, the developing ecological, economic and political crises we confront may well in the future necessitate a radical worsening of the quality of lives of workers to protect capitalists’ profits—or engender upsurges of resistance to the resulting attacks.20 The point is to break the confidence of fascists to organise now, to prevent them from gaining a foothold in society.

It would be foolish to rely, as some have counselled, on the state to achieve this through mass arrests and punitive sentences. To do so ignores the fact that the repressive power of the state is just as likely to be deployed against the left and anti-racists, indeed more so given the institutionally racist nature of the police force. Witness, for instance, the recent policing of the Palestinian movement or the clampdown on climate change activism. In Britain and beyond, the police have a long history of protecting fascists from anti-fascists and, if the former gain sufficient strength, even easing their path towards power.

The dynamics of the radical right

Unfortunately, the successes in pushing back the British fascists over the summer do not eliminate the danger or justify complacency. As International Socialism went to press, Robinson was preparing a major demonstration in London for 26 October 2024 to try to regain the initiative.21 More generally, Britain is not immune to the growth of radical right political currents that has, over the past decade and a half, been a consistent feature across most European societies—and beyond, as shown by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the US or, now, Javier Milei in Argentina.22

Consider the three most important countries in the European Union. Italy already has a far-right prime minister, Georgia Meloni. In France, Marine Le Pen has reached 32 percent in polls for the 2027 presidential election—twice as high as any other candidate—having witnessed her party, National Rally (RN; Rassemblement National), win the largest vote share in the first round of this summer’s assembly elections.23 In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD; Alternative für Deutschland) took 32.5 percent to win elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia in September, and 31 percent, just one percentage point below the conservative Christian Democratic Union, in another state, Saxony. The AfD is in second place in polls ahead of next year’s federal elections and was, at the time of writing, expected to win in a third state, Brandenburg, on 22 September 2024. One week later, Austria will head to the ballot box, with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ; Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) currently leading polls.

The rise of these forces is a response to the decomposition of a political “extreme centre”, consolidated in the 1990s and early 2000s, and committed to some variant of the neoliberal commonsense.24 Support for this extreme centre has been eroded by a series of long and short-term crises and popular discontent over inequality, corruption and cronyism. The resulting polarisation of politics throws up four types of radical right dynamic:

(1.) Openly fascist organisations, explicitly embracing a classical fascist agenda of building an extra-parliamentary street movement and aspiring to create a dictatorship. They tend to have a cadre of petty-bourgeois, middle-class elements, along with demoralised groups of workers and occasional capitalist backers. They are bound together by virulent forms of racism, such as hostility to migrants, Jews and Muslims. They combine opposition to the left with a rhetorical, phoney anti-capitalism, criticising big business, often deploying antisemitic conspiracy theories for the purpose. Their path to power, nonetheless, necessitates offering themselves as a battering ram for big business in moments of crisis. Examples include the groups discussed above that recently mobilised in Britain, the militias and neo-Nazi gangs participating in the attack on the Capitol in Washington in January 2021 in support of Trump or those organising the gangs who rampaged against migrants and the left in the German city of Chemnitz in 2018.25

(2.) Organisations rooted in fascism adopting an electoralist approach and concealing their political commitments. These groups retain a fascist core along with a wider electoral periphery. They follow the trajectory identified by the Nouveau Droit (new right) in France from the late 1960s. Postwar fascist groups such as the French National Front, forerunner of the RN, sought to distance themselves from Hitler and Mussolini’s regimes, at least in public pronouncements; to demonstrate that they could acquire state power through elections, not force, while using this to build up support; and to “reach out to peripheral supporters and ‘transform them in our image’”.26 In the case of the British National Party (BNP), which, from 2005 to 2012, was the most effective far-right electoral force seen in Britain, it meant, as then leader Nick Griffin put it, breaking its members’ fixation on “Three Hs—hard talk, hobbyism and Hitler”.27 Other examples include Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI; Fratelli d’Italia), whose roots are in the Italian Social Movement formed by former fascist cadres after the fall of Mussolini.28 Meloni does not head a fascist regime in Italy, nor would Marine Le Pen simply by virtue of winning the presidency. Nonetheless, their organisations retain the potential to transition towards more classical fascist parties, with a fully developed mass street movement.

(3.) Non-fascist organisations of the radical right. These groups, often referred to as “right-wing populist”, seek to displace traditional mainstream conservative parties, typically by mobilising elements of far-right rhetoric, but without a worked-out Nazi worldview or strategy, or the aspiration of establishing a fascist dictatorship. Examples include Farage’s current organisation, Reform UK, or its predecessors, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Brexit Party. The Italian Lega, successor to the Lega Nord, offers similar politics, as does Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands.

(4.) Mainstream conservative parties shifting rightwards. Faced with the need to reestablish a base of support and contend with more radical rivals, traditional parties such as Britain’s Conservatives, have adopted some of the phraseology and policies of the radical right. Tories such as Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch or Priti Patel have each played to the base of the party by adopting extreme reactionary rhetoric. This comes at the price of invoking tensions with sections of the capitalist class who have traditionally looked to these parties. The Republicans in the US represent an extreme case, where the rise of Trump has recast the party as one predominantly operating on the terrain of the radical right, with traditional Republicans marginalised in their own party.

As the final case discussed here suggests, the boundaries are not rigid. Many concrete organisations are hybrids, blending multiple radical right dynamics. Notably, classical fascist movements were both street movements and, to varying degrees at different times, participated in elections, often concealing elements of their core political commitments to build up their strength for an assault on power. Golden Dawn in Greece, before it was beaten back by anti-fascists, offers a recent example, with its cadres involved in paramilitary squads alongside a successful electoral operation.29 Electoral success, or the aspiration for it, can also create tensions within organisations. While it might be expedient for fascist organisations to pretend to “detoxify”, beyond a certain point the cadre may fear that the group’s politics have been watered down. Some of the current batch of fascist outfits in Britain have their roots in groups that peeled away from the BNP, thinking it overly moderate.30

The AfD at its formation in 2013 was an even more complex hybrid, containing conservative nationalists and neoliberals, along with fascist elements. The latter were organised as Der Flügel (the wing), led by Björn Höcke, who has made frequent use of Nazi terminology and slogans and has been linked to the openly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDP).31 The trajectory of the AfD demonstrates that, while some parties, such as the BNP or RN, conceal their fascist roots to masquerade as purely electoral parties, others that begin primarily as right-wing electoral formations can come to embrace a more explicitly fascist politics. As early as 2015, much of the neoliberal current in the AfD left when Frauke Petry, a conservative nationalist, replaced their preferred party chair, Bernd Lucke. Two years later, Petry was, in turn, forced out after seeking to adopt a pragmatic electoral approach, appealing to more moderate voters and demanding Höcke’s expulsion. The AfD would present increasingly hardline Islamophobic and anti-migrant positions. Then, in 2020, the Flügel was forced to dissolve itself after it was classified as right-wing extremist by the German state. It continued to organise informally, expanding its influence and triggering the departure, in 2022, of another conservative nationalist leader, Jörg Meuthen, who had previously been allied with Höcke.

In January this year, an exposure by the investigative magazine Correctiv revealed that senior AfD members had attended a meeting where Martin Sellner, an Austrian activist with Generation Identity, outlined plans to deport two million Germans, including those who have “failed to assimilate”, to North Africa.32 The revelations triggered a wave of anti-AfD protests across Germany. Then, in May, Höcke’s ally, the MEP Maximilian Krah, claimed in an interview that not all members of the Nazi SS were criminals. This was enough to embarrass even Le Pen and Meloni, who sought to remove the AfD from their European Parliamentary group. Yet, it was still the Flügel current that triumphed in September’s regional elections. Höcke was the party’s lead candidate in Thuringia; in Saxony, Jörg Urban, a co-founder of the Flügel who has appeared as a speaker for the Islamophobic protest movement Pegida. Both regional branches have been designated as extreme right by the German government.

Not only can different dynamics and currents hybridise and morph into one another; they also play a mutually reinforcing role in the growth of the far right. The US example is again instructive. The electoral breakthrough made by Trump both shifted the centre of gravity of politics to the right and gave confidence to neo-Nazi groups, as demonstrated by the assault on the Capitol. This, in turn, further radicalised the grassroots of the Republican Party, paving the way for an even harder right-wing run at the White House by Trump this year.33

Here in Britain, we see a similar pattern at work. The pressure of Reform UK and its predecessors on the Tories helped radicalise the latter to the right. UKIP made an early breakthrough when it took the largest share of the vote in the 2014 European elections, during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government headed by David Cameron. Much of UKIP’s vote came from former middle-class and working-class Tory voters, motivated more by opposition to migration than opposition to the EU.34 Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on Britain’s EU membership was driven primarily by efforts to contain divisions in his own party, rather than the rise of UKIP, but the draconian 2014 Immigration Act did reflect pressure from the Tories’ radical right rival. The Brexit Party briefly led the polls in summer 2019, during Theresa May’s hapless administration following the referendum. It was also, by now, increasingly clear that it was buoyed up and influenced by the success of Trump and other radical right currents in Europe. May’s successor, Boris Johnson, was able to forge a temporary alliance combining pro-Brexit nationalists, some disenchanted voters from former Labour-voting “red wall” seats and more mainstream neoliberal Tories, draining support from the Brexit Party. Through each of these administrations, anti-immigrant rhetoric grew—it was under Johnson, for instance, that plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda were first aired.

Reform UK rose sharply in the polls from autumn last year as Rishi Sunak’s administration disintegrated—with Farage’s party eventually winning 14.3 percent of the vote, and gaining five seats, at the general election. Farage has adopted increasingly right-wing rhetoric. A speech he gave as racist riots spread, while offering the usual ritual condemnations of violence, was littered with far-right tropes:

I understand the frustrations, I understand the anger that is felt by huge numbers of people… [T]here were masked Muslim extremist mobs some with weapons going around the streets of Midlands and Northern cities… I talked in the general election about societal breakdown…people not even recognising the centres of some of our towns and cities as even being vaguely English anymore… [W]hen it comes to the issue of two-tier policing…this perception began back at the time of Black Lives Matter…the police…took the knee to a Marxist organisation that wants to bring down western civilisation…compare the policing [of Black Lives Matter]…with the policing that happened at Southport… [W]e need to end Mass immigration now… We understand that a ten million population increase has put massive pressure on people’s lives… [I]f your kids are trying to buy a house, trying to rent a house or… get onto a social housing list they’ve now been put even further to the back of the queue.35

No wonder a popular T-shirt at recent far-right protests reads: “Nigel Farage for prime minister. Tommy Robison for home secretary”.36

Two other factors underpin the racist upsurge. The first is the central role that Islamophobia now plays in undergirding contemporary racism. Traditional far-right ideologies persist, including those directed against the left, women and LGBT+ people, Jews and black people (whether taking the form of crude biological racism or presented as attacks on Black Lives Matter, “critical race theory”, and so on). Yet during the US-led “War on Terror” of the early 2000s, mainstream pro-imperialist politicians, such as George W Bush and Tony Blair, helped furnish the far right with material to reinvigorate its racist and genocidal fantasies.37 The resulting “counter-jihad” activism envisages a clash of cultures, with Muslims pitched against a decadent white, Christian civilisation.38 The enormous movement in support of Gaza, in which Muslims have been prominent protagonists, and the election of four left-wing Muslim candidates at the election, who have now formed a parliamentary group alongside Jeremy Corbyn, was one source of anger for the racist right.

The second factor is state racism more broadly. This is obviously the case with parties such as the Tories or the US Republicans in government. However, as the example of Blair shows, social democracy is far from immune from capitulating to racist clamours and indeed propagating racism. So too with the incoming Keir Starmer government, further discussed below. Labour’s new home secretary, Yvette Cooper, took the opportunity this summer to pledge to deport 14,500 “illegal” immigrants in the coming six months, a faster rate than achieved by the previous two Tory administrations, and to expand detention centres.39 This “official” racism further nurtures forces on the right seeking to mobilise anti-migrant sentiment.

What kind of anti-fascism?

How did the successes of the anti-racist left come about in early August and what can we learn from this? One key lesson is the need for socialists to overcome paralysis and prevarication, giving courage to wider forces. That lesson has been hard won historically. In 1924, shortly after the fascist seizure of power, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, reflected on the errors of the Italian socialists. They had failed to see the party as the result of “dialectical process, in which the spontaneous movement of the revolutionary masses and the organising and directing will of the centre converge”.40 Gramsci situates his remarks within the debates on the tactic of the united front, stimulated by the third and fourth congresses of the Comintern, the international body formed by the Bolsheviks and their counterparts after the 1917 Revolution.41

The approach taken by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the largest revolutionary organisation involved in SUTR, reflects the lessons of such discussions. An internal party mailing of 5 August argued: “Stand up to Racism has called lots of important counter-protests. But this is a tipping point… Counter-protests in every area are crucial.” It called on every member to build SUTR protests for 7 and 10 August. At an emergency online party meeting, on the evening of 5 August, it was clear that many activists around the country—SWP members and the core of anti-fascists beyond the party, crystalised over years of activity—had already realised the danger and were preparing. They were able to tap into a much wider feeling in society, not just that racism was abhorrent,42 but that the fascists had to be opposed.

SUTR reflects the united front approach belatedly adopted by the Italian revolutionaries to whom Gramsci addressed himself. The united front emerged as a policy of the Comintern from 1921 as capitalism stabilised and the ruling class went on the offensive as the revolutionary wave following the First World War receded. This necessitated defensive battles that could unite the working class, including those not yet won to revolutionary politics. Over time, Marxists such as Trotsky would generalise the approach to inform the struggle against fascism.43 A united front is necessitated because, while revolutionary socialists are a minority, their struggles are insufficient to push back the fascists.44 Instead, revolutionaries must mobilise far greater layers of workers, including those still looking to reform rather than revolution. As Trotsky put it in late 1931:

Today…social democracy…is forced into sharp conflict with the fascists. It is our task to take advantage of this conflict… The front must now be directed against fascism… It is necessary to show by deeds a complete readiness to make a bloc with the social democrats against the fascists in all cases in which they will accept a bloc… The overwhelming majority of social democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but—for the present at least—only together with their organisations.45

That meant an appeal to leaders of the reformist organisations, the social democrats, who were also under threat from the fascists, as an earlier elaboration of the tactic by Trotsky made clear:

If we were able simply to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organisations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world. But then the very question of the united front would not exist in its present form. The question arises from this, that certain very important sections of the working class belong to reformist organisations or support them. Their present experience is still insufficient to enable them to break with the reformist organisations and join us.46

Within that context, Trotsky insisted that the united front be concluded to fight for specific goals, and without the revolutionary element surrendering their organisational independence or subordinating themselves to other currents:

Any sort of organisational agreement which restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely unacceptable to us. We participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment. It is precisely in the course of struggle that broad masses must learn from experience that we fight better than the others, that we see more clearly than the others, that we are more audacious and resolute.47

In other words, the united front is not simply the most effective means of mobilising workers in defensive struggles; it is also a terrain on which revolutionaries can fight for hegemony, drawing workers closer to them and preparing for future battles—including those where workers take the offensive.

SUTR is hardly a cookie-cutter version of the united front advocated by Trotsky in the 1920s or 1930s.48 Britain’s revolutionaries do not possess a mass party, and, even before Labour were in government, the relative scale of revolutionary and reformist organisations meant that a credible approach could only be made to sections of the labour movement. Nonetheless, the underlying method follows Trotsky’s advice, creatively applied to present circumstances. Indicative of its broad support, SUTR’s statement in the wake of racist riots was signed by 19 MPs and nine union general secretaries, along with prominent artists and broadcasters, and representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain, the Indian Workers Association and the Jewish Socialist Group.49 Such support builds the social weight of the organisation, allowing it to appeal to wider sections of the working class. However, it aims to do so without sacrificing the idea that mass mobilisation to break the momentum of fascism is essential, something with real appeal to activists drawn into Black Lives Matter protests or radical campaigns around Palestinian rights. Effective anti-fascism certainly must include, balance of forces permitting, mass physical confrontation: preventing fascists from marching by blocking streets, and thus stopping them intimidating their enemies at will, or preventing them from holding meetings. Such tactics were deployed as part of a struggle to reverse the momentum of the British Union of Fascists at Cable Street in 1936 and the National Front at the “Battle of Lewisham” in 1977.

Naturally, there are challenges to holding these various elements together, without undercutting the radicalism or overly diminishing the social weight of the movement. Marxism is, in this sense, an art rather than a science, and no revolutionary textbook can ensure success. As Trotsky put it: “the fundamental Bolshevik prejudice is precisely this: that one learns to ride on horseback only when sitting on the horse”.50

There are several advantages to the approach embodied in SUTR. First, it rejects the “economistic” notion, common on the left, that class struggle over economic issues alone can counter racism and fascism. France has experienced a far higher level of class struggle in recent years than Britain—yet it has, in the RN, an entrenched far-right organisation at the centre of its politics, whose tenacles reach into every region of the country poisoning its politics. Events of 1919 in Britain, touched on earlier, tell the same story. On 31 January 1919, a mass rally in George Square on “Red Clydeside”, addressed by revolutionary shop stewards’ leader Willie Gallacher, led to a famous clash between police and militant workers, part of a wave of radical class struggles that year. Yet just a few days earlier, another union leader, Emanuel Shinwell, a figurehead within the Clydeside strike movement, had demanded before a meeting of white sailors that the government exclude Chinese labour from shipping. Within hours white crowds were fighting West African sailors on the Glasgow waterfront as part of the racist riots that year.51

An equally barren response is to imagine that an electoral programme based on social or economic demands can contain racism and fascism. A recent article on the Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs, KPÖ) in Jacobin magazine was headlined “Austria’s Communists are curbing the far right’s rise”. It welcomed the KPÖ’s success in city and regional elections in Salzburg and Graz, based on left-populist measures, claiming such achievements could “cut the ground from under the right’s feet”. The article admits “the most recent KPÖ success will not stop the advance of the right by itself” but is silent on the kind of action that can stop the FPÖ, a party founded by former SS officers, winning Austrian elections.52 Similarly, as Denis Godard argues in this issue of International Socialism, despite the hope placed in the New Popular Front in France, electoral initiatives alone are insufficient to drive back the RN.

Worse still, the approach of Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany. Her party, an offshoot from the Die Linke (The Left), was the other big winner in the regional elections in which the AfD made its recent breakthroughs. Her success was based on a combination of left economic demands, opposing German support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, and right-wing politics around racism and issues such as transphobia. A recent post by Wagenknecht on X, which could have come from Tommy Robinson, claimed: “Anyone who allows uncontrolled #migration will face uncontrollable #violence”.53 Her concessions to the right help popularise anti-migrant rhetoric while doing nothing to prevent the AfD from expanding its vote. Indeed, Wagenknecht took more votes from Die Linke than from the AfD in both elections.54

Finally, we must recognise that the huge and enormously vibrant movement in solidarity with Gaza can invigorate the anti-fascist movement, without simply relying on the pro-Palestinian struggle to substitute for explicitly anti-fascist organisation. As noted above, the general Islamophobia of the radical right has found a specific target in the Palestine movement. Objectively, fascists threaten participants, and especially Muslim participants, in struggles over Gaza, offering a clear basis for the anti-fascist left to reach out and involve them in a common battle against a common enemy. Prominent figures from Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Stop the War Coalition have spoken at recent SUTR rallies, precisely in recognition of the far-right’s Islamophobic attacks on the Palestine movement.

That said, while Israel is an apartheid state, racially suppressing and excluding Palestinians, SUTR does not make anti-Zionism a ticket of entry to its activities in confronting the far right, instead mobilising all who agree with the need to fight fascism.55 It is true that most—although not all—sections of the far-right internationally, including some with a long history of antisemitism, support Benjamin Netanyahu’s onslaught against the Palestinians.56 Yet, claims by journalist Yvonne Ridley that Tommy Robinson is “Israel’s poster boy” or by academic David Miller that he is a “Zionist asset” are misleading and disorienting for the movement. The central motivation for the far-right rioters was Islamophobia and racism—any support for Netanyahu was entirely secondary and contingent on identifying parallels in Israel’s actions. Britain of course needs its insurgent Palestine movement, but it also needs a specifically anti-fascist struggle.

The Starmer government takes shape

The riots spreading through Britain in August 2024 demonstrated the shallowness of the new Labour prime minister Starmer’s promise of a restoration of capitalist stability. Here, a striking comparison can be made with Blair’s election in 1997. Starmer won his landslide on a narrow lead, spread very evenly across the country. While Blair won 63 percent of seats on 43 percent of the vote in 1997, Starmer won the same proportion of seats on just 34 percent of the vote, “a vote share reminiscent of the embattled later Blair”, as the left-wing journalist James Butler puts it.57 Andrew Rawnsley, the chief political commentator for the Observer, similarly notes that Labour’s vote-share was the lowest for any party winning a majority in the post-war period. He adds: “Factoring in the turnout, the proportion of the adult population who crossed the Labour box was a measly one in five”.58

It is not just that Starmer has a fragile, if large, majority, it is also the case that his government will be buffeted by crises. Butler adds:

Unlike Tony Blair, Starmer inherits a broken and dysfunctional country. Where Blair surfed a burgeoning economic boom and aspired to a frictionless world united under Visa, Starmer’s Britain is stuck in protracted accidie, economically DOA and beset by a deep—if justified—cynicism about politicians and the ability of the state to improve people’s lives.59

We could add to this array of maladies the deepening climate crisis and growing geopolitical instability as Israel seems hell-bent on provoking a wider regional war and Ukraine, backed by Nato, makes incursions into Russia in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Not only did Starmer and his front bench fail the test of the riots, but now they are threatening to impose austerity. The emphasis from Starmer and his treasurer, Rachel Reeves, has been on the parlous state of the public finances, complete with scare stories about a “run on the pound” if action is not taken, claims ridiculed by economists.60 There is indeed economic fragility, reflected in recent stock market turmoil as some of the hype around Artificial Intelligence was punctured.61 Yet, governments have choices when it comes to economic policy, and there was no pressure coming from financial markets to introduce means-testing for the winter fuel allowance, to retain the Tories’ two-child benefit cap or scale back public investment.62 Given the limited enthusiasm for Labour, Rawnsley is right to comment that “it is not accurate to say that the country has already fallen out of love; the country was never in love with Labour in the first place”.63 More than this, the fact that significant groups of voters supported candidates to the left of Labour at the recent general election suggests that some would welcome a socialist alternative to Starmer.

In this context, it is entirely reasonable for Unite union general secretary Sharon Graham to propose a 1 percent wealth tax as an alternative to austerity.64 However, it is far from automatic that the working-class movement will be mobilised to enforce such a demand through strikes and mass protests. How the inertia of the union leaders can be overcome and such a movement built will be another essential debate for the left, alongside the task of fighting the far right. Meanwhile, the approach of Starmer—concessions to the right over racism, combined with attacks on the working class—will continue to erode the stability of centre-ground politics. It remains to be seen whether the resulting space is filled by the politics of radical left, born of hope, or those of the radical right, rooted in despair.

Joseph Choonara is the editor of International Socialism. He is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (Bookmarks, 2017) and Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy (2nd edition: Bookmarks, 2017).

Notes