Imperialism, refugees, racism and Israel’s genocide

By Naciye Suman

This article is being written on the 23^rd August, which coincides with the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. It was on the 23^rd August 1791, that enslaved people on the island of Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) rose up against French colonial rule. The uprising played a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. A slave trade that ravaged the continent of Africa with around 15 million Africans of their sons and daughters enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic to the colonised ‘new world’. Around 2 million died in the middle passage, finding themselves thrown overboard to feed fish. Between 1640 and 1807, British ships transported about 3.4 million Africans across the Atlantic to create wealth for British capitalists.

Toussaint Louverture, leaader of the Haitian Revoluton and Great Slave Revolt of 1791

Capitalism and its evil twin imperialism is responsible for war, oppression, and environmental destruction on a huge scale, holding the world to ransom and the potential collapse of the biosphere. European nations and their bastard children, the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the US, Canada, and Australia preach their advanced civilised enlightened state with claims of moral superiority, their shouts of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” as they act as the world’s police forces. In reality their colonisation and slavery have not ended but taken on a new respectful phase in oppressing the Global South with ‘trade and funding deals’, allowing corporate exploitation of the extraction of resources, leaving a wake of pollution and poverty behind, and when that fails should the natives resist, regime change, or the raining down of bombs.

Nothing epitomises this more of the value of white corporate individuals over their less worthy poor brown counterparts than the recent sinking of the luxury super yacht, Bayesian, when it capsized off the coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean. The Morgan Stanley International chair, Jonathan Bloomer, and UK tech entrepreneur, Mike Lynch, were among six people unaccounted for, with wall-to-wall coverage in the media and a well organised search and rescue attempt provided. Contrast this with around the deaths of 25,000 refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to safety. The reality is that European lives matter, others less so. Not all lives are equal. Europe is more than willing to accept this as it pays Turkey to act as its gatekeeper. Where is the outcry in the press or on the TV channels? Where is the public outcry? Where are the protests? The only guaranteed response from governments is to administer further restrictions on those seeking asylum – even making it a criminal offence to assist refugees, even saving lives at sea, which is a legal obligation under international law.

The recent riots in Britain were attributed to an explosion of racism directed towards refugees and migrants. Responsibility for this is due to the demonisation of Muslims, refugees, and migrants, carried out by successive governments. As the embers from the flames of unrest still smoulder, instead of reflection Starmer’s response has been to act tough on asylum, the victims themselves of the recent riots. His attack dog, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, has just announced a new ‘major surge’ in deportations of asylum seekers with the re-opening of two more detention centres and a promise to achieve the highest rate of removals since 2018. Detention centres are another name for prisons to place those already fleeing persecution, all designed to deter those seeking asylum. Being held in these places impacts on an individual’s mental health, sometimes leading to suicide. The UK has one of the biggest detention centres in Europe, near Heathrow airport. It is also the only European country without a maximum limit on the length of time an individual can be detained. Research has shown that asylum seekers are five times more likely to have mental health needs than the general population with 61% experiencing severe mental distress.

So much for our civilised nature and tolerant nation. But this should come as no surprise, Labour has declared its neoliberal intent and drawn its line in the sand. Its removal of the winter fuel allowance for over 10 million pensioners, while at the same time allowing energy companies who are making record breaking profits to raise energy prices by 10% later this year shows the utter contempt it has for its own citizens. Why should it care about anyone else? This is how capitalism views human beings, nothing more than a commodity whose labour is to be exploited while also being encouraged to consume and feed the system. When that productive cycle comes to an end, the parasitic nature of the capitalist system is to spit the person out onto the scrapheap to fend for themselves.

The othering and demonisation of refugees, migrants, and especially Muslims, is designed to distract attention from domestic policies but it also importantly feeds into Britain’s war narrative as well as. They are entwined. A clear example of this is how white refugees from Ukraine were immediately given sanctuary against the racist back drop of Russophobia and how these refugees were ‘just like us’, Europeans with descriptions of ‘blond hair and blue eyes’. This allowed the clamour for war against Russia in Ukraine. Contrast that with the Palestinians now facing slaughter with an ongoing genocide sanctioned by Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin. Where are the safe routes for brown Muslims trapped in Gaza being bombed with our bombs? Why? Because they are our bombs raining down. Where is the outrage against this other than through the sanitised demonstrations taking place on the streets in London. Demonstrations organised by Stop the War and the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign with the full co-operation with the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police to ensure that it doesn’t impact upon anyone. Permission granted by the authorities to object against our imperialist war with set times and set routes on set dates, anything outside of this is open to arrest.

Palestine Solidarity march in London agasint Gaza genocide, April 2024

The truth is that now not only is colonisation taking place elsewhere but that we ourselves are also being colonised. As individuals we are being stripped of our humanity, we are allowing ourselves to be conditioned to accept anything and everything being put before us as ‘truth’. We allow ourselves to yield, to become hypnotised, and act robotically to seamlessly slide into the capitalist system, to become validated by being told of our productiveness as if there is no other system to satisfy our needs. In this we have become desensitised to the suffering of others or to the complete destruction of our environment, which not only sustains us but also alongside all other life on this planet. We conveniently divert our gaze from uncomfortable truths; we see the footage coming out of Gaza of children torn limb from limb, mothers wailing that their children are buried underneath collapsed buildings. But these atrocities do nothing to wake us from our slumber. Anyone not having their conscience pricked and feeling anything but rage is just as complicit as those that drop the bombs killing children. We are complicit with our tax dollars going towards this murder. War and environmental destruction are signs that the system is broken, a system that places profit over people with profit central to imperialist greed. We as individuals are broken.

Israel’s ongoing destruction of the Palestinian population did not start on October the 7^th 2023, it started in 1947-48 and has been ongoing in our name ever since. Israel is nothing but a settler colonial state, while not in the classic sense of having a mother country, it has several mother countries; those predominately being Europe and the US, particularly the former who not only saw a way out of their ‘Jewish problem’ but through collective guilt at their own appalling history of ‘Jewish hate’. Those that were going to pay for European antisemitism and the Holocaust were to be the brown Palestinians. It didn’t matter, it created opportunities, namely a European state planted right in the middle of a ‘barbaric Muslim’ Middle East, providing the colonisers and their backers a strategic foothold and undue influence in an area in abundance with black gold.

October 7^th and ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ is described as another Jewish Holocaust to justify the massacre of Gaza. It plays on the European psyche and how Europe facilitated the Nazis leading to the murder of 6 million Jews. It uses the memory of those massacred to facilitate its own massacre. Those colonised have had to face atrocity after atrocity directed towards them in the name of Jewish supremacy for decades. The massacres of civilians, the incarceration of adults and children without charge or trial, often with torture, the deliberate targeting of children by snipers, and expulsion from and the demolition of homes, are everyday occurrences for Palestinians. The brutality meted out towards the Palestinians from the pariah Zionist state’s occupation forces and its backers in the US and Europe have stripped the Palestinians of their humanity. Trying to reason with colonists on a humane political level has never worked, it just returns with more violence from an occupier that sees it as a sign of weakness. Stripped naked with constant violence the oppressed eventually come to a realisation of their own power and what it is to be human by uprising. This is what happened on October 7^th. They have nothing left but to rise faced with almost certain death and the death of their children.

How dare these oppressor nations talk of being civilised when using bombs dropped from advanced jets to silence the oppressed, or talk of the crime of rape when Palestinian detainees are being filmed by their captors as they are raped, or talk of children being beheaded when decapitated babies are being brought out from underneath rubble as occupation forces blow up buildings and laugh about their exploits on social media. All this under the watchful eye of the West with full material and political support. The Palestinians and Muslims in general have been reduced to zoological terms, described as ‘animals’ or ‘swarm’, even ‘cockroaches’ by those justifying this murder. How do we expect those being oppressed to find themselves and react? The only option open is to meet violent colonisation with violent resistance. Those that advocate non-violence are just as bad as those that avert their gaze. There is no option for non-violence, it has been removed as any option by their captors. The truth is that as Israel looks into the mirror it sees its own reflection. The occupation has made this resistance and its turn towards violence. When their colonial masters elevate violence as being necessary to keep order, provide safety, or economic and national stability, then it’s obvious that the Palestinians will view the same to be necessary.

For too long this oppression has been camouflaged with talk of ‘Jewish safety’ and a ‘Jewish home’, terrorism, and a two-state solution. Many on the left have facilitated this crime by raising similar concerns while ignoring a simple fact, a brutal planted coloniser and those being colonised and removed from their land. These same leftists have become nothing but mouthpieces for imperialism. Why should a ‘diaspora’ who have had no connection to a land for 2,000 years, except through religious scripture, have precedence over an indigenous population who have land titles and ties to the land running through generations? Why do modern-day Jews have a manufactured ‘right of return’ when those being dispossessed do not? How can Jews that now identify with their state of Israel claim to be unsafe when safe with dual nationality in nations that manufacture an antisemitism crisis to create a hierarchy of racism to afford privilege? How can one right of ‘self-determination’ and removal from ‘oppression’ be granted while removing others from theirs. This is the hypocrisy of the West.

The reality is that the conditions on the ground in Palestine with Gaza destroyed and the Gazan population with nowhere to go, alongside with the annexation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank, it no longer allows for a viable Palestinian state alongside their murderous neighbour. Particularly one that has no intention of allowing it. The only option is a one-state solution. This presents problems for the coloniser, it undermines the demographic superiority of their state. Ultimately, it is for those that are occupied to decide what this one state looks like, not the occupiers. Where has history allowed the occupier to decide the terms of independence of the occupied and what sort of anti-imperialists are we should we argue against this? In the meantime, the Palestinians get to decide what their resistance looks like and what form it takes to shake off their chains. The West have no authority to moralise given their own bankruptcy.

This conflict and the bravery and resilience of the Palestinians, alongside the slide into fascism of the Israeli state will be Israel’s own undoing. It is eating itself from within as it becomes clear that oppression of the indigenous population is not leading towards ‘Jewish safety’ or solving its Palestinian problem. The drive religiously rightwards in Israel is creating political divisions, domestic unrest on the streets, increasing international ostracization, and its economic destruction. Only its Western backers are keeping Israel afloat, a West that that requires its own culture wars targeting refugees and Muslims as part of the wider ‘clash of civilisations’ pantomime to enable support for genocide.

It was no coincidence that Netanyahu said in address to the US Congress “We meet today at a crossroads of history. Our world is in upheaval. In the Middle East, Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together. Because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win. They lose.” This is a call for a wider imperialist war in the region, divide the Muslim world, and justify more aid to its chronically and psychologically ill colonial partner. They talk of barbarism. This is the language of racism. Victory to the resistance and the Palestinian struggle.

Starmer’s pro-Zionist Government – Genocide and Pogroms go hand-in-hand

This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on August’s Attempted Fascist Pogrom, and the Left’s Successful Resistance.

The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.

Genocidaire Starmer (above) endorsed Israeli blockade of Gaza for food, water and fuel. (below) Palestinian child dying of starvation in Gaza.

Even from afar, it was obvious that the recent wave of anti-immigrant race-riots, which were in fact an attempted nationwide pogrom, was not beaten-back by Starmer and his pro-Zionist, genocide-supporting/genocide-denying government. The problem is that however many police they sent out to supposedly ‘deal with’ those who were trying to burn down Mosques in early August, they were bound to be ineffective. Why? Because the government fundamentally agreed with the rioters. As David Miller has pointed out, the leading figures who incited the riots are in effect Israeli agents. Particularly Yaxley-Lennon, the most prominent British fascist, whose political projects have been funded by Israel, through various covert channels for many years, and who has been proudly photographed with the Israeli army, riding on tanks, etc. The motive for the attacks on Muslims is retribution and intimidation of a community that has been pivotal in building the mass movement in solidarity with the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

However much the government tries to evade the point, Starmer clearly supported the genocidal actions of Israel when in an interview with Nick Ferrari of LBC on 11^th October 2023, he justified Yoav Gallant’s stated intention to deprive Gaza’s “human animals” (Gallant’s words) of food, water and power. That was Starmer’s real position. Everything he says now is evasion dictated by fear of political discredit or even possible prosecution for providing political support for the crime of genocide that the International Court of Justice, considered ‘plausible’ in January. The atrocities since make it a lot more than merely ‘plausible’. As he stood to be Labour leader in 2020, Starmer made a point of stating that he supported Zionism “without qualification”. And the Labour Zionists who funded him abhor the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine just as much as the far-right thugs like Yaxley do. Though they prefer state repression, Prevent and lies about ‘anti-Semitism’ to burning down Mosques. Not a good look.

And there is the smear campaign against the grouping of independent Muslim left-wing MPs who defeated New Labour in the General Election, bizarrely accusing them of ‘intimidation’ when in fact they clearly won the popular vote. The implication being that the population don’t have the right to vote out Zionist thugs and liars. That is a clear coincidence of interest between the Starmer government and the Zio-fascists.

Another manifestation of the Starmer regime’s affinity with the far right is its support for Maidan Ukraine, which is basically run by Nazis for the benefit of US imperialism. It also has a genocidal policy, of seeking to eliminate the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, the South-Eastern part of Ukraine, and the overwhelmingly Russian population of Crimea. The evidence of Nazi domination in Ukraine is overwhelming. Even the Jewish president of Ukraine, Zelensky, who was groomed by US imperialism precisely to try to camouflage the Nazi domination of Ukraine, was filmed leading a standing ovation in the Canadian parliament for a 98-year old veteran of Hitler’s SS. Zelensky is a Zionist: part of an increasingly common phenomena of Zionist Jews willing to forgive the Nazi holocaust of Jews as long as Nazis direct their genocidal proclivities against their enemies today – Arabs, Muslims and Russians. Support for Nazi Ukraine and its supposed fight for ‘freedom’ against the Russian population native to its own country – it literally is the case that they want rid of that ‘unwanted’ population – is a point of honour for Starmer and New Labour.

Not that the Starmerites won’t throw a certain number of fascist lumpens into jail for fighting the cops. Not that some of them won’t get severe sentences and lose a lot. That’s a given. That’s what happens to overtly criminal elements who brazenly defy the police when they involve themselves in behaviour that the ruling class finds inconvenient. They get more than just a slap on the wrist. A certain number will get 10-year sentences for riot. Quite a few already have. The rise of this racist lumpenism is a product of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation and the shrinkage of the working class resulting from that. New Labour offers no relief from that economic suffering, no strategy, just more of the same. The bourgeois media works overtime to incite such lumpen layers against ‘foreigners’ to make sure they don’t revolt against capitalism itself.

This government shares many of the hatreds and bigotries of the rioters. They too want to punish refugees and migrants. They too think that Muslims should be forced to shut up about the oppression and persecution they are suffering from so often, in Britain, today. In particular, the government want to silence blacks, Muslims, and other oppressed groups who are inclined to show solidarity with the Palestinians and have been marching for 10 months against the brutal Zionist mass murder of the people of Gaza. Along with the left, who they have wilfully driven out of the Labour Party by the hundreds of thousands to prove their ‘fitness to rule’ to the billionaire capitalist class and the Zionists. In that, they agree with the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, with the provocateur Andrew Tate, with Laurence Fox, with Trump and Farage, and all the other criminal far right elements who incited these racist riots.

On 29^th July a terrible triple murder of three young girls in Southport, and wounding of several other small children, apparently by a deranged, British-born teenager, was extensively lied about on social media by this fascist scum and attributed to a completely fictional Muslim refugee. Over the following week or more there were terrible attacks on migrants all over the country, mosques were attacked in attempted arson attacks. Hotels, reputed to be accommodating refugees, were also subject to arson attacks. Non-whites were physically attacked in the street by groups of racists. In Manchester a black man was challenged whether had a “problem” with “us English” – before being violently attacked. An Asian man was brutally attacked in Hartlepool simply for walking down a street that had been taken over by a mob of racist thugs. In Middlesborough, fascist ‘rioters’ set up ‘checkpoints’ on some streets to make sure that drivers were ‘white and English’ – with the threat of violence and even murder against anyone who is not. In many places these thugs fought pitched battles with the police, who in some situations were the only thing standing in the way of members of racial minorities being brutally attacked and even murdered.

On 7^th August there was a call to attack Mosques, hotels being used to house refugees, lawyers who defend migrants, and other targets related to Muslims and various migrant communities. Right across the country. A British version of Kristallnacht, the massive Nazi pogrom in 1938 that laid the basis for the Nazi holocaust. The likes of Yaxley and Farage would love such a pogrom in Britain. But it never happened. And it is no thanks to Starmer that it did not happen.

What stopped it was mass demonstrations across Britain organised at short notice by the anti-racist left. The SWP’s ‘Stand Up to Racism’ front was one major locus of this organisation, but far from the only one. The many left independent campaigns that fought so valiantly in the General Election, returning five independent MP’s, along with several more near misses where the vilest Zionist racists in New Labour were challenged and came close to defeat, also threw their mass base in into the effort. From Walthamstow in East London, to Brighton, to Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and more, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, turned out to demonstrate against the fascists, to defend the Muslim communities and in support of migrants. They massively outnumbered the miserable groups of neo-Nazis who turned out. In several places small groups of fascists were massively outnumbered by anti-fascist, anti-racist demonstrators. These thugs, who were previously in fights with the cops over their supposed ‘right’ to attack minorities, suddenly had to be rescued by the same cops from huge crowds of angry anti-fascists who would have made mincemeat out of them.

This was a major tactical defeat for the fascists. And neither the government, nor the police, had anything to do with it. In fact, Keir Starmer, our non-esteemed Prime Minister, attempted to ban Labour MP’s from taking part in anti-fascist demonstrations. One prominent black Labour MP who refused to abide by this and spoke publicly at an anti-fascist demonstration in Norwich, is Clive Lewis. Unlike in the case of the 7 MP’s who had the Labour whip removed for defying him over the two-child benefit cap, Starmer has not dared to do the same to him. Which mirrors what happened with Diane Abbott in the General Election, where Starmer was forced to reinstate the whip to her after attempting to purge her for the sacrilege of publicly doubting if Jews today suffer from systematic racist oppression, as is true for non-whites. Starmer fears taking on the black community at the same time as he is waging war against Muslims.

The forces of the state did not drive back the fascists, nor did the government. Stiff sentences for some of these far-right rioters are just a fig leaf to hide the government’s inaction and refusal to mobilise politically against the far right. Because the Starmer government agrees with the far right on so many things. That is why it ran in the General Election, and for the last few years, as a flag-shagging, Union Jack-laden party advertising its ‘patriotism’ in a manner strongly reminiscent of the way Donald Trump in the US wraps his campaigns with the bloody Stars and Stripes. This symbolises its adherence to the anti-migrant creed of the Tory and Reform Brexiters.

Prior to the 2019 General Election Starmer cynically manipulated the sentiments of many in the Labour Party – including most Corbynites – who opposed Brexit, not out of any faith in the capitalist-neoliberal bloc that the EU represents, but simply because of its anti-migrant thrust. He put forward a proposal for a second referendum with ‘remain’ on the ballot paper in 2019, and called for the reversal of Brexit, simply to sabotage Labour’s election prospects under Corbyn. It is worth noting that in 2017, Corbyn tactically accepted the narrow result of the Brexit referendum and campaigned for a soft Brexit maintaining the rights of EU workers, coming close to winning the General Election, robbing the Tories of their majority. Starmer’s policy destroyed that, by a brazen demand to overrule a previous popular vote before it had been implemented. It acted as rocket fuel to propel Boris Johnson into Downing Street. But the real motive was to destroy the leadership of Corbyn, because of its modest programme of social democratic reforms, which the boss-class will not tolerate, and his relatively weak, but real, criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinians.

Hence, we have a neoliberal, Zionist government that is carrying on with the austerity that characterised the Tories. It is determined to keep the two-child benefit cap which is a major driver of terrible child poverty. It has now removed the winter fuel payment for all but the poorest pensioners, those on pension credit. This while the supposed fuel-price cap goes up. This will cause thousands of pensioners to die because of the cold in the coming winter, even Labour MPs are warning. This is taking money straight out of the mouths of pensioners in the UK, who have the worst pensions in Europe, and sending the savings to fund Zionism and Ukrainian Nazism. Like Boris Johnson, they want the bodies of pensioners to ‘pile high’ so they can fund their far-right cohorts in Israel and Ukraine.

Expecting this anti-working class, racist government to do anything to deal with the threat of racist violence is a forlorn hope. Their ‘law and order’ will inevitably be used to attack those resisting far right violence. Like the scandalous arrest, and suspension from Labour, of black councillor Ricky Jones from Walthamstow, who called for the Nazi terrorists then rampaging and terrorising minorities across the country, to be executed by throat cutting. However crudely expressed, this is a completely understandable, emotional response to large-scale racist terrorism. The fear that this attempted pogrom caused among minority communities is enormous. Such responses are natural. It would be perfectly reasonable for a left-wing government, for instance, faced with such attempted mass pogroms, to resort to summary execution of the worst participants. The idea that minorities can rely on the police to defend them against such a systematic attack is a joke. Everyone knows that the police themselves persecute and abuse ethnic minorities, and often turn a blind eye to racist crimes. The list of scandals goes back many decades, in fact centuries. In fact, if the mass demonstrations that Ricky Jones participated in had not happened, the far right would have won.

This needs to be systematised, with the creation of independent working-class militias, centred on the trade unions, with the social muscle of organised workers behind them and their capacity to cripple the capitalist economy if the state tries to crush and outlaw such defence. The pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracy that blocks such things needs to be politically defeated. That is the way to defeat fascist terrorism. This would have the effect of breaking the bourgeois state’s monopoly of organised violence. Revolutionaries in Russia used these tactics to deal with the fascist Black Hundreds.

In tandem with independent working-class action against the fascists, we need working class resistance against austerity. We need political strikes against the attacks on pensioners. We need a general strike against renewed austerity. This has the potential to unite the whole working class, as in the end, we are all destined to be pensioners. Uniting all such battles and struggles, we need to crystallise a real mass party of the working class. Such a party would not see its role as passively standing in elections, but rather using elections as a platform to garner and mobilise resistance in struggle.

Ultimately, we need to unite the many left-wing trends that have emerged from the Corbyn movement over the last several years in a project to create a broad, genuinely working-class party that can develop politically beyond social democracy, and fight for these things. This is the purpose of our involvement in the Socialist Labour Network, to try to create the conditions for such unity and political development. Our perspective should not be one of fighting for a reformist, parliamentary government that can fill in gaps while the Tories recover from their crisis. Let alone a Red Tory regime like Starmer’s. Our perspective should be to fight for a workers’ government, based on mass organisations of the working class.

Starmer’s Labour; Tough on Riots, not on the Causes of Riots

Britain, racism, and racist riots

5000-strong anti-fascist demonstration in Brighton,7th August, part of a nationwide wave of anti-fascist demonstrations that pushed back the far right race-rioters in early August.

Starmer and Labour swept into power in July having won a General Election by default and not merit, despite Labour’s claims of a sweeping majority on the scale of Tony Blair in 1997. It was nothing of the sort with their success being solely due to the collapse of the Conservative vote, who haemorrhaged votes to Farage and Reform. Many on the left predicted a short honeymoon period but none of us could predict that within the space of a few weeks that this honeymoon would have come to an abrupt halt. Politicians in Britain have been fanning the flames of hatred towards refugees and minorities with increasing hostile rhetoric for over a decade. This exploded when on the 29th July, the teenager Axel Rudakubana, went into a dance studio in Southport and attacked children, killing three and wounding ten other people – eight of whom were children. Despite him being born in Britain and one of the victims being the child of migrants, many accused him of being a Muslim immigrant known to the authorities. This ignited the touchpaper and provided just the excuse for racist mobs to take to the streets under the banner of protecting British children from foreign attackers.

With the new government feeling the strain of civil unrest unleashed onto the streets of Britain, community tensions, and struggling to maintain order, it is facing a threat from the far right who are claiming to speak for the British working class in the absence of a unified left. This appalling attack came only two days after the convicted criminal and neo-Nazi, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, held a ‘patriotic’ rally called “Uniting the Kingdom” in Trafalgar Square, London on 27^th July. This event attracted around 20,000 ‘patriots’ to hear an array of speakers preaching nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment from their pulpit. The event also included a screening of Yaxley’s film, Silenced, which repeated false claims that he had previously made about a Syrian refugee that led to him to losing a libel case in 2021. Yaxley was due to appear at a high court hearing 48 hours after this event, accused of contempt of court for making the documentary, and in his blatant show of defiance airing this against court orders, he potentially faced prison.

After this flagrant breach, he then fled Britain and according to the Daily Mail he is now holed up in Cyprus, sunning himself where he is inciting his racist mobs on social media, attempting to portray himself as a victim for being a messenger of the ‘truth’. But he is not alone in spreading this racist poison. Others have been dog whistling and dragging British politics to the right. We have had a racist narrative coming out of Farage for years, aimed at taking Britain out of the EU, blaming migrants, refugees, and Muslims for Britain’s decline domestically and globally. Both Cameron and successive Tory leaders, and now Starmer, have sought to take him on by simply adopting the same racist rhetoric and amplifying it, albeit in more nuanced ways. The ‘hostile environment’ towards minorities and asylum seekers did not start under Therea May but farther back under Blair’s Labour.

The Labour Party have always been a party with racist tendencies and outright racist policies towards ethnic minorities, despite many members being active in anti-racist movements and attracting minorities under the pretence that it supports the working class and minorities. Blair’s neoliberal Labour was hostile to Muslims and Roma. Jack Straw the then Labour MP for Blackburn in 2006, claimed that he asked Muslim women to remove their veil when visiting his surgery. David Blunkett, the Labour government Home Secretary was even more forceful in ramming home institutional racism. On 11th November 2013, he gave an interview to Radio Sheffield when he spoke of reported tensions in Sheffield where Roma workers mainly from Slovakia had settled. His incendiary comments included “We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming community, the Roma community, because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise. We all know that”.

This was not attributed to a lone lapse of self-awareness. In 2001 after the disturbances in Burnley, Bradford and Oldham, which started with white youths attacking Asian youths, Blunkett went on to suggest that the polarisation and segregation of Asian communities was their own fault when he stated: “We need to say we will not tolerate what we would not accept ourselves under the guise of accepting a different culture.” One needs to be reminded that these comments came three months after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York by and one month after the invasion of Afghanistan with the new ‘War on Terror’ against Muslims. Labour’s imperialist mindset, which has supported wars not only in Afghanistan but also Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the ongoing slaughter in Palestine, automatically requires dehumanisation of Muslims to justify Western barbarism and the argument of a ‘clash of cultures’ to save ‘Western democracy’. This is not unique just to its ‘right wing’ but is fully ingrained within a party that supports imperialism.

Neoliberalism and the atomisation of communities

The UK has been in serious economic decline, the 2007 financial crisis and the subsequent disastrous austerity programme laying waste to public services, then through the COVID pandemic, which resulted in the ruling class overseeing one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the poor into the hands of the rich. The Tories’ taking the reins of government in 2010 led to deliberate racist dog- whistling, demonisation of refugees, and othering of communities, designed to scapegoat and hide criminal negligence and their ideologically driven programme. This appealed to the backward elements of the working class, who bought into this narrative and who then voted for a Brexit with the return of British ‘sovereignty’ with a referendum to keep them onboard. While Cameron made it clear he wanted Britain to remain in the EU, his miscalculation and poorly thought through referendum designed to stave off UKIP and in-party fighting blew up in his face. The Tories with no means to solve the underlying economic problems have had to resort to ‘culture wars’, underpinned with Britain’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, which was eventually passed onto Priti Patel, who was sacked for trying to divert money to Israel before being brought in as Home Secretary by Boris Johnson. Tory politicians like Michael Gove and Suella Braverman have consistently attacked Muslims, refugees, and the Palestinian movement with Johnson degrading Muslim women by comparing them to letterboxes.

Jonathan Ashworth, Labour Party Shadow Minister on 24^th June 2024 said in an interview:

“At the moment, people coming here from the Indian subcontinent do not get retuned, they get put up in hotels and they can stay in these hotels for the rest of their lives.”

Sarah Edwards, Labour MP for Tamworth on 30^th July 2024 tweeted on X a clip of her speech in Parliament:

“This is not the first time I have raised in the chamber that residents of Tamworth want their hotel back. I will work closely with the new Government and Home Secretary to end the use of the Holiday Inn for asylum purposes.”

Just five days later, on 4^th August 2024 a baying mob assembled outside the Holiday Inn and started a fire in an attempt to burn refugee families alive.

While Brexit under the Tories allowed racist discourse to become normalised, Labour have been no better with racist tropes and demonisation becoming accepted within the landscape of British politics. Starmer was instrumental in Labour’s mixed messaging and ‘confusion’ in having an incoherent Brexit position, which contributed to the failure of Corbyn in the 2019 general election. This must be seen as a deliberate tactic given the wider context of inside plotting and party machinations to deliberately undermine Corbyn and Labour’s shift to the left. While the consequences leading to this current situation has returned to haunt Labour, it is becoming blatantly clear that under Starmer, the government means to continue as it began with him at the helm. They have no intention of placing the genie back into bottle. In many respects it has opened a new opportunity to introduce wider attacks on civil liberties and the right to assemble and protest. The immediate reaction was to meet police chiefs and set up a ‘standing army’ of police officers with the formation of new Violent Crime Units to support individual forces. The last person to do similarly was Maragret Thatcher, to smash striking workers. Labour have labelled these protests as ‘far right’ and seem to have a cognitive impairment when it comes to calling these rioters racists who tried to carry out a racist pogrom towards people based on skin colour, religion, and cultural differences.

Riot in Southport, where three young girls were stabbed by a teenager. False information on social media that he was a Muslim asylum-seeker led to race riots that spread across Britain in early August.

While many of these protesters have been stirred up to come out onto the streets by fascists and neo-Nazis online, many of them have no alignment with any defined right-wing political groups other than to target migrants and refugees who they see as the source of their downtrodden position. Donna Jones, the Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners went one stage further in her statement on 3^rd August 2024 where she said: “I’ve spoken to people from both sides of the spectrum and the only way to stem the tide of violent disorder, is to acknowledge what is causing it.” No controversy there, however, she then went on to say “…. the commonality amongst the protest groups appears to be focused on three key areas: the desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty; the need to uphold British values and in order to do this, stop illegal immigration.” And further on she says “The government must acknowledge what is causing this civil unrest in order to prevent it. Arresting people, or creating violent disorder units, is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering; what is the government’s solution to mass uncontrolled immigration? How are the new Labour government going to uphold and build on British values?”

Many years of hollowing out manufacturing and public services and the neglect of investment of infrastructure has led to growing inequality and the atomisation of communities, which has created fertile ground for the far right to resonate with their blame game. It is no coincidence that 7 out of 10 of the areas affected by these race riots have been in poverty-stricken areas. The statement by Donna Jones makes no mention of the deliberate economic programme that created this community destruction, other than to blame the victims themselves for this racist pogrom. This is a sordid attempt to downplay racism and rehabilitate racists. The government and media propagandists have also attempted to deflect blame in fuelling of these race riots by claiming that ‘Russian disinformation’ created the spark to inflame the streets. The truth is that the radicalisation of these people in creating a potential domestic terror problem lies squarely on the shoulders of British politicians, the British press acting as an arm of imperialism, British political commentators, and other foreign actors aligned closely to Britain, such as US and Israeli politicians and political commentators.

Hananya Naftali, Netanyahu’s deputy social media adviser, tweeted on X on 27^th May 2018, after Robinson was arrested:

“Free Tommy Robinson!….. He has done nothing wrong, and it’s his right to express his freedom of speech”

Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on 29^th April 2024:

“We’ve seen what happened when Europe opened their doors to jihad…..Look at Paris, look at London. They’re no longer recognizable.”

In 2011 riots gripped Britain, which were an eruption of anger against poverty and targeting those with money. There was no call for any understanding, the rioters were immediately condemned with calls for heavy sentences. Despite the arrests of ‘far right protesters’ during the recent events, many of whom were responsible for violent disorder that included rioting, targeting mosques, attacking minorities and their businesses, arson with the burning of vehicles, two hotels with refugee families inside, and a library, the sentencing so far has been far more lenient than the sentences handed out to climate activists for simply holding a Zoom meeting to discuss tactics. There is also a class element to this. Many of the protesters were from a working-class background, some who have been arrested and convicted for inciting unrest or racism by their social media activity. No politician has currently been arrested or stripped of Parliamentary privileges due to incitement on social media and other platforms that contributed to this social unrest because most politicians agree with the underlying sentiment shown by these protesters.

Immediately after the riots a We Think survey showed that 39% of people surveyed agreed that violence towards refugees was the only means to get the attention of British politicians with 36% of people agreeing that xenophobic acts of violence are defensible if it means fewer refugees settling in their towns. The acceptance of these views has not appeared in a vacuum. This is the result of years of racial stereotyping and othering. These race riots are the most serious since the 1958 Notting Hill riots when the West Indian community were targeted in a racially motivated attack. This hatred towards refugees is entwined with rampant prejudice against Muslims, Islamic culture and religion in the West, which is not only designed to avert the gaze from domestic policy but also to support the West’s imperialist foreign policy towards the Middle East and sanitise Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians. This manufactured ‘clash of civilisations’ is nothing but pure racism directed towards Arabs and Muslims. The colonisation of the Palestinians and the unfolding genocide is steeped in white supremacy.

Laurence Fox, Twitter on 29^th July 2024, reacting to the news of the Southport stabbings:

“Enough of this madness now. We need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain.”

And further on the 30^th July 2024 as the riot was unfolding:

“We are about to witness the long overdue correction to the approved narrative.”

Nigel Farage, Reform MP for Clacton, interview on LBC Radio on 9^th August 2024 with Tom Swarbrick in answer to his line of questioning that contradicted the official accounts:

“I would argue that what happened in Southport would not have been in the same magnitude had the truth been told.”

After he implied that reports suggested that the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings had crossed the English Channel in a boat in October 2023, or was an ‘active Muslim’, amplifying anger towards refugees and Muslims.

Islamophobia and Al-Aqsa Flood

Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which took place on 7^th October 2023, when Palestinian freedom fighters broke out of Gaza, Labour has fully supported Israel’s genocide toward the Palestinians. Starmer made this clear beforehand with his “I support Zionism without qualification” statement in February 2020 during the leadership election. This was a deliberate manoeuvre to distance himself and the party from the previous Corbyn years and pander to the bogus anti-semitism charges levelled against many socialists within the party, disproportionally affecting Jewish socialists who found themselves expelled. This was to ensure the continued protection of Israel and Britain’s imperialist interests in the region. It was a Labour government that handed over Palestine to Zionists at the end of the British Mandate in 1948 and has continued to support Israel unconditionally with its oppression of the Palestinians ever since, which was brought into question under Corbyn who declared that a Palestinian state would be recognised. Immediately after 7^th October, Starmer defended the withholding of food, water, and fuel, despite it being a war crime as Israel laid siege, which he would have been fully aware considering previously being a human rights lawyer.

It was no coincidence that Hamas codenamed their breakout ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, it was a deliberate attempt to send out a message and remind particularly the world’s Muslims of the attacks on Al-Aqsa, the third holiest site in Islam, which is under direct threat from Israel with regular incursions from settlers. It is also no coincidence that the West refuses to even acknowledge this making no reference to it, while showing their complete contempt for Muslim suffering in Gaza by supplying material support and political cover for a genocide. The West has its sirens with an audience ready and willing to receive their songs of anti-Muslim hate. Figures like Yaxley-Lennon, Farage, and Fox constantly preach their poison from their pulpits. There are others across Europe such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the AfD in Germany, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and individuals like Trump, Pamela Geller, Robert B. Spencer, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali across the Atlantic in the US. Not only do they all have a rabid hatred for Muslims, but also a common like for Israel. Much of the intensification of recent anti-Muslim rhetoric is to counter the pro-Palestine movement and demonstrations in support for the Gazans facing up to systematic murder. This is evidenced with constant accusations of anti-semitic ‘hate marches’ and the ‘two tier’ policing of demonstrations despite the Stop the War demonstrations being totally peaceful.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, tweeted on X on 27^th July, posting an interview that took place in London:

“The line in the sand has been drawn. Patriots of Europe. Unify your countries. Enough is Enough. We’re being replaced no longer!”

And a further tweet on the 30^th July shortly after the riot in Southport:

“Before anyone starts condemning the angry English men up in Southport, ask yourselves this, what do you fucking expect them to do? Don’t call them hooligans – they’re justified in their anger.”

Who funds Robinson and the far right?

Funding for these individuals has been well documented by Professor David Miller and the British rapper and activist Lowkey, with connections documented between Zionism and the far right made by the Jewish anti-Zionist and a founding member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Tony Greenstein. There is a flow of money across the Atlantic from wealthy Zionists to amplify Israel’s policy objectives towards the Palestinians wrapping it up with immigration and Islamophobia. Wealthy benefactors such as Robert Shillman, Robert Mercer, and Nina Rosenwald, fund various projects such as the Shillman Foundation, the David Horowitz Freedom Centre, The Rebel Media, Stop Islamization of America, and Project Veritas. The now-bankrupt ‘Tommy Robinson’ had received funding from the Rebel Media, where Robert Shillman reportedly financed a fellowship that paid for a position for him in 2017. Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum bankrolled a demonstration to ‘Free Tommy’ in London in 2018 as well as provide funding for his legal defence after being sentenced to 13 months in jail when he was found guilty of being in contempt of court. Evidence to support these claims and how the Zionist lobby operate are here:

Lowkey EXPOSES Tommy Robinson’s Links to Israel (youtube.com)

Palestine Talks | British rapper and activist Lowkey unravels the UK’s Israel lobby (youtube.com)

Palestine Talks | Professor David Miller reveals how Zionist lobbies fuel Islamophobia (youtube.com)

Confronting racists

Racism is tied up in capitalism, an integral part of dividing of the working class to undermine solidarity in the workplace. Ultimately to justify the expansion of capital, the seeking of profits, and its imperialist forays abroad. It is capitalist competition that is the cause of the decay in living standards and the attacks on the workplace, filtering down into competition between workers, creating racialised competition. Therefore, to be a true anti-racist or anti-fascist one has to be a revolutionary anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X all understood this. The problem with anti-racist or ‘race awareness’ programmes within the workplace or bourgeois parliamentary politics is that they attempt to channel this ‘anti-racism’ into support for capitalist ‘parliamentary democracy’ – capitalism being the cause of racism in the first place. It is another tactic of reformism. Starmer has attempted to take the credit for the fizzling out of the race riots by way of arrests. Thatcher also attempted to take credit for defeating the National Front after adopting racist rhetoric when in January 1978, as leader of the then Tory opposition, she gave a television interview on the World in Action programme when she said “People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.” Farage when defending himself against accusations of inflaming tensions ahead of the riots, claimed to be attacking the far right. Jason Cowley, the editor in chief of the New Statesman, claims that Farage said to him “No one did more to beat the far right in this country than me. If I wasn’t here, somebody with a bit more brain than Nick Griffin would emerge.”

This adoption of right-wing politics and rhetoric when moments of crisis rear their ugly head is exactly why no one should be under any illusion in liberal politicians, parliamentary democracy, and the police to tackle fascism. The defeat of fascists and racists has always come from counter movements organising and directly confronting them on the street. This is borne out in practice; Cable Street in 1936, Lewisham 1977, and Southall in 1979, when fascist marches were met with organised counter protests consisting of large numbers of counter-demonstrators to protect the communities being targeted. After the initial riot in Southport and the following few days, racists organised the targeting of refugee support services, charities, and immigration solicitors. Lists were published online. Large numbers of anti-racist counter demonstrators and anti-fascists organised themselves to protect those communities. Brighton, Bristol, and Walthamstow in East London had turnouts of 10,000 or more, which demoralised the rioters, who in the end were being protected by the police. The police have historically protected far right marches on the street and given that the UK police have been found to be institutionally racist as outlined in the Macpherson Inquiry, it is hardly surprising that the Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities have a deep distrust of the police, who have often been on the receiving end of ‘over-policing’ and ‘under-protection’. The only defence that communities have from the far right is through establishing workers’ defence guards and protecting themselves. Ultimately it will be the dismantling of capitalism through socialist revolution that completely removes the scourge of racism.