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.
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 11th 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 29th 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 7th 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.
