Between 30 July and 7 August 2024, racist riots exploded in towns and cities across England and in Belfast. They were sparked by widespread social media posts claiming that the murderer of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside on 29 July was a Muslim who had recently arrived on a small boat. While subsequent mobilisations against the racists were a major factor in limiting the duration and spread of the outbursts, the events have fuelled a spurious anti-racism which targets figures on the far right such as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and his associate Tommy Robinson at the expense of building a movement against the British state. Its purpose is to distract attention from the racism of the Labour government. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
We have been here before. In the 1970s the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) was set up to allow Labour MPs to posture as anti-racists while the Labour government viciously persecuted migrants and black people. In the 2000s, Unite Against Fascism (UAF) performed the same service during the Blair/Brown Labour government. Fast forward to today’s new Labour government, and Stand up to Racism (SUTR) is dancing to the same tune of its predecessors even as Labour boasts of deporting hundreds of migrants in its first few weeks in office. FRFI has consistently argued that there cannot be a serious fight against racism unless it is a fight against the racist, imperialist Labour Party. It is as true today as it has been in the past.
A racist wildfire
Although individuals from fascist organisations were undoubtedly involved in promoting the rallies which turned into drink-fuelled riots, these were not in themselves fascist protests: they were elemental explosions of racism by disenfranchised elements of the working class together with a section of the petit bourgeoisie. They petered out as quickly as they materialised: by 7 August, widely advertised rallies mobilised a fraction of those involved in earlier riots, and in many cases, nobody at all.
The first riot was in Southport on 30 July, the day following the murder of the three children; up to a thousand racists had mobilised from across the north in response to millions of social media posts emanating from the likes of Tommy Robinson. The excuse for the mobilisation was to attend a vigil for the victims: it rapidly turned into a racist riot, in the course of which a mosque was bricked and shops were looted. The following day, racist mobs rampaged through Hartlepool, while over 100 people were arrested in central London and a smaller number of racists attacked a hotel accommodating asylum seekers in Manchester.
On 2 August, shops in Sunderland were looted by a mob shouting racist slogans. There were racist mobilisations in numerous towns and cities on Saturday 3 August: around 1,000 in Liverpool, with gangs attacking a Muslim stall and an Asian mobile phone shop in the city centre before attempting to burn down a community library and looting an Asian store in the north of the city during the night. A similar number of racists mobilised in Blackpool, while in Hull a horde attacked a hotel housing asylum seekers and burnt a car belonging to Romanians whom they assaulted. Confrontations between racists and anti-racists took place in Bristol. In Bolton and Blackburn, Asian youth in their hundreds came out in opposition, preventing the racists from marching as they had intended and hundreds of attendees at a punk festival faced down a racist mobilisation in Blackpool. The next day, extensive rioting took place in Rotherham and Tamworth where racists targeted asylum seeker hotels; in Rotherham there was an attempt to set the hotel on fire. The same day racists fought the police in Middlesbrough smashing up shops and looting them, while on 5 August, smaller outbursts took place in Birmingham, Darlington, Plymouth and Weymouth.
Shortly before 7 August, a list of some 30 immigration centres and lawyer offices were slated for attack in widely shared social media posts; the number of targets had increased to around 100 by the day itself. However, there is some doubt as to whether the calls were genuine. Counter-mobilisations were called by local groups in Asian and black communities, SUTR and others. In the event, apart from Chatham and Portsmouth, few racists appeared, while thousands of anti-racists attended rallies in Brighton, Liverpool, and North London, and hundreds demonstrated in Birmingham, Oxford and Southend among other cities and towns. There were to be no further significant racist mobilisations. The left claimed this as a victory for the counter-mobilisations and although this may have played a part, many racists will also have been deterred by the state’s response: the first rioters had been jailed on that day, and hundreds of others had already been arrested and charged.
Labour on the offensive
Following the Southport riot, the Labour government made it clear that it would not tolerate any repetition, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer declaring that those involved ‘will feel the full force of the law’. On 5 August, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper stated that ‘We do expect swift justice to take place. We do expect those cases to be reaching the courts this week’, and in The Times added that rioters ‘are not patriots standing up for their communities’ but ‘thugs, criminals and extremists who betray the very values our country is built on’. Cooper’s wish was granted: on the morning of 7 August and in advance of the expected street confrontations that evening, three Southport rioters pleaded guilty to violent disorder and other charges and were jailed for between 20 months and three years. By this time dozens had been arrested, and it was quite clear that many more would be sent down by Labour’s promised conveyor belt of 24-hour a day and weekend court sittings. This was undoubtedly a deterrent to the alcohol-fuelled gangs who had hurled bricks and other missiles at the police or attempted arson without the precaution of covering their faces. By 19 August, over 130 people had been jailed, mainly for violent disorder, receiving an average two-year term. Some of the 400 so far arrested are being charged with riot which can lead to a ten-year sentence.
Labour is determined to show it will deal ruthlessly with any outbursts by the working class whatever their political motivation. It is fortuitous for the government that it can burnish spurious anti-racist credentials by dealing in this way with the events of August: it provides a cover for its increasingly aggressive campaign against those it deems to be ‘illegal migrants’ – asylum seekers fleeing from war, economic destruction or the impact of global warming. But the writing is on the wall: a couple of those jailed for violent disorder so far are Asians who were defending their communities against the racist mobs, and there will be more.
Opportunism and liberalism
When following the general election the left made opposition to a Tommy Robinson rally on 27 July an unassailable priority, we asked:
‘Which has by far and away the most impact on the conditions faced by asylum seekers, refugees, migrant, black and Asian workers? The Labour government or Reform UK (or for that matter Tommy Robinson)? Labour can organise charter flights to deport trafficked workers to Vietnam at the drop of a hat. Reform UK cannot. The Labour government operates immigration detention centres, it has the power to expel migrants, it runs the entire apparatus of racist state repression: the police, courts and prisons, which arrest, convict and lock up black and Asian people in disproportionate numbers. Reform UK does not.’ (‘Who will fight Labour’s racism?’ FRFI 301 August/September 2024)
From the outset, the opportunist left has deliberately conflated fascism with racism. By doing so, it has deliberately restricted the fight against racism to a battle against the far right, presenting Robinson and Farage as the principal targets. Yet as FRFI has repeatedly argued, this is a purposeful distraction from the real source of racist oppression today: the imperialist state directed by a Labour government. It was Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper who used the virulently racist Sun newspaper to announce a ‘summer blitz’ on nail parlours, beauty salons and car washes to root out ‘illegal migrants’; Labour’s manifesto included a pledge to end hotel accommodation for asylum seekers and ‘clear the asylum backlog’. Labour now boasts of the number of deportation flights that have taken place since coming to office, and is re-opening of two of the many detention centres it operated in the Blair/Brown years. It is a continuation of the ‘hostile environment’ established by Theresa May in 2012 when she was Home Secretary. Meanwhile the very real powers of the state have been deployed against the forces the opportunist left has cast as the actual enemy.
We have to be clear: the riots were not an expression of fascism. Beyond their virulent racism they were politically formless. The British ruling class does not need a fascist movement – there is no mass revolutionary movement of the working class, and the Labour government is proving that it will deploy the necessary state force against any threat to the stability of British capital. For the ruling class, the real danger of these racist protests lay in the possibility that they could summon up opposition on the streets from a movement led by black and Asian workers. The scale of repression is therefore a warning of what a genuine working class movement will face in the future.
Fascism and racism
That the opportunist left uses the terms fascism and racism interchangeably in its characterisation of the riots has a political purpose as A Sivanandan pointed out in response to the fight against the British Nationalist Party (BNP) 30 years ago in Tower Hamlets:
‘The left continues to see the fight against racism as subsidiary to the anti-fascist struggle, and itself as the historical repository of that struggle. It ignores state racism and continues to view working class racism as an aberration. Racial violence, therefore, is a by-product of fascism. Get rid of the fascists and racial violence will disappear.’ (Cited in Maxine Williams: ‘Fighting Racism: which way are we marching?’, FRFI No 116 December 1993/January 1994)
As Williams continued, ‘In fact, the election of a BNP candidate by a largely working class constituency should first and foremost have been viewed by the left as an indication of its own failure to build any serious or worthwhile roots in poor working class areas. Such areas have been left prey to right-wing racist organisations because for the British left — as for the Labour Party — the poor, the old, the unemployed, simply do not count.’
Nothing has changed. We have a Labour government which refuses to end any of the most cruel measures devised by the Tory government to reduce the poorest sections of the working class to penury: the two-child benefit cap, the overall benefit cap, the bedroom tax, benefit sanctions, let alone restore benefit levels to the miserable level they stood at in 2010. Labour’s first decision on pensions was to withdraw the annual winter heating allowance for anyone minimally above the poverty line and who thereby does not qualify for pension credit. Then there is the refusal to restore adequate funding for the NHS and instead to look to so-called public-private partnerships – in reality, more privatisation. The riots were in part an expression of hopelessness at a Labour government which has ruled out any prospect of relief to the abject conditions that poorer sections of the working class face after 15 years of unrelenting austerity. But in the absence of any attempt by socialists to challenge the divisive state narrative they found expression in reaction and racism.
Covering for Labour racism – the ANL
As we concluded decades ago, magnifying the political significance of the far right and those it describes as fascist serves the opportunist left in covering up for the racist, imperialist Labour Party. It is a deliberate process. The ANL was set up in 1978 to oppose the National Front (NF) and to distract attention from the cruel racism of the 1974-79 Labour government and to protect it against growing opposition from Black and Irish workers. It explicitly excluded opposition to immigration controls from its political platform, and as we wrote at the time,
‘…it is clear that attacks on black people are not coming only or indeed primarily from the NF. The major attack today is being carried out by the British state. It is the state that has introduced immigration controls, the state that uses its forces to harass and intimidate all black people, the state that imprisons hundreds of so-called “illegal immigrants” in the foulest conditions. An anti-racist movement, worthy of the name, cannot ignore these attacks but must defend black people from them.’ (The Anti-Nazi League and the struggle against racism, 1979, p2)
So-called left Labour MPs were key sponsors even if they supported immigration controls: the SWP protected them, while their presence ensured the ANL would not in any way challenge an utterly reactionary minority Labour government dedicated to the systematic oppression of the Irish people and the defence of the apartheid regime in South Africa, while implementing the appalling ‘virginity’ tests at Heathrow for Asian women joining their fiancés and maintaining the racist ‘sus’ laws used against black youth. We described the ANL as ‘fake anti-racists’ because it refused to challenge state racism, most notably in September 1978 when it refused to divert people from a carnival in South London to defend Brick Lane in the East End from a widely-advertised NF march. This scabbing was defended by then-SWP leader Tony Cliff in an article headlined ‘STILL UNITED’ where he claimed the SWP could have sent 40,000 people to Brick Lane but that ‘the result would have been 1) the disintegration of the ANL; 2) The realisation that even such a movement on the empty streets of the City of London facing 8,000 police might not have been broken through and beaten the Nazi marchers’ (Socialist Worker 30 September 1978). It was a recognition, first, that a proper defence against the NF would have meant confrontation with the British state, and second, it would have led to the disintegration of the ANL as the alliance with Labour MPs and trade union leaders would have collapsed. The SWP continued to aggressively defend its reactionary collaboration with these forces, and then called for Labour’s re-election in May 1979.
In October 1993, a march jointly called by the ANL and Militant’s Youth against Racism in Europe (YRE) against the British National Party’s (BNP) headquarters in Welling, South East London attracted some 50,000 people who fought Met police deployed in their thousands to protect the BNP. This proved to be too much for the organisers, and their next step was to support a far more peaceful demonstration under the aegis of the TUC in March the following year. As we wrote at the time ‘very few trade unions were present on the 19 March demonstration. The TUC’s ailing body had to be propelled by the twin legs of the SWP/Anti-Nazi League and Militant/YRE who formed the biggest contingents…19 March was not simply a tactical retreat from the militancy of 16 October, it shows the SWP’s and Militant’s craven abasement of any independent class politics to Labour’s needs’ (FRFI 118, April/May 1994). The obligatory Labour Party speaker was the then Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair, shortly to become Labour leader; few apart from RCG supporters were prepared to heckle him, and certainly not the SWP or Militant.
Covering for Labour racism – UAF
The SWP dumped the ANL in favour of UAF in 2003 to sidetrack opposition to the 1997-2010 Labour government’s increasingly oppressive campaign against asylum seekers and migrants and instead to focus attention on growing electoral support for the BNP. Like its predecessor, the UAF was a vehicle for the SWP to maintain a close alliance with the Labour Party, ensuring that the platform was palatable to Labour Party and trade union leaders. No fewer than 60 Labour MPs sponsored it, together with 20 trade union leaders; its platform was so reactionary that even Tory leader David Cameron was to become a signatory. It warned that an electorally successful BNP would be a threat ‘to all those dedicated to freedom and democracy’. This was of course ‘freedom and democracy’ for British people alone: the Labour government had by this time launched four wars in Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq, and was ensuring that asylum seekers were unable to savour any ‘freedom and democracy’ at the hands of the British state.
UAF/SWP’s support for Labour was made explicit when in November 2007 BNP leader Nick Griffin announced he would stand against Labour MP Margaret Hodge in her Barking constituency in the next general election. The BNP was by this time the second largest party on the local council, having won 11 seats in 2006. Hodge, a virulent Zionist who would later denounce Jeremy Corbyn as a ‘fucking anti-Semite’, had responded to growing support for the BNP by espousing a racist housing policy in The Observer in May 2007:
‘We prioritise the needs of an individual migrant family over the entitlement others feel they have… We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants. We should also look at drawing up different rules based on, for instance, length of residence, citizenship or national insurance contributions which carry more weight in a transparent points system used to decide who is entitled to access social housing.’
Within 48 hours of Griffin’s announcement, the UAF had published a statement from Hodge on its website under the headline ‘We’ll make sure Griffin’s MP bid for Barking is a failure, anti-fascists vow’. In it she declared that ‘The BNP have no place in democratic politics and Labour will campaign against them across the country.’ Leading SWP member and UAF spokesperson Weyman Bennett echoed her: ‘The vast majority of people in Barking hate Griffin and the BNP… We want to mobilise that majority to drive Griffin’s vote down – and drive the BNP out of town.’ Typically, the UAF appealed in the 2009 local elections ‘On 1 May, election day, we must turn out in massive numbers and vote against the Nazis’ – an implicit call to vote Labour.
Covering for Labour racism – SUTR
Where the SWP is forced to admit that Labour has followed racist or imperialist policies, it ensures that this is ascribed to external forces such as the Tories, or to reactionary Labour leaders, never to the necessarily racist character of the Labour Party itself. Typical is a statement prior to the 4 July 2024 general election that a Labour government ‘would introduce a new Border Security Command to stop boats and “smash” smuggling using counter-terror style tactics to police the Channel. And it would clear the asylum backlog—but to speed up deportations. Labour is playing a dangerous game by pandering to the Tories’ racism (our emphasis).’
More recently, under a headline ‘Yvette Cooper’s new anti-migrant plan will boost far right and fascists’, Weyman Bennett, now SUTR co-convenor says ‘We need real answers and solutions, not pandering to the right-wing media. Instead of opening safe passages for refugees in need of safety, we’re opening up passages for the far right to grow.’ The article asks ‘What could be next on Cooper’s agenda? Will Labour reject more cases of refugees? Will it make it even harder for refugees to get asylum?’ Instead of a patently obvious ‘yes’ Socialist Worker equivocates. It may say ‘Anti-racists have to challenge Labour’s plans – alongside building a fightback to the far right and fascists on the streets.’ But there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the SWP/SUTR will imperil their alliance with Labour. This duplicity enables them to continue pandering to pro-imperialists like John McDonnell MP and allow him to posture as anti-racist.
Covering up for Labour racism by blaming either the Starmer leadership or external factors extends across the left. The Communist (paper of the former Socialist Appeal, now the RCP) says ‘Starmer and his cronies are just as complicit as the gutter press. Labour have been aping the Tories for years in their migrant-bashing rhetoric. (emphasis added)’ (8 August 2024). The RCP’s former comrades in the Socialist Party say much the same: ‘Rather than challenging the Tories, Starmer’s Labour joined in the anti-immigration rhetoric’ (The Socialist 14 August 2024). Socialist Alternative, like The Communist and The Socialist a spin-off from The Militant, prefers silence. The persistent reference to ‘Starmer’s Labour Party’ highlights the determination of these organisations to bury any notion that Labour was from the outset a racist, imperialist and anti-working class party, and instead to attribute its reactionary standpoint to an endless succession of reactionary leaderships, the latest being Starmer and his allies.
Under the guidance of the SWP, SUTR has gone even further down the road of middle class liberalism, declaring in its 7 August unity statement that ‘the far right are a threat to all decent people’ and that all ‘must join in a united mass movement powerful enough to drive back the fascist (sic). The majority of people in Britain abhor Robinson and the far right.’ Signatories to the appeal include the usual suspects: more than a dozen Labour MPs, and almost as many union general secretaries or presidents. There is no attempt to present the fight against racism as a class issue – it has become a ‘decent people’ question. ‘Decent people’ are of course ‘respectable people’ and in its drive to attract ‘respectable people’, SUTR stewards police its protests and hand over those heckling Labour Party speakers to the real police (Newcastle) or try to shut down calls to support Palestine (Oxford, Walthamstow). Notoriously SUTR has also repeatedly refused to exclude Zionists from joining its annual march against racism in Glasgow, saying it would be ‘difficult’ to do so, and at one time trying to broker an arrangement that neither Palestine nor Israeli flags be flown on the demonstration. SUTR’s model motion for trade unions (published 20 August) excludes any mention of the Labour government or its attacks on migrants and asylum seekers and instead implicitly attributes racism and Islamophobia in Parliament to a supposed parliamentary resurgence of the far right.
Who will fight state racism?
The fight against racism has to be first and foremost a fight against imperialism, as racism is the expression of national oppression within the imperialist heartland. Anything less is a fake anti-racism. It is the imperialist state that enforces this national oppression and creates a layer of the working class which is doubly oppressed – as workers and as black or brown people. Every state institution is involved in this oppression – the police, courts, prisons in particular. One legal form of this oppression is immigration controls; their form and content are dictated by the needs of capital. Imperialist domination of less developed countries ensures that they provide a ready source of migrant workers while bearing all the necessary costs of their rearing, education and training. Immigration controls in an imperialist country therefore cannot be other than racist.
However, migration controls cannot be used to regulate asylum seekers as their primary aim is not to obtain work but to seek refuge from appalling conditions which have been created directly or indirectly by imperialism. Imperialism requires a further legal and management apparatus to deal with asylum seekers: dozens of laws and regulations, detention centres and so on. Asylum seekers are designated ‘illegal migrants’ and the state subjects them to a ‘hostile environment’ which the mainstream media supports enthusiastically.
In reality, the Labour Party is the enemy of any real fight against racism. SUTR actively covers this up and instead provides a platform for Labour politicians and other supporters of immigration controls to posture about driving Farage, Robinson et al off the streets and use all the cheap rhetoric that goes with such a campaign. As with the ANL in the past so it is with SUTR of the present, ‘The Labour Party politicians say “not a word about immigration controls, or Labour’s racism, or we will desert you.” And the left obligingly seals its lips.’ (The Anti-Nazi League and the struggle against racism, op cit p12)
Nor are the trade unions to be regarded as allies. All sections of the left praise the trade unions as the bedrock of anti-racist resistance without a jot of evidence. It is almost impossible to read a report of an SUTR event without being breathlessly informed about the number of trade unions that had supported it or how many trade union banners there were. This is all meaningless: all the unions have to do is provide a tiny chunk of their enormous reserves to sponsor SUTR and in effect to buy anti-racist credentials as if they were the indulgences of the Middle Ages. The trade unions support immigration controls, of course, and they are tied by a thousand threads to the Labour Party. Trade unions are barred from taking strike action for political purposes by Tory anti-trade union laws which Labour has no intention of repealing, and these give trade union leaders a perfect excuse to commit to nothing more than lending their name to this or that SUTR event. In the meantime the left will busy itself with motions and proposals for all sorts of union meetings and claim that it is conjuring up working class support for anti-racism. But it will not be genuine anti-racism: it will not involve breaking from Labour, let alone opposing it.
The forces who will lead a genuine struggle against racism will be those whose life experience tells them of the inseparable connection between racism and imperialism, and who are subject to the specific oppression of state racism: black and brown workers. There have been signs of this trend emerging: Muslim youth led the demonstrations against Labour Party MPs and Labour Party offices when the vast majority of Labour MPs refused to support a call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in November last year. The vote for pro-Palestine candidates against Labour imperialism was strongest in constituencies with a substantial Muslim electorate. Most recently, the mobilisation of Asian youth was critical to stopping racist mobs from rampaging through Bolton and Blackburn.
While the left prattles about unity, we ask: unity with whom, and on what basis? Unity with Labour politicians or the trade unions is unity on their reactionary terms, unity with racism. Communists have to fight against that false unity, and oppose any attempt to drag black and brown workers behind the Labour Party and trade unions. This new movement will organise against raids and deportations, oppose the re-opening of detention centres, oppose the criminalising of migrants. It will stand against the racist police, courts and prison system. It will build among working class communities which are going to be hammered by the Labour government and will demonstrate how it is the British state which is the principal enemy of working class people of all colours and religions. It will expose SUTR as a reactionary organisation, and the opportunist left as fake anti-racists who will not stand against imperialism and fight state racism, placing their cosy relations the Labour left and trade union leadership first. Join us in a fight against the racist, imperialist British state and the Labour government.
