On Saturday 28 November FRFI activists arrived at Newcastle’s Monument for the monthly Speak Out Against Racism organised by Tyneside Community Action for Refugees (TCAR) to find a large BNP stall with a main banner reading: ‘800,000 Muslims killed in Iraq. Labour and Tories backed the war; the BNP opposed it. Who are the REAL racists?’. The BNP had clearly decided to pre-empt a simultaneous protest called by Tyneside Stop the War (Tyneside STW) in expectation of the 100th British soldier dying in Afghanistan this year which had been built around the slogans of ‘Afghanistan: The Unwinnable War’ and ‘Bring Our Troops Home’.
The BNP is presenting its populist face in opposing the war. It knows there is significant opposition to the war from a chauvinist standpoint, and is attempting to capitalise on it. Fascism has always had a populist side: it needs this to attract working class support, and so in the past has supported strikes for working class demands and even claimed to represent a revolutionary movement against capitalism when it has suited its purposes. Labour and Tories are indeed racist through and through; the attempt by the BNP to present itself in Newcastle as anti-racist is of course empty demagoguery – but its populism did require a proper political response from the left.
On seeing the BNP, TCAR supporters alerted all the left and anti-fascists and called them down to support TCAR in opposing state racism and confronting the fascists. In the meantime, TCAR decided to go ahead with its Speak Out Against Racism and set up a PA system set up directly opposite the BNP. This provided a focal point for people wanting to oppose the BNP, with large numbers of previously uninvolved young people grabbing banners, petitions and literature. A steady stream of speakers used TCAR’s open mike to denounce racism, including many people who had never spoken in public before. FRFI and TCAR supporters located the racism of the BNP in the use of racism by the Labour government to divert resistance to the crisis; they spoke about the thousands locked up in Britain’s immigration prisons and deported every year , and the young black and Asian people harassed on a daily basis by the police:.
The response of Tyneside STW and the SWP (supported by a Labour councillor) when they arrived was to protest that TCAR should abandon its Speak Out, arguing that speakers should ‘leave it till later’ to talk about state racism – the focus should be exclusively on the BNP. In the meantime, downplaying any actions against the war in Afghanistan let alone state racism, SWP supporters led a completely apolitical barrage of chants at the BNP stall: ‘Nazi scum, off our streets’, occasionally alternating with the even less challenging ‘Scum, scum, scum’. When the BNP packed up their stall after over four hours, the SWP held a celebration of how they had ‘driven the Nazis off the streets’ – a complete fiction.
FRFI rejects a strategy of fighting fascism which calls on the left to exercise self-censorship and abandon politics. The SWP go down this road because they want to retain respectable allies such as Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors. They will therefore constantly try to control the movement, and act to isolate and expel real socialists – those who want to take a stand against imperialist war and against state racism. But these are the real priorities for socialists to build a new movement around, not a fictitious fight against the BNP.
Tyneside FRFI
