Birmingham FRFI and supporters, with much appreciated help from local anarchist groups, went to a counter demo against the far-right ‘Yorkshire Patriots’ on 2 September 2023. They were attempting to spread their reactionary, racist propaganda in the Midlands. Their failed attempt to sow division and hatred among the working class is one in a wave of demonstrations against the rights – and very presence of – migrants. A wave that has clearly been inspired by government rhetoric aimed at justifying extensions of already inhumane border controls. While simultaneously shifting the blame for capitalism’s ‘cost of living crisis.’
This state-level racism has always been the inspiration for far-right movements, as far back as the 1905 Aliens Act, aimed at Jewish migrants who Conservative MP William Evans-Gordon deemed ‘foreign invaders’. The 1906 Liberal government continued this racist hysteria under the guise of defending an early form of the welfare state. Liberal Wolverhampton MP Henry Norman referred to migrants as filth, saying other nations should ‘disinfect their own sewage.’ False friends and opportunists in the labour movement joined in the reactionary chorus. Independent Labour Party member Tom Man called Jewish immigrants ‘money grubbers’. Trade Unionists like Ben Tillet called them ‘the dregs and scum of the continent.’ These weren’t uncommon, fringe stories either. Better-off workers rallied the labour movement around state racism to defend the relative comforts imperialism brought them, with seemingly only the Socialist League consistently opposing state racism.* All this inspired the right-wing, British Brothers League to hit the streets.
Today, the Labour Party is continuing this long history of amplifying the state racism of a ruthless Conservative government which has clearly inspired the Yorkshire Patriots, Patriotic Alternative, etc. One of the main slogans at these right-wing-rallies has been ‘stop the boats’, a favourite mantra of the Conservatives and something Labour has also promised to do should they win next year’s general election.
As the Yorkshire Patriots attempted to parrot and build upon the rhetoric of state racism, forces from across the left – Stand up to Racism, AntiFa and FRFI to name only a few – successfully sectioned off the racists into a corner of Victoria Square, despite the best efforts of the police to stop this and give racism an open platform. Through chants and loud music, the racists were totally inaudible and cut off. The left-wing counter-demo was easily triple the numbers of the right-wing’s meagre showing.
With the fascists clearly cornered, FRFI focused our attention outwards; to the passers by so that we could dispel the myth that migrants have anything at all to do with the cost of living crisis, and build a working-class organisation that is totally separate from the opportunism that comprises the crisis of working-class leadership. One that can actually fight and replace the imperialist state which is driving up poverty and dispossession around the world, criminalising people who flee those terrible conditions and blaming them for the crisis that imperialism also creates at home. Because it is imperialism, more so than the fascists it inspires, that is the real threat to rights, dignity and lives of migrants and workers across the globe.
FIGHT STATE RACISM.
*Anti-semitism, immigration controls and the welfare state, by Steven Cohen.
