There is an urgent need to build an anti-racist movement in Britain. But the 28 March Together Alliance demonstration isn’t it. This lovefest of celebrities, trade unionists and political figures so hyped over many months by the British left is in not only a cover-up for the actually existing racism of the Labour government, but an attack on socialism itself. Its unctuous sentimentalism – ‘we stand for love over hate’ – is a rejection of class struggle, a middle class conceit that hate and anger can only be negative emotions. This is at a time when to build a movement we need more hatred and anger: more hatred of genocide, more hatred of imperialism, more hatred of capitalism, more anger at the forces which threaten humanity with the destruction of a habitable planet, more anger at a Labour government which is boasting about its racist attacks on asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers.
Even before the Labour government was elected in July 2024, Stand up to Racism, the organisation behind Together Alliance, was pitching the supposed immediate dangers of the far-right whether it was Reform UK or Tommy Robinson. There was no warning about Labour’s explicitly racist programme. Nor has there been any campaign against the Labour government as it has tightened the screws on migrant workers, expelling nearly 60,000 since it came to office. It has committed to building new detention centres, opened up military camps in which to decant asylum seekers, tightened rules about when and how refugees can achieve citizenship while imposing cruel limits on its duration. Labour Home Secretaries accompany this with frequent venomous references to ‘illegal migrants’.
Yet Together Alliance has neither publicised nor condemned the Labour government for its campaign against migrant workers. Far from it: it has welcomed Labour MPs on to its platforms without requiring them to say a word about Labour’s criminal policies or to break from a party which has been racist since its establishment over a century ago. Dawn Butler MP is headlined speaker for 28 March. She is an apologist for Labour’s racism. She remains in the Labour Party for no purpose: she has absolutely no influence on Labour government policy whatever she claims. It is no different with the others – Richard Burgon, Kim Johnson and so on. They are hypocrites, and SUTR/Together Alliance indulges their empty professions of anti-racism. They stand against the working class.
Together Alliance is founded on a middle class fiction: that racism originates with the far-right. It does not: racism is a product of the imperialist state. It is the state which is deporting migrants and asylum seekers under the direction of the Labour government, not the far-right. It is Labour which operates the whole apparatus around migration control, not the far-right. SUTR and Together Alliance are being thoroughly dishonest about the foundations of racism in Britain. Racism is founded on the imperialist character of the British state.
There will be those on the Together Alliance platform who laud the magnificent anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis and tell us that SUTR/Together Alliance intends to build the same sort of movement. This is a deception. The anti-ICE protests direct working class resistance against state racism, not the far-right. Dealing with the far-right is incidental. SUTR/Together Alliance is quite the opposite: it opposes confronting ICE-equivalent Home Office kidnap gangs, it opposes acting against state racism, it opposes anything that smacks of class struggle or socialism. Its slogan that refugees are welcome here when patently they are not is a pious middle class sentiment. It is a cover for those who perpetrate the cruel treatment of asylum seekers and refugees rather than a call to take action.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! is clear: the far-right will always be with us in whatever form until we destroy capitalism. That means we have to build an anti-racist movement which targets the source: the imperialist state. It means that we have to build a class struggle campaign which emulates the anti-ICE movement in the US. Above all it has to recognise that its main target is the vicious, racist British state – whatever capitalist party is in power. That means that ultimately the fight against racism must be a fight for socialism.
This pamphlet explains that imperialism forms the material basis of racism in Britain and that racism is the form national oppression takes within Britain. It shows that for the fight against racism to be effective, it must inevitably confront British imperialism and therefore the British state.
