Not the SWP. Having said repeatedly like the rest of the opportunist left that they would come out fighting a Labour government from day one, their headline on 5 July was ‘Anti-racists crash Nigel Farage and Reform UK victory party’. Arguing that ‘the anti-racist movement must escalate to challenge Farage and the rise of the far right’, SWP/Stand up to Racism (SUTR) for the subsequent three weeks prioritised mobilising against a 27 July demonstration called by the far-right leader Tommy Robinson. Organising against the racism of the Labour government has never been on the SWP’s agenda, whatever they may say.
We have to ask a simple question: 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. It is the police who brutally remove Roma children from their family in Leeds, who kick and stamp on the head of a defenceless man in Manchester Airport and expect to get away with it.
The poverty and destitution that wider and wider sections of the British working class now face is down to the Labour government and not Reform UK whose views on the two-child benefit cap for instance have no consequence. Why therefore focus attention on forces which are irrelevant? Because the SWP and others on the left may offer verbal opposition to the Labour government, but they also want it to protect state spending and therefore the material conditions of their membership and their allies.
We have been here before. When the SWP organised the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in the 1970s, it specifically prevented opposition to the then Labour government’s immigration controls from forming part of the ANL’s platform so as to bring in left Labour MPs as allies. Then there was Unite Against Fascism in the 2000s to oppose the British National Party; in its drive to recruit support from trade union leaders (and even David Cameron), this too avoided any challenge to the racism of the then Labour government. SUTR follows in their footsteps: funding and support from the major trade unions ensures that it will not organise against the Labour government. During the general election, SUTR’s concept of opposing racism was to send people to Clacton to campaign against Farage as if Labour were not standing for a racist quasi-military war on asylum seekers. We can expect SWP/SUTR to not only play down Labour’s racism, but to rubbish those who oppose it.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
