Workers, Again, Kick The Fascists Off The Streets

For several days, last week, in what was clearly a pre-planned series of attacks across England and Northern Ireland, by small fascist organisations, hundreds of far-right thugs ran rampage, with, in many places, little response from police, who were to be seen retreating down streets, whilst the fascists attacked local communities, burned cars, and, as such fascists have done throughout history, burned books, this time an entire library, as well as entering a building where frightened children and families of refugees, were in danger of violent attack and being burned alive.

All of this continued for several days, and yet far right politicians like Fartage, as well as their mouthpieces at GB News, and Talk TV, not to mention the racist, gutter press such as The Daily Mail, and even disgustingly a journalist at Sky News, talked about, and gave credence to, the idea that the police were treating these fascists more harshly than they do the black and Asian community, or those protesting about the genocide taking place in Gaza, that has been supported by the British government under Sunak, as well as by, the, then, Blue Labour Opposition that is, now, in government, and has still to stop its arms sales, or condemn that genocide, or to commit to arresting the Zionists for whom the ICC is issuing arrest warrants.

Capitalist police thugs occupied mining villages
during the miners strike.  Where were
 those numbers against  the fascist thugs?

Of course, there is two-tier policing, but not that which the likes of the above complain, as I set out previously. The police have repeatedly been found to be guilty of institutional racism, and the same can be seen in relation to its misogyny, homophobia, and, of course, as an arm of the capitalist state, its fundamental role in beating down the working-class as a whole. In the last week, there has been the inevitable hypocrisy not only from those far-right mouthpieces, but also from the likes of Blue Labour politicians and liberal pundits. We see them attacking the far right thugs on the streets, as well as the likes of Fartage and Tommy Robinson, but have stayed silent about the role of the gutter press. They talk about biased and false information transmitted over the Internet, as though the information transmitted by the mass media is not, also, guilty of bias, and that mass media has been pumping out this racist bilge for as long as it has existed.

In one TV discussion, it was said that false information had been transmitted via the internet about immigrants being given free houses, cars and so on. But, there is nothing new about such lies being spread. It goes back way before the Internet had ever been thought of. Back in the 1980's, I frequently had arguments with people who had read such lies, literally the same lies about free houses, cars and so on, in the likes of The Daily Express, and took it as gospel. No matter how you tried to rationalise with people that absorbed such garbage, they were just as steadfast in wanting to continue to believe it as they are now. And, that continued after the 1980's, just as much as, I'm sure it occurred before the 1980's. The Daily Mail after all was one of those papers that welcomed Mussolini and then, Hitler, to power, and routinely spread the dominant form of racism of that time, anti-Semitism.

In the 1980's, Thatcher undermined a growing National Front, by adopting many of their clothes, and, of course, many National Front members simply joined the Tories, when their own political fortunes were on the wane. When New Labour took office after 1997, even as it took in 2 million EU migrants, to deal with a drastic shortage of skilled labour, in Britain, its Home Secretaries, like Clarke, talked tough on immigration and refugees. Cameron did the same, when the Tories returned to government, in 2010, and the Liberals, who present themselves as the voice of reason, today, of course, never held him to account over that, just as they supported the austerity measures that have undermined the fabric of society, and just as, in that coalition, they paved the way for the disastrous Brexit referendum.

Blue Labour, with its jingoistic, sovereigntist flag waving, and appeals to patriotism in all of its worst, monarchical, anti-democratic forms, is riddled with racism and Islamophobia, as The Forde Report indicated, made worse by its support for the Zionist genocide in Gaza, as part of its commitment to the aims of US imperialism. It prevented Faiza Shaheen from standing, simply for speaking out against genocide! When it lost thousands of Muslim votes across the country, it described it as “shaking off fleas”! During the week, Labour MP for Tamworth, Sarah Edwards, even after days of far right thuggery attacking refugees, pointed to the Holiday Inn, where refugees were being housed, and claimed that the people of Tamworth wanted their Holiday Inn back. Not surprisingly, the far-right thugs heard the message loud and clear, and responded in the same way they had to the identical message coming from Fartage, Robinson and co., by heading to the hotel, and attacking it.  Imagine if it was someone on the Left that had acted as Edwards did.

The criticism of the far-right thugs and fascists by these Blue Labour nationalists and populists, who have tried to follow Thatcher by covering themselves in the clothes and the flag of the racists and bigots, in search of cheap votes, is gut-wrenchingly hypocritical. The same is true of the Tories, and of the mass media, in general, and not just the gutter sections of it. For decades they have scapegoated migrants for the problems of British capitalism, and for the failures of successive governments that have attacked workers rights and living standards in the interests not even of real industrial capital, but in the interests of a tiny group of parasites who no longer play any useful role in society, and yet, drain billions of pounds a year out of the economy, in the form of dividends and other interest payments, as well as direct capital transfers to them. The top 4 billionaires in Britain, alone, have a net worth of £51 billion! Yet, Blue Labour will not be taxing that wealth, as Reeves insists that there is no money, and again cuts public services, once more fuelling the conditions that will lead to the next conflagration.

It took several days, but, eventually, it was not the mealy mouthed words of Blue Labour politicians, nor the actions of police that stopped the fascist thugs, but the working-class itself, as it has done before, for example, at Cable Street in the 1930's, where Jeremy Corbyn's parents were amongst those that stood fast to protect the local Jewish community against the threatened pogroms of Oswald Moseley and the British Union of Fascists. Today, it is the jingoists and populists of Blue Labour that more closely resemble the politics of Moseley, but without its economic radicalism. Even the police, and the gutter press had to acknowledge that the promised far-right rampage that was promised was stopped in its tracks by the mobilisation of tens of thousands of workers, organising in their own communities, via a range of organisations from faith groups, to the trades unions.

Yet, almost immediately, Starmer and Blue Labour were quick to distance themselves from this effective, grass roots community action and self-defence. Blue Labour sent out instructions that no MP, and no councillors were to take part in any such activities. So, its okay for a Blue labour MP, like Edwards, to talk about the need to take back refugee centres, which is then used by the fascist thugs as justification for their thuggery, but not okay, for Labour members to actively stand with those communities AGAINST the fascist thugs!!! Why would anyone be surprised. This is a Blue Labour Party that supports genocide by Zionist thugs in Gaza, but expels those of its members that oppose that genocide.

In the 1970's, as the NF was on the rise, the leaders of the Labour Party also opposed Labour members joining with others on the Left, mobilising to defend communities and oppose the fascists. Again, that was nothing new. At Cable Street, in the 1930's, Clement Attlee had been one of those who also opposed the labour movement mobilising to stop the fascists. The message has always been the same. On the one hand, it is a call for us to rely on the racist, anti-working class police to deal with the fascists, and on the other we are told that if we ignore them they will go away!

Every time, it has been the mass mobilisation of the organised working-class to physically confront the fascists that has actually stopped them. In the last week, even the fascists themselves, online, admitted that it had been these massive counter-mobilisations that had kept them off the streets, with some of them calling for the actions, then, to be organised in secret, off-line, as though, that had not been the case all along, as the real planning must have been done weeks ago, as they waited for an opportune moment to act.

But, that shows why the labour movement has to remain in constant mobilisation against them, ready to have quick response units, to bring out thousands, in each area, of trained and disciplned units of workers and community defence. It needs democratic control via, local workers councils, which given the nature of Blue Labour, will probably best be organised via, local Trades Councils/TUC's, or the most advanced workers in large workplaces, via factory committees. The mantra should be, as established more than a century ago, that of “March separately, strike together.”

The organised working-class, needs to retain its political and organisational independence from any bourgeois forces that seek to confront the fascists, be they faith groups, or liberal, green and other such parties. If they want to turn out in support, to physically stop the fascist thugs, fine, they can stand alongside us in that effort, be we cannot allow our immediate tactics to be dictated by accommodating them, and we certainly cannot limit our longer-term, political response by their bourgeois agenda.

The fascist thugs cannot be reasoned with, they have to be physically stopped by the full might of the organised working-class. The abysmal response of Starmer, Cooper, and their apologists in the media, including the latter's obnoxious husband, Ed Balls, should be enough for ordinary Labour members to see, already, where Blue Labour is headed, and to begin to organise against it. The same is true with the trades unions, as Reeves prepares to again slash public spending, and inflict the same measures of austerity that stoked the current levels of dissent, upon which the far-right have built their hatred of migrants, and anyone who is not white.

Rank and file LP members need to ignore Starmer, and turn their branches outwards to their communities to build these workers defence squads. Joint committees of Labour branches/CLP's, and Trades Councils and union branches should be established to democratically control, and train our own Red Guards, to protect workplaces and communities against the fascist thugs, as well as to protect workers, in shops etc., against violence from the increasing attacks by the criminal elements, which themselves form part of that lumpen element in society in which the fascists swim and recruit.

But, whilst the thugs must currently, just be stopped, we need to drain the swamp from which they emerge. That swamp has swelled from the 1980's, as the petty-bourgeoisie grew by 50%. It is comprised of some of the least educated, most backward elements, and whose self-employment, and precarious conditions of dwarfish capital, makes them isolated and atomised, encouraging reactionary, individualist ideas, and also makes them dependent on the worst forms of exploitation of labour, including the labour of their own family members.

That growth of these elements arose as a result of the deindustrialisation policies of Thatcher and Major in the 1980's/90's, which were also continued by Blair/Brown up to 2010. It went along with the idea that wealth could be generated from speculative capital gains, as property prices and financial asset prices were inflated. The symbol of this casino economy was the creation of the National Lottery, whereas, in the 1960's, Harold Wilson was even very loathe to establish Premium Bonds, as a means of national savings, because of the encouragement of gambling. A look at any TV commercial break, shows a plethora of other lotteries, scratch cards, online bingo, tombola, slot machines, gambling, not to mention all of the actual casinos set up in cities across the country.

No wonder people think that they must gamble on house prices rising, rather than seeing high house prices as a terrible thing, if you really want a house to live in, rather than to use as gambling chip. This is the sign of an empire in decline and decay. Yet, Britain remains a wealthy country. If workers controlled all of the actual industrial capital, which is their collective property, they would use it more effectively. They would not drain it to simply hand money to stock market wolves and speculators. If workers in Britain, combined with workers across the EU, to demand not just real political democracy, but also industrial democracy, as they were starting to do in the 1970's, then all of that real industrial wealth and capital could be properly put to use to raise living standards, and to grow the economy. It would drain the swamp of despondency out of which the monster of fascism periodically slithers forth.