The recent pogrom against perceived foreigners by the far right asserted its ‘legitimate’ concerns under the former government’s election slogan of “Stop The Boats!” This, the shameful legacy of the last Tory gamble.
Is its comparison with the Nazi ‘Kristalnacht’ against the Jews in Germany 1938 too far a stretch?
Families with children in shuttered shops being smoked out by mobs waiting outside with sticks; individuals beaten in the streets with paramilitary involvement; hotels set alight with blocked fire exits, high streets wrecked, shops shut, and graves defaced.
The numbers involved were only a fraction of those in the urban disturbances of August 2011. Then the eruption, triggered by the police shooting of an unarmed black man, was a reaction to poverty, austerity and arbitrary policing. That lasted five days. These racist riots nearly twice that, with only hundreds in place of the thousands arrested then. The priority of property before people is clear.
The recent mass acts of violence are made more disturbing because their enemy is the perceived foreigner and their targets people. People like us, other workers! In 2011, the targets were shops and the palaces of commodities by people who had nothing.
These events aren’t out of the blue. Governments of all shades have long sought to divide the working class and blame sections of it for the problems they created of low wages, austerity, poor housing and collapsing services.
Decades of demonisation and ‘othering’ reaching is crescendo from Brexit to now, with ‘take back control of the borders/country’ and ‘stop the boats’! Even one of the leading Tory leadership candidates has recently suggested a public profession of faith by Muslims should be an arrestable offence! (“Row over Tory MP’s Allahu Akbar arrest call” BBC 07/08/24). It’s not just the words that have been used by the state’s cronies. It is the treatment that has been meted out to too many migrants, people seeking refuge and asylum, that is increasingly portrayed as fair and consequently seen as acceptable by the public. The fiction of luxury hotels has hidden the barrack-like nature of accommodation supposed to last families for years. But there is worse, effectively camps of concentration.
The large-scale containment camp at Wethersfield in Essex is so overcrowded and under resourced that charities like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Doctors of the World (DOTW) are now diverting resources from sites of war, epidemic and natural disaster to provide healthcare to people seeking asylum here in the UK.
While the spark that lit this latest conflagration may well have been the misinformation spread about the suspect in the Southport atrocity, the fuel has been continuously heaped up by the mainstream media and politicians when they talk of immigration as a “problem”.
This is not a creation of social media, but also the usual suspects of the legacy press. The Mail, the Express and the Sun. Not just from populist politicians like Farage, Patel and Braverman, but also the now Prime Minister when as opposition leader he said there were “too many immigrants in the NHS”. The BBC has just amplified this when it constantly portrays migration, of whatever sort, as a “problem” to be “solved”.
The recent election, distilling the right-wing hatred of the ruling party from the last decade, has produced an extreme parody of itself in Reform. This caricature of ‘democratic’ fascism, styling itself as the ‘Real Conservatives’, has linguistically weaponised these demonstrators as its paramilitary expression on the streets.
How have the fascists got away with it? They haven’t, they are still at it. They’ve never gone away. They have always been the ‘democratic’ states last resort against effective opposition to capitalist exploitation. Wheeled out whenever a ‘strategy of tension’ helps divide our class by fooling some into believing their interests ally with them.
The crisis of capitalism is everywhere around us, and we see it so much we virtually breathe it. War, environmental crisis, worsening mental and physical health, falling living standards, increasing crises in all the social consequences of this and the disappearance of the means of addressing them.
While crisis is in our living experience, so is the potential for its solutions. The last strike waves across the UK a year ago never reached the potential we all know they had, the potential to change something. What they did do was demonstrate that collective action can happen, as it did in the anti-racist rallies to oppose the fascist reaction recently.
Racism and poverty don’t end by good motives and verbal opposition. They end through solidarity and resistance. The social peace at home is disintegrating as our state representatives of capitalism fight their wars for profit abroad. Labour will be no different – their pronouncements on law and order will revisit us in the next wave of resistance to cuts and austerity.
The opposition to their peace at home does and must include our opposition to their armed adventurism abroad in search of profit.
To paraphrase the Dutch revolutionary Anton Pannekoek a century ago, our class is not weak because it’s divided, it is divided because it’s weak. The fascist assault on our communities is there to weaken us further. It is not a coincidence that this is happening in a time of war.
AnarCom Network 