Broad Left Network activists have, over the last week, been attending demonstrations and counter-demonstrations across the UK. From the demonstration in London on 27 July to the many towns that saw peaceful anti-racist, anti-fascist demonstrations on 3 August.
The violence, horrific attacks on hotels housing asylum-seekers, car burnings, vandalism of a local community, the attack on a mosque and the looting of shops first in Southport but now in towns around the country – have been provoked by a tiny network of racist, far-right activists’ intent upon using any tragedy – such as the murder of three children – to further their aims, irrespective of truth. On 29 July, these racist activists travelled to Southport with the explicit intention of causing violence.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that these actions – and any ability these racists have, to mobilise angry white people – exist in a vacuum. No one can doubt the rage seething in working class communities. From collapsing adult social care to falling staffing in schools, from a drastically under-resourced NHS to cost of living crisis, people can be in little doubt of the indifference of the political class to whether ordinary working class people in the UK live or die, are housed or unhoused, are healthy or are dying in the poverty that long term sickness can bring.
All of these are legitimate reasons to be angry. Wages and conditions of employment remain dreadful for millions of workers. At the same time, they cannot access basic services such as GPs, nor afford to pay for other needs like optometrists and dentists. This anger is being hijacked however, by far right thugs who seek to make everything about immigration and/or refugees.
Such hijacking is facilitated by politicians, by the media, and even by social media algorithms, which have long since been proven to promote any story that generates rage, in the same way as it generates profit for social media companies via advertising revenue. This is how an untrue post on a social media site claiming that the murderer of Bebe King (6), Elsie Dot Stancombe (7) and Alice Dasilva Aguiar (9) was a Muslim, rocketed around the UK, even though the original post was deleted after an hour.
Politicians and the media play into the narrative that immigration and refugees are a key problem with British society. This is how the ugly chant “send them back” turned up in Southport, even though the person accused of murder was not an immigrant but was born in the UK. Most politicians and their hangers-on, and the media, are funded by and depend upon the capitalist class; the owners of the British economy and the powerful social and institutional networks in British society that these capitalists have built. Racist tropes about immigrants and “integration” are a viable way for them to duck acknowledgement of the consequences of capitalist economics and capitalist direction of the state.
The role that the fascists and far-right play in dividing workers on racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic grounds only benefit the bosses. History shows that these forces have been used to attack workers organisations such as the trade unions.
The leadership of the labour movement in particular, for which unity of the working class across lines of gender, sexuality, nationality, skin colour etc is a foundational principle, is not taking the anger at work in working class communities seriously enough. The union-backed Stand Up to Racism chant, “Say it Loud, Say it Clear, Refugees are Welcome Here” is one we agree with, but it does not seek to intervene with those whose anger is being manipulated to racist ends. It does not offer a fighting programme behind which to cohere on the basis of being working class.
Within PCS this week, a number of branches have passed a variation on a motion, included below, which calls for a different approach – for a serious TUC-led campaign on “Pay, Jobs, Homes not Racism”. Housing is a driver of protests against refugees and must be addressed by the state for everyone. Crap pay, crap jobs, the housing crisis and hyper exploitation likewise affect all races, all genders etc. Our communities are falling apart around us.
It is vital that the union movement takes the lead in building a united workers response, including by calling demonstrations, well-stewarded against the threat of the far-right.
Therefore, only a united labour movement, putting forward strong class demands, will be able to force the new Labour government to act. The vote for Reform also is a warning of how vital it is to build a working-class political voice that fights for socialist policies. A first step would be for our union to call on PCS General Secretary, Fran Heathcote, to use her position on the TUC General Council to call for the TUC to organise properly stewarded mass demonstrations across the UK as well as to call on PCS’s parliamentary group of MPs to support this ‘Pay, Jobs and Homes – not Racism’ approach. A party based on the organised working class that fought for anti-racist, anti-war, socialist policies – for the pay, jobs, homes and services we all need – would undercut support for far-right groups.
Our motion will be sent to branches, groups, regions and national executives and we hope this will be the start of a conversation about how we draw the mass of union members into the fight not just against racism, but against the despair off which it threatens to feed.
PCS Broad Left Network 