Lindsey German on street thuggery and state surveillance

The outbreak of rioting by fascist and far-right mobs last week should not be dignified by the term ‘protest’. Despite the flimsy pretext that they are in sympathy with the victims of the atrocious killings in Southport, they are nothing of the sort. They are using the issue to launch vicious attacks on mosques, hotels housing refugees, and other buildings, and on Muslims and other ethnic minority individuals unlucky enough to cross their path.

In this they are the echo of the pogroms and lynchings which litter the history of racism and which were designed to keep whole populations in subjugation and fear. The fascists want to create this kind of climate again. Their targets are above all Muslims, and they have been able to grow because there is a fertile ground for them in the Islamophobia and racism spouted daily by mainstream ‘respectable’ politicians and the media which dutifully repeats and embellishes their racist lies.

The chants of ‘stop the boats’, ‘send them home’, ‘we want our country back’ didn’t originate with the fascists but in the palace of Westminster and on the front pages of  the right wing papers (reported daily in ‘paper reviews’ by the supposedly liberal BBC). Nigel Farage, leader of Reform, has been given greater exposure on the media than any other politician – again look at BBC Question Time – to spout his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bile.

The dying Tory government doubled down on its rhetoric about deporting migrants to Rwanda and stopping the boats and were not challenged on their basic racist premises by Labour. We have had over two decades of growing Islamophobia, reaching a crescendo in the last year with repeated attacks on the mass Palestine movement as ‘hate marches’, ‘extremist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’. This is despite the fact that the marches have been overwhelmingly peaceful and composed of people from all ethnicities and religions.

Former home secretary Suella Braverman deliberately encouraged far right demonstrators onto the streets to confront the Palestine march of 11th November last year. We are seeing the consequences today of the politicians’ rhetoric.

Keir Starmer has little understanding of this and wants to treat the far right mobs as simply one wing of ‘extremism’ and to see their actions as purely criminal. While few of us would shed a tear if some of these people were locked up, it isn’t going to stop this behaviour. It is created by political discourse from above which then strengthens the far right in parliaments – as we see across Europe – and in turn helps to reinforce this type of racist street violence.

The right plays on genuine grievances – about poverty, housing, unemployment, rubbish jobs – in order to build its base and then uses that base to attack ethnic minorities, trade unionists and anyone who does not conform to its racist hierarchical views. Labour does not challenge the priorities of capital and is therefore unable to deal with the reasons for the misery so many working class people suffer. Only last week it cut the winter heating allowance for pensioners, pushing many further into poverty. And Labour’s own response to defeats by independent candidates over Palestine has been to accuse them of violence and hate campaigns, echoing Islamophobic attacks.

The fascists will not be – and never have been – defeated through parliamentary means. They have to be confronted on the streets, as many people did over the weekend and will have to continue to do over coming weeks and months.We also need to link the mass Palestine movement which has been such an important force for change in recent months to opposition to fascism and the far right.

But the fascists also need to be undercut by providing an alternative to the misery of capitalism. That can only be done by the left building a base among working class communities which can fight on all the issues facing working class people, and which can challenge the false narrative that it is migrants or those of a different religion who are to blame. Events of the last week show the urgency of this task.

Spycops: the disgrace of undercover policing

I have spent several days at the Mitting inquiry into undercover policing by the Metropolitan police, which involved infiltration of left wing organisations and campaigns by police spies, who adopted false names which they took from children who had died young, and formed close relationships with socialists and campaigners on the basis of pretending they agreed with their aims and motivations.

I have been spied on since the 1970s and gave a day’s evidence last week rebutting claims that the SWP, of which I was a member, was violent and unaccountable and only used campaigns in order to further its own ends. I also spent two days listening to one of those who infiltrated the SWP and the Anti-Nazi League, Trevor Morris, who took his identity of Anthony ‘Bobby’ Lewis from a dead child. He also had, as did a number of other spy cops, sexual relationships with two women which would not have happened if they had any idea about who he was.

What is clear looking at the documents revealed in the course of inquiry (and we don’t get to see many of them or the names of many people spied upon) is firstly that the spying was about trying to criminalise the left for campaigning, and that secondly the views of the police towards their victims was pejorative in the extreme. They despised the left and the various campaigns, including the families of those killed by the far right.

The huge demonstration at Welling in October 1993 was a case in point. Its aim was to close down the fascist BNP ’bookshop’ which was an organising centre for racist attacks including several murders in the area, one of them Stephen Lawrence. There should have been no argument over this but instead it was left to socialists and anti-racists to make this happen. On the day the police were determined to prevent them and to protect the fascists. We now know the deep collusion between some local police and the murderers. Yet we were regarded as criminals.

The demonstration was viciously attacked by police quite deliberately who wanted to send a message that any protest would be broken up, in this case using 83 police horses to charge the crowd. The undercover police blamed it all on ‘agitators’ – a complete lie.

I regard it as very important to bring as much of this to light as possible, despite the limitations of the format and inquiry. It should be a matter of historical record and also it is important to defend ones own and other comrades activity – we have after all been on the right side of history. I was very pleased to meet some of the women who have suffered so much from those people. We are standing up and stating our own history – and rejecting the narrative that somehow we need to be put under surveillance.

This week: is the centenary of Black American author James Baldwin’s birth. I am reading his final novel Just Above My Head but any of his writing both fiction and non-fiction is well worth reading, as is this film about him worth watching.