The fascist riots of recent days have their roots in the racism and despair created by decades of neoliberalism. Chris Bambery argues that we can and must organise to stop them

It is with no gladness I wish to return to an issue I raised following the results achieved by Reform UK a month ago in the UK general election. I do so because issues I raised have come home to roost with the Islamophobic riots and attacks on refugee accommodation, mosques, businesses and individuals by fascist thugs.

On social media there had been a debate about what is fuelling these riots, with some stressing that the communities where these are occurring are home to disposed white working-class people suffering from austerity, dead-end jobs and bad housing who are scapegoating migrants and Muslims.

Others have blamed these attacks on racism and the far right.

I think it would be a profound mistake to counterpose the two. Firstly, we must call out these attacks for what they are; carried out by racist bigots and fascist thugs.

But, combined with that, we do need to address the conditions whereby racism takes a hold.

On Sunday, there was an attack on at a hotel in Rotherham housing migrants. Rotherham was a steel town set within the South Yorkshire coalfield. It has a proud history of working-class struggle; not least the 1980 steel strike and the 1984-1985 year-long miner’s strike. But these are fading memories now. The pits are long closed and the one remaining steel plant employs a fraction of those once working there in the industry.

Sunderland, where one of the first riots occurred, was a shipbuilding town with its own proud traditions and a strong Labour left in the 1970s and 1980s.

Blackpool, which saw another attempted protest, was never an industrial town. But I recall in the days when Tory and Labour conferences took place there protesting outside. There was an active Trades Council in the town who backed the protests (I remember them welcoming and hosting the 1981 Liverpool to Blackpool Right to Work march). Outside the town there were aerospace plants which were fully unionised.

Last month I analysed Reform UK’s vote, noting that while it won just five seats in parliament it came second in 98 seats, of which 89 were won by Labour. The top ten of these results were:

Barnsley South 33.2%
Makerfield 31.8%
Kingston Upon Hull East 30.6%
Rotherham 30.3%
Easington 29.8%
Barnsley North 29.3%
Normanton and Hemsworth 29.2%
Houghton and Sunderland South 29.1%
Washington and Gateshead South 29.1%
Blackpool South 28.6%

Sunderland Central (27 percent), Stoke-on-Trent North (24.4 percent) and Stoke-on-Trent Central (24.2 percent) were in the top 20. In Southport, Reform UK won 16.4 percent behind Labour, who won, and the Tories.

Reform UK’s best performances are in areas similar to where Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally, RN) have built in France; not so much in the cities but in deindustrialised smaller towns and rural areas with small migrant populations.

Le Pen herself represents the former mining town of Hénin-Beaumont in the Pas de Calais, once a Communist stronghold. Former Communist supporters don’t vote RN generally – they just don’t vote. I suspect that would be the same among former Labour voters in Easington or Rhondda, once mining communities, or in the former shipbuilding towns of Jarrow and Sunderland, all of which feature in Reform UK’s top 20.

What Reform UK achieved was winning the support from working-class people in such constituencies who have no organic links to Labour, the left or the trade unions; indeed they see Labour as having failed their communities.

But Reform UK has also won a tranche of Tory voters among pro-Brexit voters. Most of these had already ditched the Tories prior to 4 July, alienated by David Cameron, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak and angered over the defenestration of Boris Johnson.

In today’s Britain there is a large section of the middle class and the traditional ruling class who feel alienated by the globalised elite which rules this; who they feel have ditched English nationalism (I use that description carefully) and that the British state no longer represents the older imperial and wartime traditions – it’s also seen as inept, giving the British military’s disastrous performance in Iraq and Afghanistan. The British armed forces and secret services are agents of the US and NATO, no longer independent players. The pride of the 1982 Falklands war seems a distant memory.

British-owned industry hardly features and post-2008, the City and finance is a similar story. Reform UK offers a Brit version of ‘Make America Great Again.’

So, Reform UK can (let’s emphasise the ‘can,’ it’s not inevitable) bring together violent fascist thugs and respectable middle class and upper class types who endow it with a degree of funding and organisational expertise.

They focus their bigotry on Muslims and migrants, following the elite’s targeting of those two. This is particularly true since the post 9/11 War on Terror in which Islamophobia was cutting edge – both are respectable. They do not focus on Jews, or Hindus (think Sunak, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel who are part or represent a major Anglo-Indian bourgeoisie).

So how can we respond?

Physical opposition in defence of our communities is vital. We cannot depend on the state, given its record of Islamophobia and attacks on migrants, and, for similar reasons, on the Starmer government. But that is only part of the response needed. We need to isolate the Nazi hard core and tear away their respectability. We, potentially, can do that by mobilising the mass of the British population.

First time round, the Anti-Nazi League mobilised across British society in the late 1970s, for the first time bringing tens of thousands of Asian, Afro-Caribbean and white people together against the Nazi National Front. It involved the Indian Workers’ Association, the various Asian Youth Movements, formed to protect their communities from racist attacks, trade unions and many other organisations. By bringing together punk and reggae bands Rock Against Racism (RAR) created a vibrant musical dynamic and helped mobilise within the Afro-Caribbean communities.

At the memorial meeting for David Widgery, a key figure in RAR, Paul Foot quoted a key speaker, Darcus Howe, thus:

‘In a brilliant and moving tribute to David… Darcus Howe said he had fathered five children in Britain. The first four had grown up angry, fighting forever against the racism all round them. The fifth child, he said, had grown up “black with ease”. Darcus attributed her “space” to the Anti-Nazi League in general and to David Widgery in particular. It is difficult to imagine a more marvellous epitaph.’

Through mass mobilisation the ANL isolated and defeated the National Front but it also created a wider anti-racism. That in turn gave confidence to those Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities being targeted by the Nazis and suffering police racism.

When the ANL was relaunched in 1992 to counter the rise of the British National Party it repeated that. In October 1993, in the aftermath of Stephen Lawrence’s murder close by, the ANL took the lead in organising a unity march on the BNP’s HQ in Welling, south-east London. It was backed by other anti-racist organisations including the defence campaigns for victims of racist murders.

Around 60,000 marched and were stopped from reaching the Nazi bunker by waves or riot police and mounted cops. But the effect was to inspire greater resistance to the BNP. In the spring of 1994, 100,000 people gathered in South London’s Brockwell Park for the Carnival Against the Nazis.

In my article examining Reform UK’s electoral performance I wrote:

‘Here we have to address the fact that the far left is in the worst state it has been in my lifetime – Counterfire is the exception. The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition stood forty candidates, gaining 12,901, with a UK-wide vote share of 0.04%. This was less than the Yorkshire Party who stood fewer candidates, 27, but who got more votes, 13,663, 0.05% of the poll.

‘Two far-left groups stood candidates as independents in Stratford and Bow in East London and Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough getting 4.1 percent and 8 percent, far below what was achieved by independents standing on a clear left programme: Leanne Mohammed in Ilford North gaining 32.2%, Michael Lavalette in Preston 21.8% and Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras 18.9%.

‘The left to the left of Labour has no presence in northeast England between York and Newcastle – certainly in holding regular meetings – nor in Barnsley. I state this not with sectarian glee but to simply point out the far left is much weaker than even twenty years ago.’

To the absence of any organised left to the left of Labour we could add Southport, Blackpool, Stoke and Rotherham.

The immediate danger is not in Bristol, Manchester or Nottingham where the left, anti-racist groups and the unions can still mobilise. But it is in the smaller, de-industrialised towns with smaller Muslim populations.

The first thing I would suggest in places like Sunderland, Easington, Rhondda or Rotherham is to get in contact with former miners, steel and shipyard workers and their families to organise meetings to point out how, in the 1984-1985 Miner’s Strike, for instance, Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities rallied to the support of the strikers and their families. How the National Union of Miners was a supporter of the ANL first time round, with Miners Against the Nazis groups across the coalfields.

This is not to recount abstract history but to argue if we do not stand together and allow ourselves to be divided, we know the result and cannot allow any repeat.

From that we can start leafletting housing estates, workplaces, colleges and secondary schools and we can mobilise against the Nazis.

We can also mobilise in support of Palestine. In each one of these communities there will be a variety of people appalled by Zionism’s genocide in Gaza.

But we also need to bring hope to these communities; and that requires a revolutionary left which campaigns on wider social and economic issues and which builds solidarity.

Neither can be achieved without hard work and a sense of urgency. It’s not where I would like to start from. But its where we are and we need to recognise reality. Let’s set to it.

See Counterfire’s event page for a list of upcoming anti-fascist mobilisations and public meetings