The far right have to be defeated and the Palestine movement shows the way, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

On 1 February, the far right is planning to demonstrate in London for freedom for political prisoners. By this, of course, they don’t mean people in prison for trying to stop the genocide in Gaza or for demanding action on climate change. They don’t even mean the fifteen prisoners still being held without charge, after more than twenty years, in Guantanamo Bay. They mean Tommy Robinson, who is in prison for repeatedly lying about a young Syrian refugee.

Robinson presents himself as an anti-establishment figure, although the fact that Elon Musk, billionaire businessman, Twitter owner and friend of Trump, is his supporter gives us some indication of how true this is. In reality, the activities of Robinson and his ilk help allow the Islamophobic, anti-immigration agenda of mainstream politicians, making the most outrageous statements seem permissible. We have seen this recently with the furore about grooming gangs. Robert Jenrick’s comment that British people whose families came from Pakistan represent an ‘alien culture’ would once have been seen as too far right even for a Tory, but it was capped by Robert Lowe of Reform, who called for not just Pakistani members of grooming gangs but their ‘wives, sisters, mothers, cousins’ to be deported.

This, like Musk’s accusation that Jess Phillips is a ‘rape genocide apologist’, is the sort of language that gets people killed, as in the Islamophobic murders of Mushin Ahmed in Rotherham in 2015 and Makram Ali in Finsbury Park in 2017, both of whose murderers were inspired by ideas about Muslim grooming gangs. This makes it all the more essential that we turn out in large numbers against the latest far-right mobilisation. We saw in the summer how significant demonstrations of solidarity across communities, against the far right, Islamophobia and the demonisation of asylum seekers, were able to stop the spread of the anti-refugee riots, and this is the lesson on which we need to build.

A key part of mobilising against the far right is understanding the relationship between the far right and the state. When we rally against Tommy Robinson’s supporters, we are standing not with mainstream politics against a principled outsider, but against the use of Islamophobia as a weapon of state power, whether that’s cracking down on asylum seekers or justifying our government’s disgraceful support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

As we have seen from the election of Trump in the US and successes by the far right in countries across Europe, the failure of mainstream parties to fulfil people’s basic needs creates a climate in which the far right can thrive. At the same time, as shown in November 2023 when Suella Braverman called them to the streets against the Palestine movement, governments won’t hesitate to use the far right when they feel themselves under threat. The Palestine movement remains a major challenge to the establishment and a significant weapon against the far right. A strong Palestine turnout against Tommy Robinson will send the message that our challenge is not going away.