For two horrifying nights, racist rioting and pogroms have hit the streets of Belfast. Houses, cars and buses have been set alight. On Tuesday alone, at least 27 people, including families with children, were forced to flee their homes when far-right thugs went door to door. The target was anyone perceived to be a foreign national. Such attacks continued for a second night yesterday evening, with rioters attempting to reach a hotel housing asylum seekers. They were only blocked in doing so by the police. Chants of “get them out” rang through the streets.
These chilling scenes are a reminder of the increasingly dangerous and volatile atmosphere being skillfully and very deliberately whipped up by reactionary politicians and their counterparts in the media. Incendiary rhetoric has fanned the flames of the real fires. Egged on by the Trump regime, along with Elon Musk, the far right is now attempting to assert itself in the most aggressive way it has in many years on this side of the Atlantic.
As well as the rioting in Belfast, small far-right ‘protests’, often accompanied by lower level violence and disorder, have also taken place in several towns and cities around Britain and Northern Ireland. It is still little more than a week since Southampton was hit by far-right rioting following uproar over the police’s treatment of the murdered teenager Henry Nowak.
In a similar way, this week’s riots have followed the cynical weaponisation of a tragic and undoubtedly horrific violent crime in which the alleged perpetrator was from a migrant background. In this case, a Sudanese man has now been charged with attempted murder. Once again, despite calls for calm from the family of the victim, the incident has triggered a gleeful feeding frenzy for reactionary politicians, far right ‘influencers’ and a chorus of racist propagandists dubiously self-describing as ‘journalists’.
Open Racism
Rupert Lowe, whose Restore party has been polling at around 7%, put out a statement responding using the most offensive language you could imagine. He writes of “third world savages”. He goes on to call for mass deportations and the death penalty for refugees or migrants convicted of violent crime.
Meanwhile, Reform’s Nigel Farage proposed to cancel all visas for people from Sudan. The fact that his statement seems mild by comparison is actually a warning of how badly desensitised mainstream political discourse has become to open racism. It should not be necessary to point out that to hold all Sudanese people to blame for the actions of one individual is racist. Nor should it be necessary to remind people that the majority of UK knife crime – and of violent crime generally – is committed by white perpetrators. And yet, when these exact same crimes are directed against migrants and people of colour, the establishment media keeps remarkably quiet.
It is not just politicians on the far-right fringes who bear responsibility for generating the increasingly dangerous atmosphere in British politics. It was only a few months ago that Keir Starmer was busy quoting Enoch Powell in his speeches. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is currently preparing one of the most far-reaching and draconian crackdowns on migrant rights in the country’s history. Andy Burnham, who will almost certainly become prime minister if he wins the Makerfield by-election, has pledged to stick to these policies.
In Belfast, politicians from the Democratic Unionist Party, despite mouthing words about the need for calm, have also taken the opportunity to call for an end to “mass immigration” and for closing the border between the north and south of Ireland. Traditional Unionist Voice, a right-wing split from the DUP, outflanks it in its racist scapegoating. Figures from Sinn Féin have meanwhile suggested the ‘solution’ is a joined up all-Ireland approach to control immigration, leaning into their party’s recent turn towards increasing anti-migrant rhetoric.
These sorts of interventions, combined with the crossover that exists between the far right and various loyalist extremist groups (though racism is a major problem in all communities), raise the danger of a ‘spillover’ into a wider and more sustained increase in sectarianism and racist violence in Northern Ireland. This emphasises the importance of a unifying, trade-union led response to the far right in this part of the world. The workers’ movement is the force in society best placed to cut across all forms of division, and to mobilise the scale of fightback that’s needed. This is true in Britain as well.
There can be no complacency now about the scale of the threat the growth of the far right poses. But it remains the case that the majority of working-class people oppose racism. The Together Alliance demonstration that took place earlier this year in London significantly outnumbered the largest “Unite the Kingdom” protests. And the joint Nakba day and Stand Up to Racism march last month was also bigger than Tommy Robinson’s gathering, despite the latter being gifted the whole of central London by the Metropolitan Police.
Trade Union Response
But the trade union movement, which organises almost seven million workers and wields enormous latent political and economic power, has yet to put its full weight behind the struggle against the far right in Britain.
Many trade unions have correctly rejected Farage’s laughable appeal for the trade unions to affiliate to Reform. As a next step, Unite, UNISON, and the NEU, which are led by left-wing General Secretaries, should pull together a coalition of trade unions, anti-racist and anti-war campaigners to launch a new, worker-led campaign against the far right. Following the success of the Together demo in March, huge launch rallies for such an initiative could now be organised around the country. These could also be a real show of force in areas where the far right currently feels unchallenged, helping to push back against the growing confidence of racist groups.
This campaign could also help to develop the “rapid response” style organising, which has played an important role in fighting ICE terror in the US, needed to physically protect communities under attack from the far right.
To decisively push back the racists, the movement should combine absolute opposition to all forms of racism with demands for a massive expansion of high-quality genuinely affordable housing, real-terms wage rises, and proper investment in public services.
The declining and crisis-ridden capitalist system is leaning ever more decisively upon reactionary and backwards forces for its survival. We need to fight for the socialist alternative to this rotten system, based on solidarity, public ownership and democratic planning to meet the needs of people and the planet.
