The first lightning flashes – and what to do

Editorial of Socialism Today issue 280

One month after Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party was ‘swept to power’ by a paltry 20% of the electorate – the lowest support base of any government since the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1918 – violent protests and riots, instigated by far-right groups, broke out across the country. For those trapped in asylum-seekers’ hostels or mosques under brutal attack from gangs of rioters, the experience was terrifying. More generally, many Black, Asian and Muslim people feel that their safety is increasingly under threat. Tell Mama, a monitoring group tracking Islamophobic hate crimes, reported a five-fold increase in threats to Muslims compared to the same time last year.

The absolute numbers involved even peripherally in the riots were small, probably less than 15,000 nationwide. This is far fewer than those who came out on the streets in counter-protests or – for example – the many tens of thousands who peacefully marched for Gaza on the same Saturday as the right-wing riots started to spread, or the 50,000 who took part in Trans Pride the week before. Not one word, however, of the Gaza demo featured in the capitalist media; whereas the riots were at the top of the news bulletins every day for a week, adding to their momentum.

Unusually, however, the large anti-racist counter-protests on 7 August did top news reports, with overwhelmingly positive coverage, even from the most rabidly right-wing capitalist newspapers. In a total volte-face the headline on the front page of the Daily Mail, for example, was the ‘Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down Thugs’. (8 August) This, of course, from the rag which, alongside numerous Tory politicians, has routinely referred to the overwhelmingly peaceful mass protests against the slaughter in Gaza over the past ten months as ‘hate marches’.

Meanwhile the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, credited the counter demonstrations as a “show of unity from communities together” that was central to preventing further far-right violence. It was the overwhelming mood in society of disgust at the racist violence that left the capitalist press and the police compelled to report the anti-racist demonstrations positively. One YouGov poll showed that 86% of people had little or no sympathy with the violent protests.

The police, moreover, were also attempting to rebuild their social base. A 2023 survey found that a record 51% of Londoners don’t trust the Metropolitan Police. Yet for the police to play their role effectively as a vital part of the state apparatus, ultimately defending the interests of the capitalist class, they rely on being seen as a ‘neutral force’ acting for the good of society as a whole.

That perception of the police may have been slightly strengthened by the events on 7 August, but it will not negate the ongoing daily experience of Black and Asian workers of racist policing. Already two Asian men have been jailed for affray in Leeds after taking part in a counter-protest. The Chair of the Police Federation has used the riots to call for more powers to be granted to the police, including the use of water cannon. Some workers, active trade unionists even, might have sympathy with this demand at this moment, but any repressive powers granted to the police will be used against the organised workers’ movement in the future.

However, the main lesson that will have been drawn by those who took part in the anti-racist protests is not reliance on the police, but of the potential power of united, properly stewarded, mass action. The capitalist class also got a glimpse of that power, and viewed it with trepidation. The immediate response was to bend to – and try to claim – the mood of unity from below; but just a day later Nick Thomas-Symonds, New Labour’s Cabinet Office Minister, was urging anti-racist protesters not to keep coming out onto the streets.

On the contrary, the fight against racism needs to be stepped up. The most effective way to build the unity of the working class necessary to decisively push back racism is for the six-and-a-half million strong trade union movement to start to play a central role. The 7 August mobilisation should have been followed up by a trade union-led mass anti-racist demonstration, around the slogan agreed at the 2018 TUC congress of ‘jobs and homes, not racism’. Not least would this have thrown down the gauntlet to the Starmer government as it prepares its autumn budget plans, a signal that the working class will not accept the coming austerity 2.0 agenda – or be divided by it.

Warning for the future

While this spate of riots may have passed, they were a warning of what could develop in the future. Tommy Robinson and others of his ilk instigated the protests, seizing the moment after the sickening child murders in Southport, but at this stage far-right organisation in Britain remains extremely weak and fragmented. They have far less cohesion today than at the end of the rule of New Labour Mark One. In 2009, for example, the far-right British National Party (BNP), with neo-fascist origins, reached a peak of 57 councillors; along with two members of the European parliament (MEPs) elected in June that year from the North West region and Yorkshire as, across Britain, it polled nearly a million votes.

Nor is there currently an increase in the numbers the far right can mobilise onto the streets. The 15,000 that Robinson rallied in London in July 2024 is the same number who marched to demand that he be released from prison six years ago in July 2018. Nonetheless, the violent eruption of the riots points to the dangers ahead, and the combustible material which could potentially be harnessed by the far right. Most of the participants appear to have had no history of involvement in far-right activity. Arrests were mainly of local people including children as young as eleven. In addition to the attacks on mosques and immigration centres, looting of shops including supermarkets was a feature.

While entirely different in many other ways, this aspect of the riots has similarities with the last major riots in Britain in 2011. These were triggered by the police killing of a Black man, Mark Duggan, and were a multi-ethnic outpouring of anger, whereas the summer riots were overwhelmingly white and dominated by racist hatred. Nonetheless, both were products of deep alienation and poverty among sections of the working class.

Since 2011 levels of poverty have grown nationally. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, 4.3 million children (nearly one-third of all UK children) were in poverty in 2022-2023, up from 3.6 million in 2010-2011. In 2014-2015, nineteen of the twenty child poverty hotspots were in London, but by 2022-23 only three remained in the capital, with the rest split between the North West and West Midlands. Starmer’s refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap, and his suspension of Labour MPs who defied him on the issue, was the clearest possible signal that his government will take no serious measures to lift people out of poverty.

Clearly, none of those who rioted have even the faintest hope that Starmer’s New Labour will improve their lives. In this, if not in other ways, they are no different to many of the working class. This year’s British Social Attitudes survey shows that 45% of people ‘almost never’ trust the government to put the interests of ‘the nation’ first, compared to 39% who trust them to do so ‘some of the time’ – the highest levels of disillusionment with government ever recorded. Starmer’s new age of austerity will only deepen that disenchantment with capitalist politics.

It is no surprise that this summer a small minority of working-class people vented their rage over their plight by turning on Muslims and migrants in particular. Blaming ‘illegal immigrants’ has been a constant theme of successive Tory governments. New Labour Mark One, under Tony Blair, fed anti-Muslim prejudice as part of justifying its participation in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nor is the approach of Starmer’s New Labour Mark Two qualitatively different, as was shown in his dog-whistle comments on Bangladeshis in a Sun readers question time event during the general election. While he has cancelled the Tories’ inhumane ‘Rwanda scheme’, which was in any case completely unworkable, he has continued the propaganda against ‘illegal’ immigration and ‘small boats’, including suggesting he will consider his own version of the Rwanda plan by processing asylum claims overseas. Of course, the bloc of right-populist Reform MPs in parliament are amplifying anti-migrant propaganda, and can make further gains on that basis. But Farage is only singing a more ‘right-populist’ version of the same divisive tune of more ‘mainstream’ capitalist politicians.

Capitalism remains based on nation states, which have created deep-rooted national consciousnesses. Capitalist classes have always been prepared to stoke nationalist feelings, for example to justify war, or to attempt to play the divide-and-rule card to try and defend their rule from social uprisings and revolutions. Capitalism is now in an era of crises, leading to deep divisions between different sections of the elites on the best way to defend the system. In country after country sections of the ruling class have turned to right-wing nationalism, searching for some means to increase the social base from which they can defend their rotten system. The Tory party did not succeed in preventing a general election catastrophe by whipping up anti-migrant racism, but the propaganda has nonetheless had an effect.

No generalised rise in racism

However, it would be a mistake to draw the pessimistic conclusion that racism is on the rise across the whole of society. On the contrary, despite the anti-migrant propaganda from capitalist politicians, broad measures of social attitudes on a number of issues have shown a continued improvement. For example, in 2022 a majority said they would be happy if an immigrant household (56%) or a Muslim household (60%) moved in next door, compared to 48% and 45% as recently as 2017. According to the 2024 British Social Attitudes survey more than two-thirds of people (68%) say that the British government should be doing more to help refugees, with only one in eleven (9%) in favour of reducing support.

On the other hand, the same survey simultaneously found that 65% thought that stronger measures should be taken to ‘reduce illegal immigration’. This seemingly conflicting mixture of attitudes, however, should be no surprise. Over the last fourteen years of Tory rule the living standards of the working-class majority have fallen markedly, public services have been cut to the bone and overwhelmed by need – above all the NHS. Housing is increasingly unaffordable. It is not wealthy suburbs that most new immigrants are moved to, but the poorest inner-city areas. A certain feeling from existing populations – including those from previous generations of migrants – that they have no control over any aspect of their lives, including how many people are moving into their local communities and joining the queue for already overstretched services, is understandable and, in reality, inevitable. That feeling has been fuelled by establishment politicians attempting to shift responsibility for austerity from the consequences of capitalism onto the shoulders of the poorest, newest arrivals.

Contradictory ideas – backward prejudices alongside fervent working-class solidarity – can exist in the same individual, never mind within communities, with different aspects dominant at different times. One important factor today is that around 18% of Britain’s population are from ethnic minorities. In the cities, and even in most smaller towns, white workers work – and strike – alongside Black and Asian colleagues, including first generation migrants, and are therefore more likely to have a sense of solidarity with them. And the other side of the increased size of the Black and Asian population is the hugely greater confidence to struggle – compared to the past – which was shown in the large turnout on counter-demonstrations across the country. It is therefore not surprising that the racist riots have been mainly in areas with much smaller migrant communities.

Tasks for the workers’ movement

Less than two months into Starmer’s premiership and some things are already very clear. As stated, the government has a shallower base of support than any in Britain’s history since the introduction of universal suffrage. The only reason it was able to claim a ‘landslide’ was the catastrophic collapse in the vote of the Tory party: the traditional party of British capitalism. There is no prospect of either Labour or the Tories substantially rebuilding the crumbling remnants of their support bases. Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have made it absolutely clear that they will act in the best interests of British capitalism, which will mean a further squeeze on the living standards of the working-class majority.

Opposition to that will find an expression. How events develop will depend on whether the organised working class puts itself at the head of that opposition. Reeves’ attempt to ‘sort out’ the public sector pay claims by offering a few – very minimal – concessions to try and prevent the government facing ‘the cost of industrial action’, is an indication that capitalist New Labour recognises the danger it faces from a working class that has increased its cohesion and confidence as a result of the experience of the 2022-2023 strike wave.

Combatting racism and nationalism is clearly a vital task facing the workers’ movement. Generally speaking, when class struggle is on the rise, it is easier to successfully push back racism and other prejudices. Heather Rawling’s article on page 18, part of our series commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike, records the impact of this great working-class struggle on social attitudes, of those directly involved and in society more generally. Different sections of the working class fighting together against their common enemy – the capitalist class that is exploiting them and their political representatives – tends to lead workers’ best instincts to come to the fore. However, that cannot be simply left to chance.

Historically, the most militant parts of the workers’ movement have been key to fighting racism. In the 1950s, for example, it was the railway workers’ union which played the leading role in getting rid of the colour bar in many London pubs. This flowed from a realisation that Black and white workers had more in common with each other than the bosses, and that the only way to stop workers from the Caribbean being used as cheap labour was to fight to convince them to join the union and launch a common struggle for decent pay. In the 1970s, trade unions were instrumental in the battle to defeat the far-right racist National Front.

Today the trade unions again have to take the lead in opposing racism, not just giving donations to anti-racist organisations, and not simply on moral grounds, but by mobilising around the basic class argument that unity is a necessity for effective workers’ struggle. That would include, in the reviews of the summer events that should take place at all levels of the movement, a discussion on how the unions – perhaps through local trades councils – could organise effective stewarding of the anti-racist mobilisations that will be needed in the future. This is a vital task. Firstly, to prevent the far right gaining confidence that they can ‘take the streets’ and intimidate minority communities. But also, to ensure that as Black, Asian and Muslim youth inevitably organise in self-defence – as they began to during the riots – the workers’ movement, while not able to totally deter police reprisals, can create the broadest possible protective shield.     

Class politics also vital

Combative trade unionism alone, however, will not decisively cut across right-populist forces making gains: especially in the electoral field. The working class also urgently needs a political voice. The threat of the far right will be used by New Labour’s apologists in the workers’ movement to argue that backing Labour is the only way to block gains by Reform or even more reactionary forces.

But taking this path would have exactly the opposite effect. As anger with Starmer’s Labour inevitably grows the right populists would be free to exploit it unless there is a workers’ party, with an anti-racist programme in the interests of the whole working class. That is why Bob Crow, the late general secretary of the RMT transport workers’ union, seriously discussed being prepared to stand himself in the 2010 general election in Barking under the banner of the then newly established Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), as the best means to start to undercut the support the far-right BNP had in the area at the time, with 12 local councillors.

Similar conclusions have not, as yet, been drawn by any of the current national trade union leaders. It is ironic that the initial racist protests were called under the name ‘Enough is Enough’. This phrase could only be appropriated in this way because of the failure of the trade union leaders who launched the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign during the 2022 strike wave – Mick Lynch, current general secretary of the RMT, and Dave Ward, general secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) – to harness the half a million people who enthusiastically joined it to launch a party. Both have made effective speeches during the recent events denouncing the far right and defending workers’ unity, but have not drawn the necessary political conclusions.

Nonetheless, the recent general election and its aftermath has led to the establishment of at least a putative group of ‘workers’ MPs’ in parliament. In addition to Jeremy Corbyn, elected as an independent in Islington North, the four other ‘independents for Gaza’ MPs have been joined by seven Labour lefts who have been excluded from the Parliamentary Labour Party for having the temerity to vote for the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap. Potentially this outline ‘workers’ bloc’ of MPs is more than twice the size of Reform’s little Englander bloc.

By fighting on the central issues facing the working class – and by the left-led unions proactively ‘adopting’ them into their parliamentary groups to champion workers’ politics inside and outside the Commons chamber – such a bloc could be an important lever to speeding up the creation of a party. But not, though, a fully sufficient one to get a new mass workers’ party off the ground.

How to get to a new party?

There is no one blueprint, nor can there be, for how to get to a new, mass, democratic workers’ party from the position that the working-class movement finds itself in today in Britain.

Jeremy Corbyn himself outlined some thoughts on this issue in an opinion piece in The Guardian newspaper on 12 July. To follow up his victory in the Islington North constituency he talked about establishing a ‘people’s forum’ in the borough as a “shared, democratic space for local campaigns, trade unions, tenants’ unions, debtors’ unions and national movements to organise, together, for the kind of world we want to live in”. He then went on: “Once our grassroots model has been replicated elsewhere, this can be the genesis of a new movement capable of challenging the stale two-party system”. 

Arguing against precipitate action, he concluded: “I have no doubt that this movement will eventually run in elections. However, to create a new, centralised party, based around the personality of one person, is to put the cart before the horse.Remember that only once strength is built from below can we challenge those at the top”.

There is more than one grain of truth in these arguments. A party built only around ‘the personality of one person’ is not a way forward. Some of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters, however, including some of those who stood unsuccessfully as independent candidates in the general election, have interpreted this idea, and the concept of ‘building strength from below’, to mean that they themselves should declare a new party, with membership opened and structures put in place, without his central, public involvement or that of any trade union. Their expectation is that tens of thousands of individuals – former Labour Party members and others – will join anyway and that Corbyn, other independents, and left unions, will follow.  

But this ignores the role that authoritative individuals play as a catalyst, if the conditions are there. And even more importantly, it hugely underestimates ‘the strength from below’ that does already exist. More than six million workers are currently organised in trade unions – what is this but a powerful ‘grassroots model’ of working-class organisation? One that, moreover, doesn’t need to be ‘replicated’ but instead mobilised in a systematic campaign, alongside continuing local community struggles and national movements. This argument, unfortunately, has been discounted – on the grounds that the situation is ‘too urgent’ – not by Jeremy Corbyn but by some of his supporters who wrongly view the unions as monolithic organisations, unchanging and unchangeable.

Clearly, the big majority of national trade union leaders currently intend to continue arguing that their unions should remain as backers even of Starmer’s New Labour Mark Two. However, even now – with the paint barely dry on Starmer’s premiership – many trade unionists are questioning this. A ferocious debate within the unions on the need to start building something new will take place regardless. A premature declaration of a new party without authoritative forces involved, with structures already set and a ‘demand’ that unions should join it – rather than democratically decide their own stance on how a new party should be formed – would not take the argument forward.

But Corbyn and his supporters could seriously advance the debate by openly linking up with those in the unions fighting for a new party; and, in parliament, with the other left independent MPs, by being the best fighters for trade unionists’ interests.

An inclusive approach

Jeremy Corbyn was also right in his Guardian article that ‘a centralised party’ is not the way forward at this point; if by that he means that a new workers’ party will have to be created as an ‘umbrella’ formation involving the trade unions, social movements, community organisations, environment campaigners – and different socialist political parties. Of course there will always be some small groups – sects – who do not follow the dictum of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto to “have no interests separate and apart from those of the working class as a whole” and who might well play an irritating, disruptive role. But restricting the clash of ideas in the name of ‘unity’ will not achieve unity, above all unity in action. Instead, what will be needed, certainly at least in the initial stages, is an organisational recognition of the inevitable plurality of ideas that exist and the validity of different parties and groups who express them – a democratic federal structure.

Unfortunately, however, that was not clear in the Guardian piece, and some of Jeremy’s supporters discussing a new party are instead looking to the ‘horizontalist’ approach that predominated in the pro-Corbyn organisations that were established within Labour while he was leader. If that is the case, it would be a serious mistake.

Modelled on the organisational methods of some of the new left parties in other countries, particularly Podemos in Spain, this approach relies on online polls, forums and workgroups as a means to consult the membership on different issues, but with no collective input from the trade union movement that reflects its social weight or the different socialist groups. Superficially ‘ultra-democratic’, this approach actually tends to leave the majority of the membership as passive bystanders while power is concentrated in the hands precisely of a ‘centralised’ leadership. A new workers’ party will need to be built on the basis of representative, participatory democracy.

There are some positive examples in Labour’s history that point towards what is needed. We debate the question of the character of the Labour Party, both historically and today, in response to a reader’s letter, on page 29 of this month’s magazine. As we summarise it there, prior to Blair’s destruction of its democratic structures, Labour was a ‘capitalist workers’ party’ with a leadership at the top which invariably reflected the policy of the capitalist class, but with a socialistic ideological basis to the party and a structure through which workers could move to challenge the leadership and threaten the capitalists’ interests.

Labour’s origins were highly federal, in essence a coming together of disparate trade unions and socialist organisations to fight for working-class interests in parliament. Until 1918 it wasn’t possible to join the Labour Party, but only its various affiliated organisations. That changed over time, but at their best local Labour Party constituency and district organisations were able to function as local ‘workers’ parliaments’ with trade union branches, local ward Labour parties, youth and women’s sections, all able to send delegates to debate, decide policy, and select candidates. During the 1980s battle of Liverpool city council, led by Militant (now the Socialist Party), District Labour Party meetings were hundreds strong – with elected delegates discussing and debating tactics at each stage of the struggle, representing, and reporting back to, their constituent organisations.

Local ‘forums’ approaching that character would be a step forward. But again, to realise them will require a determined struggle in the trade union movement – as the key force for the formation of a new workers’ party.

The summer riots have brought a new immediacy to the task facing the workers’ movement of building a new, mass vehicle for its political representation, and the debate on the way to achieve this must be urgently stepped up. But to put things in proportion, just weeks into the new situation of a Starmer premiership, they are but the first lightning flashes of the wild and stormy weather to come which will further enormously develop the conditions needed to realise the goal.