Community solidarity is beating the extreme-right, not Keir Starmer

Community solidarity is beating the extreme-right, don't let Keir Starmer try to steal the credit.

Last night people came out in their thousands all over the country to protect their communities from the wave of extreme-right thuggery that has been sweeping Britain.

Socialists, social liberals, anti-racists, the Muslim community, and decent people of all classes and colours participated in massive counter-demonstrations to prevent extreme-right rioters from targeting minorities and smashing up their communities.

In Brighton the extreme-right protest was so massively outnumbered by the counter-protest that they had to hide behind a police cordon for hours (picture in the article header).

It’s actually quite funny how they’ve gone from violently attacking the police to cowering behind their protective cordons in the space of a week.

Entirely peaceful counter-protests across Britain prevented another appalling night of violence, and Keir Starmer’s stenographers in the media are already seeking to award him credit for "handling" the riots.

There are many problems with this absurd narrative.

It took Starmer almost a week of nightly extreme-right riots to even decide that it wasn’t the best time for him to jaunt off on a family holiday, and when he did deign to intervene, the best he could come up with was a couple of impotent speeches that refused to call out the disgusting culture of racism and Islamophobia that stoked the rioting in the first place.

Starmer’s own track record on these issues is extremely concerning. From the "hostile environment" towards people of colour he’s been constructing within the Labour Party; through his inexplicable racist attack on Bangladeshis during the election; to the extreme-right rhetoric used by himself and other Labour Party figures to stoke up resentment and hatred towards refugees.

[Video Credit: Saul Staniforth]

It’s abhorrent to see Labour right figures like Jonathan Ashworth now attempting to take the moral high ground against politicians who have "fanned the flames of racism" when the Labour right have deliberately and consistently imitated divisive extreme-right rhetoric, rather than opposing it.

Let’s not forget that Keir Starmer forced the Labour candidate in Clacton out of the election campaign in order to give Nigel Farage a free run at the seat too.

Starmer was so concerned that the young black candidate in Clacton was upstaging his own election campaign (with viral videos and interviews in GQ magazine) that he decided to give the seat to Farage! That’s how much Starmer really cares about opposing the extreme-right.

Then there’s the fact that Keir Starmer and the Labour Home Secretary sent out diktats attempting to prevent Labour politicians from participating in the massive and effective counter-demonstrations last night.

In these diktats they attempted to pretend that acts of community solidarity against the violent racist mobs would impede police efforts to contain the violence.

In reality, we’ve all seen how the police were way out of their depth to begin with.

They let things get so out of hand that a library and a Citizens Advice Bureau were burned down; mosques were attacked; racist road blocks were set up in Middlesbrough; shops were looted all over the country; private residences were invaded by racist mobs; cars were burned; £millions worth of public and private property was destroyed; and racist mobs even attempted to burn down two hotels full of terrified refugees.

The police were horribly over-stretched on the ground, and it seems like police intelligence on the attacks the extreme-right mobs were plotting was sorely lacking too, given their demonstrable inability to prevent so many arson attacks and looting rampages.

It’s only when decent British people took to the streets in enormous numbers to demonstrate that extreme-right thuggery isn’t welcome in our streets that the violence was constrained … and Keir Starmer’s position just yesterday was that these counter-demonstrations were an awful idea, and that Labour politicians shouldn’t be attending them!

Let’s not allow Keir Starmer and his acolytes to completely rewrite the story of the riots into a wonderful personal success for him, just like they tried to steal the credit for Marcus Rashford’s campaign against child hunger.

Starmer clearly wanted ordinary people to stay away so we could suffer more pitched battles between extreme-right thugs and over-stretched police forces.

But to Starmer’s chagrin, decent people came out in their thousands to protect their own communities, which is a display of the people power that Starmer and his Labour right technocrats utterly despise.

Hence their demands that Labour politicians stay away, and their refusal to repeal Tory anti-protest laws that result in much harsher sentences for peaceful environmental protesters than for any of the racist thugs who have been terrorising our communities.

Community solidarity is what beats extreme-right thuggery.

It’s a lesson we’ve learned time and again, from The Battle of Cable Street in the 1930s that saw off Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists; through the mass resistance to the National Front in the 1970s; to the success of the peaceful counter-protests last night.

We can’t let Starmer and his goons overwrite this important lesson about community solidarity with a load of factually inaccurate and self-aggrandising bollocks about what a great job they supposedly did to stop the riots.

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