Earlier this month, I helped organise a protest to defend the refugees holed up at the Thistle City Barbican hotel in London. We mobilised 800 people to support the asylum seekers, who waved back at us from the hotel to show their gratitude. On the other side of the road, about 250 people had gathered to demand the hotel be closed. Speakers there called refugees “illegal”, “invaders” and “parasites”.
Seeing and hearing our opponents, the anti-racists responded with a spontaneous chant of “Nazi scum, off our streets”, which our side was able to sustain for more than an hour. I understand why people wanted to express their contempt for the people who tell lies about refugees, but the chant didn’t strike me as effective when I heard it, and the more I have thought about it since, the more convinced I am that it was the wrong strategy.
There were fascists present at the demonstration – one banner advertised a small hard-right group – but they were not the organisers; they hung back, mute, at the edge of the protest. The crowd did chant in support of Tommy Robinson. The latter, I suspect, is probably the link that organisations like Stand Up to Racism lean on when labelling the current anti-refugee movement as fascist. (Many of the protests, their spokesperson has said, “are organised by known fascists and Hitler admirers”.) But Robinson, unlike the fascists of the 1970s, doesn’t leaven his speeches with reworked passages from Mein Kampf. He isn’t a “Hitler admirer”, nor is he perceived as such by the movement. He used to boast of having a Churchill quote tattooed on his arm.
The strategy of labelling our enemies fascist depends on a context where the mainstream is willing to isolate and shame Nazis. Those are not the times we are living in. So a smarter, more tailored message is necessary.
Take Robert Jenrick, the shadow lord chancellor, who recently attended an anti-refugee protest in Epping. Anti-fascists released a photograph from the protest featuring Jenrick with Eddy Butler in the background – Butler is a former election candidate for the British National party and was the guru behind its “rights for whites” campaign in the 1990s. What was most revealing about the incident was what came next: a “source close” to Jenrick said he did not know who Butler was; Jenrick kept the photographs of his time in Epping showing on his X profile. He made it clear he wasn’t embarrassed, and the story dissipated to nothing.
If the movement was perceived as fascist – by Jenrick, or by the other Conservative and Reform politicians who have associated themselves with it, or by the Labour ministers who have conceded the right’s main demands and agreed to close the refugee hotels – then it would not be as confident and unrepentant as it is. And behind the politicians who have flattered the street movement are a much larger group who share its insistence on describing migration in negative terms. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, tweeted than a dozen times in August about migration – every one of his messages has presented it as problematic, “illegal” or the work of criminal people smugglers.
In the weeks since the Barbican protest, the anti-refugee movement has kept up its momentum. Calling them Nazis – even when there were fascists present at the edges of their event – has done little to undermine them. They don’t believe they are fascists; they don’t have organised fascists in their leading circles. The term seems to them exaggerated, laughable.
You may say I’m expecting too much of one term; even if the fascist label had worked, and got under our opponents’ skins, there is no way we would know it was working. But in the 1970s, it was common for former supporters of the National Front to break with that campaign and to cite its fascism as their reason for leaving. Here is one defector quoted in the East End Advertiser in 1977, explaining that she abandoned the far right when she saw pictures of Front leader John Tyndall dressed in a Nazi uniform. “I won’t stand for any of this Sieg Heil nonsense,” the former NF member said. (This was, of course, a mere 30 years after the blitz; east London still bore the physical scars left by German bombs.) If the same tactics were working 50 years later, anti-fascists would be meeting people like that and making sure their stories were in the press.
When we deal with the far right now, we are facing a movement that is pushing forward a group of female leaders – that feels different from five years ago, let alone 50 years since. In Islington, one of the speeches came from a woman described as running a local nursery (it was read out on her behalf). The contemporary far right is focused on pushing a single narrative about refugees, all based on the same logic – that the people in the hotel are single men, are foreigners, and on both scores are likely to be sexual predators.
This argument wins supporters, and it shields them from accusations that they are extremists. The only way to confront this is to meet it head on, by rejecting any idea that foreign men – or Muslims – are more prone to sexual offences than their British counterparts. The logic of the argument is racist – it relies on the assumption that just because they are migrants, or asylum seekers, or not white (and with no other supportive evidence), they must be more prone to sexual violence than the men who already live here.
And the simplest, one-line refutation of it is to look at the men who were convicted of offences in the various race riots that followed events at Southport last year. Of those men who attend the far-right protests, a staggering 40% have been reported to the police for domestic violence. There is, in other words, probably no single group of people – not in Britain or anywhere else – who are more prone to violence against women than the people now standing outside the hotels denouncing refugees.
This, rather than shouting Nazi, is the argument most likely to undermine the anti-refugee protests. We need to be using it in our leaflets, when we talk to people, and on our protests.