Britain is being beset by a new wave of far-right aggression against migrants. This is fuelled by despair in sections of the native-born working class and other sections that have long been abandoned by the Labour Party, that was originally created as a half-step towards independent working-class politics. But the days have long gone when any real gains from working-class people came from electing Labour politicians. 40 years ago, Margaret Thatcher waged war against effective trade unionism, in order to gut the core of the British working class and export productive manufacturing sectors: mines, steel, the motor industry largely to lower wage economies to offset the low rate of profit that the employing class were able to make from these industries when located in the former ‘workshop of the world’. Similar problems have beset most of the older imperialist countries.
The core of the British working class benefited considerably from Britain’s early monopoly position as a capitalist-imperialist power, and gained the subliminal consciousness of itself as the ‘popular’ layer of Britain, the supposed bringer of democracy and progress to the world. The working class of imperial Britain was “cut down to size” decades after Britain lost its imperial monopoly, first in conflict with Germany in two world wars, following on from which it was by degrees pushed to one side by its ally, US imperialism. The sheer strength of organisation of the British working class delayed the massacre by decades – only by the 1980s was the sledgehammer ready. But when the British ruling class decided it could no longer afford that imperial illusion among its subjects, the Labour and trade union bureaucracy, in thrall to that imperial conceit far more than the masses, betrayed every struggle against the jobs massacre.
Ever since then Labour has been a Thatcherite party, barring a brief period in the late 2010s when a tepid left-Labourism was reinstated under Corbyn through a revolt from below as the neoliberal political class in Labour was caught napping. But that did not offset the decades-long purging of the parliamentary and political bureaucracy under Labour by neoliberals, and relatedly, fervent Zionists who are key to the neoliberal cult that arose out of Thatcherism in the whole political class. Even though Corbyn’s Labour was able to show its mass appeal in the 2017 election and nearly won, it was still sabotaged, ruthlessly by the neoliberals. They put together effectively a new, secretive Zionist-funded bourgeois party, Labour Together, within Labour to reassert neoliberal control with Starmer as its frontman.
The party in power today is Labour Together, not Labour as previously known to the masses. Its main policy seems to be to inflame far right discontent with attacks on the working-class and thereby feeding the growth of posh-boy billionaire- and Israeli-funded far right parties – Reform, led by Nigel Farage, the more openly racist Restore Britain of Rupert Lowe and not least their street thug auxiliary, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”). Starmer’s victory in the 2024 General Election therefore was that of a secretive party of outright bourgeois reaction thinly disguised in a Labour Party wrapper. The British working class was completely unrepresented. Its foreign policy is completely reactionary, backing Nazism in Ukraine and Zionist genocide to the hilt in Gaza.
The attempt by Zarah Sultana in 2025 to create a new working-class party was shipwrecked by the duplicity of Corbyn, who appears to have gone along with it in order to wreck it. It gained the active attention of 800,000 potential members when it was announced, but afraid that the party whose creation would be too radical and too large for his liking, Corbyn manoeuvred to sabotage it. Since then, it has been a shambles – much of its potential mass base has defected to the Green Party, led by the left-talking Zack Polanski, which however is not a working-class party and therefore does not have the class-based drawing power that a real workers party would have.
So, the British working class is still leaderless, and its more backward, demoralised and lumpen sections prey to delusions in right-wing parties that they can “Restore Britain”, the analogue of Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. This is in reality a nightmare for working class people of untrammelled rule by the decayed predatory billionaire financial-speculator bourgeoise, with its fondness for Zionist genocide and sexual abuse of children. As epitomised by the social connections of both the right-populists like Farage and Trump, and also the godfathers of Labour Together (Peter Mandelson) with the Israeli-Mossad child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
So that is the context for the far-right riots, flags on lampposts and painting of roundabouts, the racist polarisations that repeatedly happen in Britain, and which the left is struggling to combat. Fundamentally the problem is that the working class in Britain has been robbed of class-wide political representation and political leadership for its struggles. What is needed above all is a party of the working class able to give a class expression to social discontent and to put forward systems of demands to be implemented in struggle that point to the abolition of capitalism itself. We need to mobilise the sections of the class that do retain class-consciousness against the lumpen demoralisation – and where necessary against the hardened lumpen elements themselves – in organised defence corps and ultimately working-class militias. These must defend the migrant sections of our class, and indeed all sections, against reactionary and anti-social violence. This has to be tied to a firm defence of migrants against all legal and physical attacks, and the demand for trade union organisation of migrant workers and the restoration of the closed shop. But that principled approach does not absolve us of the need to address actual issues that arise concretely.
Racist eruptions and despair – the antidote
The murder of 18-year-old university student Henry Nowak in Southampton on 3 December 2025 was a flashpoint. When the culprit, Vickrum Digwa, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on May 28th, it ignited a storm of far-right agitation. This agitation had been prepared on Elon Musk’s X for several months, but could not be mentioned in the British media until the case concluded. Henry Nowak was an English-born youth of Polish parentage; his killer is a 23-year-old Sikh. It does appear that after an apparently trivial late-night exchange between them, Digwa took offence and stabbed Henry Nowak five times with a 21-inch ceremonial knife. Digwa and his brother then phoned the police and claimed that Henry was a racist assailant, which was untrue. The cops arrived and treated Henry as a criminal, putting him in handcuffs even as he was bleeding to death. When he told the male officer he had been stabbed, the cop replied “I don’t think so, mate” and put cuffs on him. Only then did a female officer realise what had happened and try to save him. In vain – he died at the scene.
The cops were clearly negligent, as they did not separate the parties and examine both – it is not clear whether Henry Nowak would have survived if they had. They simply believed Digwa and his family, who knowingly called police and made false allegations of racism to get Digwa off the hook. There was a huge outcry from the far right, despite the Nowak family – his parents are Polish immigrants – stating publicly that his death must not be exploited to cause hatred. But this case has been a cause celebre of fascists who initiated riots in Southampton over this case and extensively fought battles with cops. Farage’s incendiary claim that this was ‘two-tier policing’ in favour of non-whites against white people, and call for ‘cold rage’ in response to that was obvious incitement for this violence. The ‘cold rage’ phrase was formulated for ‘plausible deniability’ so those who responded with violence could then be disowned, as they duly have been as a variety of rioters have been sent down for various violent offences related to the riots.
Then there was a stabbing in Belfast by a Sudanese refugee, which was the spark for a pogrom in the Protestant Shankhill Road area. Black families were the target of virulent racial hostility with people burned out of their homes, while British far-right politicians basically called for the violence and sought to spread it. Hundreds of lamentable murders take place in Britain every year, most of them are committed by perpetrators from the native population. Sensationalising the inevitable ones where immigrants are involved is a dangerous, cynical form of grifting that the ruling class uses as part of a divide-and-rule strategy. The cops are incompetent and class-prejudiced even when they are put upon to check the race prejudices that are rampant among them. The idea that there is some kind of ‘two-tier’ justice system discriminating against whites is a cynical piece of nonsense put about by fascist grifter politicians, looking to ride to power in the manner of Trump on the backs of despair and a vacuum of class politics.
The only sustainable antidote to this fascistic project is to create a genuine class party to fill that vacuum. And the latest diversion from this is the candidacy of Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election aiming at a return to parliament to challenge Starmer’s leadership, trying to keep the neoliberal Labour project going after Starmer appears to have run it off the road. Another key obstacle is the Green Party, which is attempting to fill the vacuum to the left of Labour but is unable to do so because of its petty-bourgeois class nature and politics. All of these may require various tactical approaches to win people away from them, but this can only be done by creating a real working-class party out of those forces open to this, and with the potential to develop a real, anti-capitalist revolutionary programme.
