Fascists on the streets are no longer chanting ‘Tommy Robinson’ but ‘Boris, Boris, Boris!’. And while he may have lost his parliamentary majority, his spectacular antics have a greater prize in mind: winning the next election so that he can gut the state; trample on workers’ rights and environmental regulations; enable the hedge funds who’ve invested heavily in a no deal Brexit to make a killing; and open up the British market to his billionaire backers. And if Britain becomes an authoritarian regime in the process, so what?

Boris’ elevation to the premiership has not happened in a vacuum. In Britain, decades of right-wing media messaging from outlets like the Daily Mail and the Express have launched attacks on the institutional foundations of liberal democracy: parliament, the judiciary, the civil service. They have whipped up xenophobia and reaction amongst a significant constituency of the British electorate.

Supposedly ‘liberal’ outlets like the BBC, with their anti-labour and anti-Corbyn editorial policy, have stoked this further, consistently platforming spokespeople of the far-right, from Steve Bannon to Generation Identity. Big data and targeted advertising on social media played a critical role, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighting the rife abuse of data for political ends.

Public services devastated by decades of austerity, and a capitalist system that has left many workers exploited with high living costs and low wages has created rage amongst the British people, some of whom who have been persuaded by the media and the racist Tory regime to scapegoat migrants rather than politicians and bosses. The Brexit vote encapsulated this sentiment.

As this study from LSE shows, it was not a monolithic ‘working class’ that drove the Brexit vote. Instead, the ‘squeezed middle’ played an instrumental role. Many Tory voters in the shires — white, older — swung the vote. Neoliberalism has created atomised individuals and broken down any sense of community solidarity.

The squeezed middle, struggling to cope, turns to patriotism, nationalism, and strongmen leaders to fulfill their need for belonging. This trend is repeated across the globe: from Trump’s America to Orban’s Hungary, from Modi’s India to Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In my recent book, co-authored with Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, and Phil Hearse, we call this process Creeping Fascism.

It is now crunch time for Brexit and the liberal parliamentary order as we know it. For the Labour Left, the crisis is existential. Labour’s Brexit fudge isn’t working. The party has wasted years promising to deliver a ‘jobs first’ Brexit, failing to expose it for the racist, far-right, billionaire-backed venture that it is.

In doing so, it’s hemorrhaged progressive remain voters across the country. It’s not just the polls – long discredited on the Labour Left for their failure to predict the 2017 election – that prove this. The EU election results were a hammer blow to Labour, and the Peterborough by-election evidenced a huge drop in vote share.

The progressive vote is now split between Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens. With the Tory Party and the Brexit Party now headed for an electoral alliance, the far-right vote is soon to be unified. If things remain as they are now, we will have a Tory-Brexit Party majority government in power by the end of the next election.

Labour MPs and the shadow cabinet know it. That, of course, is why legislation for a general election has not yet passed. The only way for Labour to stand a chance, and we must repeat this over and over again, is for Labour to unequivocally back a radical remain position.

It must not be the remain campaign of Cambell and Blair. We must go, all guns blazing, on an offensive against the Brexiters and their fundamentally capitalist, racist agenda. We must defend migrants and free movement. As Sabrina Huck recently argued in LabourList, capitalism as a system must be explicitly criticised and a real socialist transformation offered. And our manifesto as a whole: domestic and foreign, must be far more radical than 2017.

A four-day week, universal basic income, rent controls, housing as a guaranteed right for all, complete nationalisation of railways and the energy industry are just some of the ideas that have been floated. Of course we can and should dare to go even further. A positive, inspiring, visionary manifesto from the Labour Party can break us free from the current constitutional quagmire and threat of fascism.

But a radical policy agenda is not enough. Labour most mobilise its mass movement onto the streets. The fascists are emboldened. On Saturday, they brazenly attacked two demonstrations and started altercations with the police. They openly stated their intentions to attack Diane Abbott and Owen Jones (who has already been ambushed and beaten on his birthday), both of whom were speaking at the rallies. This is an escalation of their previous mobilisations. The Left must be ready to take control of the streets to defeat the fascists and create a new generation of activists to fight for socialism in Britain, Europe, and the world.

This is the only way to tear apart the Tory and Brexit party’s base of Leave voters. The appetite for a clean break with the existing order exists: the task for Labour is to ensure this radicalism is channeled to the Left, not to fascism and the far right.

Seema is co-author of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it with Neil Faulkner, Phil Hearse and Samir Dathi. Follow her on Twitter @seema_syeda.

Source: The Guardian

Momentum launches a new campaign to bankrupt climate change and stop Barclays bank funding the fossil fuel industry.

We all know that the impact of climate change is felt unequally, depending on where you live, how wealthy you are and how easily you can shield yourself from its effects. Less widely known, however, is that responsibility for the crisis is unequal too. In recent years we have been sold a lie: that ordinary people are to blame for the climate crisis. It’s our spending and our consumption habits that have created the mess we’re in, we are told, not the bankers, oil companies and a rich elite.

French president Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax, which sparked the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement into life, exemplified this approach. The tax attacked the rural working poor – ordinary people are being pitted against planet.

But there is another way. The truth is that the crises we face – economic, social and ecological – are the fault of an economic system that serves the few, not the majority. The rich have become richer, while austerity has hollowed out Britain, and the ecosystems sustaining life have been devastated.

At the pinnacle of this system stands the fossil fuel industry. A report last year showed that just 100 companies have been responsible for over 70% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1988. The fossil fuel industry has wrecked the planet, while enacting violence and devastation across the global south. They brought about this crisis, and they should be the ones to pay for it.

But fossil fuel companies aren’t the only ones to blame here. These companies are only able to finance their mines and oilfields with the help of banks. And believe it or not, these banks are increasing their financing for fossil fuel companies. A decade ago they crashed the economy; now they’re crashing the planet.

According to the Banking on Climate Change report, the worst offender in Europe is Barclays. Since the Paris agreement was signed at the end of 2015, Barclays has funded the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $85bn, from fracking and coal here in Britain to the Dakota Access pipeline in North America. In each case this funding has been integral to fossil fuel companies undertaking ecocidal projects, sometimes forcefully, against the wishes of local communities.

If we can pressure Barclays into stopping its fossil fuel finance, we will throw a spanner in the workings of a capitalist machine intent on extracting profit by any means, even at the expense of the planet. That’s why today, Momentum members around the country are launching a new campaign to bankrupt climate change and stop Barclays funding the fossil fuel industry. With over 40 creative direct actions planned at Barclays branches on the first day of the campaign alone, we will put huge political pressure on the bank to end its key role in financing climate chaos.

In doing so, we are drawing on a rich history of protest. In the 1980s British students campaigned for Barclays to withdraw from apartheid South Africa – and won. More recently French campaigners successfully pressured banks into stopping funding coal projects. And just last month, renters’ unions across the UK, including Acorn, forced NatWest to drop a policy discriminating against welfare claimants.

Our campaign can succeed too, especially in the context of an upsurge in climate activism. From the inspiring youth climate strikes, to the push for structural change by the Sunrise Movement in the US and Labour for a Green New Deal in the UK, people across the world are demanding not just the decarbonisation of our economies, but the transformation of the very basis of our societies too.

Ordinary people will no longer accept the many being punished for the crimes of the few who caused the climate crisis. Instead, we’re pointing the finger squarely at the oil barons, the fossil fuel executives, and the corporate elites – and demanding something better.

Seema Syeda is an author and Momentum activist. See also her recent article Christchurch, Islamophobia, and the rise of the far-right. On 2nd April 2019, she is speaking at a London public meeting titled Islamophobia, Brexit & Creeping Fascism. Details…

Seema Syeda is co-author of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it, published by Public Reading Rooms March 2019

How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself in the early 21st century? How do we break fascism, before it breaks us, and open the road to an alternative future and a world transformed?

Read More…

A global alliance of neoliberals, racists, and the fascist far-right is capitalising on the upswing of discontent in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

In a sickening twist, the attacker video-recorded and live-streamed himself gunning down the congregation and pumping his bullets into the bodies of the dead, the injured, and those trying to crawl away to safety.

The footage was played live on his Facebook page; shared widely on alt-right platforms such as 8chan, and spread like wildfire across the rest of the internet. Today’s fascists are mobilising on the streets—but cyberspace is their richest recruiting ground, and is the key tool that has enabled them to so rapidly globalise their networks and share tactics and strategy.

This attack was not just an isolated incident. It must be seen in the wider context of rising Islamophobia, spurred on by the political establishment, the mainstream and tabloid media, and institutionalised state racism across the globe.

Directly before his murderous rampage in Christchurch, the attacker, a 28-year-old Australian man named Brenton Tarrant, published a 78-page manifesto in defence of his white supremacist ideology. The UK’s Daily Mail, notorious for its hate-filled, racially motivated headlines, immediately made the manifesto available online for download by its readership.

From Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ to Nigel Farage’s xenophobic Brexit campaign, Boris Johnson’s dehumanisation of Muslim women as ‘letterboxes’ to Matteo Salvini’s racist statement that ‘Islam has no place in the Italian constitution’ and that Italy must be ‘cleansed’ of migrants ‘street by street’, elected fascist politicians are fuelling the rise in anti-Muslim hatred.

In France, presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has stated that ‘Islam needs to be put back where there is no place for it’, and has compared Muslims praying peacefully in the streets to a ‘Nazi occupation’.

In India, Narendra Modi, formerly a full-time organiser for the known fascist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was elected prime minister in 2014 despite having presided, in 2002, over the bloodiest communal riots to occur in decades—when over 1000 people—mainly Muslim—were massacred in the state he was governing: Gujarat.

Under Modi, violence and lynchings of Muslims, as well as the assassination and intimidation of left-wing commentators and journalists, is now commonplace and generally occurs with relative impunity.

In China, vast swathes of the Muslim Uyghur population are being housed in concentration camps, euphemistically billed as ‘re-education camps’. In Burma, we have seen the state-sponsored genocide of the Muslim Rohingyas.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has recently announced on social media that ‘Israel is not a state of all its citizens’, later telling his cabinet that Israel is ‘the nation state… only of the Jewish people’—rhetorically de-legitimising the existence of Israel’s significant Muslim population.

Back in Britain, Muslims are already being treated as second-class citizens; indeed, in some instances, they are not even considered citizens at all. The UK Home Office’s treatment of the British-born Shamima Begum is a case in point.

Brainwashed by a radicalising ideology at the age of 15, she was induced to travel to Syria and ten days after her arrival, while still a child, she married Dutch-born convert Yago Riedijk.

While much can be said about how this young under-age girl was failed by the British state, the British state’s response to her requests to return are wholly unlawful and have set a precedent for the stripping of citizenship rights for British-born people without white skin; myself included.

Sajid Javid and the Tory Home Office’s actions send out the message that anyone whose parents or grandparents were not born in this country can now be made stateless at the whim of the British government. Indeed, even if your parents were born in this country, as Shamima Begum’s dead baby may testify from the grave, that does not qualify you for British citizenship.

Javid, of course, is trying to prove his mettle to the reactionary elements of the population who have ingested decades of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim propaganda. The Tory party, in its bid to stem the hemorrhaging of its electoral support to UKIP, has tacked to the far-right.

Javid, despite himself being of South Asian descent, has capitulated to Tommy (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) Robinson’s rhetoric of racial hatred, singling out the race of the perpetrators of the Rotheram sex-gang scandal on social media as  ‘sick Asian paedophiles’—as if their race, not their criminality, was the most important factor.

What is really going on? Racism and Islamophobia have complex and deep historical roots. But this recent upsurge and conjuncture with the rise of fascism has occurred in a specific politico-economic context.

Yaxley-Lennon, alongside many other of the far-right, fascist parties, is funded by big business and backed by billionaires. Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and the alt-right, racist news network Breitbart, are all financially supported by corporate sponsors—including former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, and Robert Mercer, co-CEO of the $50 billion Renaissance Technologies hedge fund. The dark funding behind the Brexit campaign has also been exposed, and it too has been exposed as a neoliberal project of the disaster capitalists: from Arron Banks to Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It is clear that a global alliance of neoliberals, racists, and the fascist far-right has emerged, and they are capitalising on the upswing of discontent that has mushroomed in the wake of the 2008 financial crash—channelling it into hatred towards the ‘other’.

Failed austerity policies, stagnant wages, market liberalisation, the rollback of social security, the intentional refusal of neoliberal governments to invest in social housing, free healthcare, better education, and sustainable jobs, compounded by historic levels of inequality as wealth and profits are hoovered up by the 1%, has unleashed a torrent of rage and discontent.

However, instead of blaming these problems on themselves and the failed neoliberal orthodoxy they have implemented, politicians and media outlets, funded by big business, have scapegoated migrants. Bosses, bankers, and politicians are not to blame: Muslims, refugees, free movement, and people of colour are.

Take, for instance, the British tabloid newspaper The Sun. In an article headlined ‘SUN SAYS: We urge our readers to beLEAVE in Britain and vote to quit the EU on June 23’, the erroneous statement that ‘To remain means being powerless to cut mass immigration which keeps wages low and puts catastrophic pressure on our schools, hospitals, roads and housing stock’ was published.

This, of course, is an outright lie. Countless studies have shown that the British economy would be kneecapped without migration, particularly given the ageing population. Indeed research from the Oxford Migration Observatory shows that migration has boosted British workers’ wages and overall economic performance in the medium and long term.

The real reason why wages remain stagnant across the world is the structure of the economy and the weakness of the trade union movement. In Britain, migrant workers are poorly unionised (though incipient steps are being taken to reverse this). Worker ownership and co-operativisation is low. Profits are being hoovered up by CEOs and shareholders. Social democratic parties, instead of fulfilling their historic post-war redistributive role, have cut back taxation and given in to the austerity narrative.

This capitulation of social democrats parties to the neoliberal orthodoxy and racist, migrant-scapegoating rhetoric is particularly dangerous. In an article for the Guardian, Hilary Clinton, former Democrat presidential candidate, stated that her party had to be more harsh on immigration to win. Even the left-wing leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn—usually an ardent and unequivocal defender of migrant and refugee rights—has repeated the claim about migrants depressing wages, stating in March 2018 that Brexit would prevent firms ‘importing cheap labour’ to undercut UK wages.

Len McCluskey, leader of Unite the Union and key backer of Jeremy Corbyn, has also capitulated to the rhetoric. He has urged that the Labour leadership must take concerns about immigration into account, and in a speech in 2016, stated, ‘we are also, I would argue, past the point where working people can be convinced that the free movement of labour has worked for them, their families, their industries, and their communities.’

This is a dangerous admission of defeat from a man whose career was built on the premise of fearlessly and unashamedly defending the working class—and that should, in theory, include the non-British born working class.

The Labour leadership in Britain, and social democratic parties across the world, have got it wrong. They got it wrong when they implemented austerity. They got it wrong when they ran with the narrative of ‘fiscal responsibility’. And they are getting it wrong now, when they are allowing the narrative of migrant-scapegoating for the woes of ordinary people to reign unchecked.

History shows us that appeasement never works. To defeat the far-right, left-wing parties and movements must unapologetically and unashamedly defend and protect the rights of refugees, migrants, and Muslims. They must quash the claims that it is migrants—not a rigged economic system—who undercut workers’ wages.

They must call out and fight back against the racism of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Sajid Javid, and the migrant-scapegoating Leave campaign. Across the globe, they must reach out to Muslim and migrant communities, and put them at the forefront of a united working-class movement to transform the neoliberal capitalist system into a system based on social justice and workers’ co-operation.

As the attacks on the synagogue at Pittsburgh, the murder of the liberal Polish mayor of Gdansk, the brutal stabbing of Labour MP Jo Cox, and now the massacre at Christchurch show, the fascist far-right is out to get us all. We must unite and fight back.

Seema Syeda is a writer, editor, and socialist activist. She is co-author of ‘Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it’, with Neil Faulkner, Phil Hearse, and Samir Dathi. Follow Seema on Twitter @seema_syeda.

Creeping Fascism: What It Is And How To Fight IT
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda.

The film of the 1930s is re-running in slow motion. Fascism is rising again. A tide of nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism is sweeping the world. This book is an urgent call to arms. It argues that we face the clear and present danger of creeping fascism.

READ MORE…