On Saturday 13 September an estimated 110-150,000 people demonstrated on the streets of central London waving Union and St. George flags to ‘Unite the Kingdom’. This followed a campaign of painting the cross of St. George on roundabouts and bridges and attaching the flag to lampposts which no car driver or bus traveller could have failed to notice. Meanwhile the Reform UK party tops polls of voting intentions and is winning local council by-elections up and down the country.
Some, like the organisers of the much smaller — only some 5,000 — counter-demonstration ‘against fascist Tommy Robinson and his Far Right supporters’, see it as the beginning of the rise of a fascist movement that needs to ‘smashed’. Certainly, the organisers were demagogic rabble-rousers peddling prejudice and hate, starting with Robinson himself. Some are indeed fascists. Others seem to have been Christian Nationalists as evidenced by some demonstrators waving crosses. But that’s the organisers.
Most of those taking part in the demonstration can’t reliably be called fascists, but are people who had been misled into believing that immigrants and asylum-seekers are somehow being given priority over people born here. They aren’t, but the rabble-rousers encourage the mistaken belief that they are. The socialist response is not to smash such demonstrations but to argue all the more forcefully why all workers, native or immigrant, should unite to end the capitalist system that treats them both as second class.
What we are witnessing is not fascism, which arguably belongs to a different era and different political conditions, but what political philosophers have called ‘nativism’ — the view that the established population of a state should be given priority over incomers. ‘Nativism’ is one end of the spectrum of nationalism, distinguished by insisting that measures should be taken against immigrants, from making it difficult for them to become citizens to stopping more coming to deporting those who have come.
Part of the socialist case against trying to reform capitalism to make it work for all is that the rise of reactionary parties — including in its day fascism — is a result of the inevitable failure of reformist politics and parties to do this. Those excluded from the ownership and control of society feel (correctly) that their problems are not being solved and (mistakenly) expect politicians to solve them. Traditionally either the Conservative Party or the Labour Party have been elected to do this. At the moment, the Tories are still discredited by the failure and antics of the previous government while the Labour Party, given a chance after last year’s election, has very quickly — more quickly than would normally be expected —become discredited too. This has left an opening for a different set of politicians to bid to have a go.
Reform UK, too, will fail as the problems are not caused by what governments do or don’t do but by the workings of the capitalist economic system, which both causes the problems and prevents their solution. The excluded majority are treated as second class because under capitalism making profits for those who own the resources on which society depends comes first. As long as capitalism persists, and as long as people put up with it, the needs of the excluded majority will come second — and some of that majority will be duped by far-right demagogues.
