LONDON — The horrific stabbing to death of three young girls in Southport, near Liverpool, was met with widespread revulsion. Working people turned out to show their outrage.
Forces on both the right and left of capitalist politics intervened in ways that threaten political rights and are aimed at blocking a working-class response.
False reports that the killer was an immigrant were utilized by gangs of rightist forces to organize days of violent assaults on immigrants and small protests in over a dozen towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland.
Forces on the left of bourgeois politics organized their own protests targeting so-called fascists.
The three children, Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, were killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class for 6 to 11 year olds July 29. Five other children were critically wounded. Following the killings a false social media report said a Muslim asylum-seeker carried out the slaughter. In fact, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, a 17-year-old Cardiff-born son of Christian Rwandan immigrants, was charged.
Seven years earlier 22 people had been killed in nearby Manchester by an Islamist suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert.
Following the Southport killings, thugs attempted to set fire to hotels that house asylum-seekers, attacked mosques, torched and looted foreign-owned premises and physically attacked individual immigrants. They also engaged in pitched battles with riot cops.
The clashes come amid rising competition among workers for jobs, housing and health care, alongside boss attacks on wages and conditions. Politicians on the left and right of capitalist politics blame immigrants for the crisis.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new Labour government has used the riots to deal blows to free speech. A child care worker faces 18 months behind bars for the thought-control crime of “stirring up racial hatred,” and others have been arrested and jailed for things they wrote.
The government will target those “who took part in this violence, those who whipped them up on social media … and those who have felt emboldened by this moment to stir up racial hatred,” Home Secretary Yvette Cooper warned, threatening “swift justice.”
Already nearly 1,000 people have been arrested in connection with rioting, with 450 charged, 47 jailed for up to three years and more to come.
In Belfast, loyalist gangs and rightists from the Irish Republic joined the anti-immigrant attacks.
While at first the anti-immigrant actions attracted some misplaced sympathy because of the killings, most of them involved no more than a few hundred people and have since petered out.
Working people responded by coming to the aid of immigrants.
Chanaka Balasuriya, a Sri Lankan in Southport, had his shop looted. He came in the next day to find people he didn’t know cleaning it up. His windows were repaired for free and money was raised to help him. “It’s not about the money people gave me. It was the messages, the cards, the flowers. That support from strangers is unbelievable,” Balasuriya told the BBC.
King Charles Windsor praised the cops Aug. 9, issuing a call to “strengthen and unite the nation.” Echoing the classless appeal, a statement circulated by Stand Up to Racism and signed by members of Parliament and union leaders proclaimed, “Britain has a proud history of defeating fascists.”
Stand Up to Racism organized several large protests in response to the riots. But the thrust of these actions was not to unite the working class, but to target opponents in bourgeois politics that the group falsely accuses of being “fascist” and to seek to crush them. This included targeting the headquarters of the Reform political party, which gained 14% of the vote in the recent general election. Reform leader Nigel Farage MP is branded as a “fascist” by the left.
“We need to cut all their throats and get rid of them,” said Ricky Jones, a Labour councilor, to cheers at a Stand Up to Racism protest, in bloodthirsty remarks directed at so-called fascists. Jones was subsequently prosecuted for his comments.
A group called Finchley Against Fascism, issued an online leaflet calling on people to protest to “get fascists, racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes out of Finchley!” a Jewish area in north London. “Zionist” is used as a code word for Jew among opponents of Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for the Jewish people.
“There’s no rise in fascism today in the U.K. or other imperialist countries,” Communist League leader Jonathan Silberman told the Militant.
No rise in fascism today
The League issued a statement Aug. 6 condemning the killing of the three children, the thug attacks on immigrants and the rise in Jew-hatred. It calls for an amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the U.K. “In the absence of a mass united working-class struggle, or any working-class political voice, some workers get diverted to scapegoating workers born abroad,” it says.
“But working people have started to resist, turning to the unions.” And “that opens the road to a working-class alternative.”
Silberman pointed to the recent union-organizing fight at the Amazon warehouse in Coventry, which involved workers of many nationalities joining together to fight the bosses.
The CL statement highlights the pressing need for a party of labor, to “chart a course of independent working-class political action: a class break, from Labour, Conservative, Reform, Liberal Democrat, Green and the Scottish National parties.”