Letters
Shanly resigns
I respond in a personal capacity to last week’s letter from Max Shanly with the claim that members of RS21’s Marxist Unity Caucus (MUC) led the Democratic Socialists of Your Party to become “nothing more than a rump of what it once was” (June 11).
DSYP, as we came to know it, was formed through the merger of two grassroots groups, DSYP and For a Party Republic, the latter founded by Shanly on the back of popularising a unitary, mass socialist party, modelled on the constitutional structure of the Democratic Socialists of America. These ideas formed the basis for a broad appeal and popular campaign group to win this approach in the founding of Your Party and ultimately, at the YP founding conference in late 2025.
Despite multiple attempts to plan ahead, comrades in DSYP were unable to reach clarity on its purpose. This is the moment when DSYP became the rump of what it once was - there was simply no agreed plan on what next - and after an incredibly intensive four-month campaign with mixed results, our organisers had started to disengage.
Shanly immediately pushed for DSYP to be the leading group in forming a slate for the YP central executive committee elections. His strategy focused on the exclusion of competing groups - eg, Democratic Bloc and Organising for Popular Power - in order to leverage his much repeated claim of deep friendship and connection with Zarah Sultana MP, as the ‘big name’ for a slate, and get as many DSYP organisers as possible elected to the CEC. In doing so, it would then be possible to course-correct YP.
While I was a member of the DSYP executive committee in late 2025, I warned that the lack of direction for DSYP after the YP founding conference, combined with sleepwalking into the CEC elections without democratic accountability inside DSYP, would demoralise and burn out a majority of our organisers. That’s exactly what happened.
Shanly and his allies gained a majority influence within DSYP through internal disputes, personal attacks and making accusations of incompetence against myself and other members of the EC, which led to a number of us resigning. I published a long-form response alongside my resignation, raising my concerns, the risks, uncomradely behaviour and contradictions on Shanly’s explanations on maintaining an exclusive communication channel with Sultana, which gave him unaccountable influence to bypass our democratic norms. In doing so I was accused by Shanly and his allies of betraying DSYP and jeopardising our chance to form a slate with Sultana. Soon after I resigned from the EC, Shanly was elected to the EC in a by-election, which in my opinion started a period of DSYP developing a culture of secrecy, a lack of democracy and accountability - despite the best efforts of some EC comrades who spent subsequent months firefighting and trying to open up the organisation.
Over the Christmas break, the Grassroots Left slate emerged from a series of secretive meetings, featuring Shanly and a line-up of DSYP candidates that were close to him. The national campaign team was headed by Shanly as one of two campaign directors and the team consisted almost entirely of his close allies in DSYP, each given formal and hubristic job titles. Very early into the Grassroots Left campaign a series of internal disagreements, dramas and power struggles erupted. Just as the national campaign had barely started, Shanly and almost all of his campaign team resigned. Shanly disappeared, focusing instead on his individual campaign only. Around this time, Shanly also resigned from the DSYP EC.
A minority of DSYP organisers, including myself, recognised the opportunity and task ahead of us and critically supported Grassroots Left. Through the leadership of Tina Becker part-way through the CEC campaign, we helped to save Grassroots Left from the fallout of its key DSYP founders who had walked away. We had the unenviable task of repairing relationships, rebuilding credibility, developing systems, coordinating getting the vote out and more, in the middle of a live campaign - all critical tasks that should have been planned for before the campaign had even started. In these circumstances I’m proud of the camaraderie, transparency and discipline that we brought to the new national campaign team.
Several weeks later Shanly returned to the national campaign team in the final days to propose a library of day-one motions in the event Grassroots Left actually won. However, we did not win a majority on the CEC and Shanly resigned, again, leaving Grassroots Left as a minority bloc on the CEC that lacked any coherent political foundation and functional internal democratic processes.
By this time, Shanly had been losing votes routinely for months in DSYP, the EC and inside Grassroots Left. Therefore, the reasons why Shanly’s motion for the refounding of DSYP (now Democratic Socialists) fell are simple - whilst his underlying proposal for a ‘Democratic Socialist Party of Great Britain’ was very ambitious, it lacked critical detail on practical and political questions, and his record spoke volumes as to his opportunistic attitude towards organising, leadership and group discipline. It then came as no surprise that, soon after, Shanly resigned from DSYP.
The refounded Democratic Socialists has just launched (see democraticsocialists.org.uk). I encourage comrades to read our points of unity, interim programme and constitution for a steady campaign to build towards a mass socialist party that we so desperately need.
Jon Benson
DS EC member, RS21 and MUC
WP nonsense
Further to my admittedly very short report of the ‘Connections convention’ event held on June 6 in Sheffield, which featured in last week’s Weekly Worker (‘Another fine mess’ June 11), I thought it would be worthwhile to explain how the ‘second statement’ came about.
It is very short and reads: “This convention agrees to encourage local socialists to build an open meeting to organise against the coming anti-cost of living crisis and prepare to resist it, aiming to unite the left, local unionists and community campaigners, including tenants and renters groups, as well as those of the oppressed. This could lay the basis for a national anti-crisis assembly in future months that could outline an emergency plan to make the bosses pay, not us, and put it into action.”
This was put forward by the Workers Power group, a couple of days ahead of the convention - initially they wanted it to replace the much longer statement, which outlines some of the political problems that have led to the implosion of Your Party, as well as how a real democratic socialist party would have to be built: “with a clear programme for socialism (ie, a classless society in which production is for need, not private profit, with a planned economy in place of the market and private ownership), transparency, openness, accountability and thorough-going democracy”. Any further conference of the left should be “a space for open and democratic debate, reflective of the need for a culture where differences are not brushed under the carpet, but are openly debated and discussed, in front of the working class”.
At the convention itself then, Workers Power changed their tune and suggested their motion should become an “additional statement”. That’s a real shame, because there can be no doubt their nonsense ‘statement’ would have been defeated and rather spectacularly so.
It sums up everything that is wrong with much of the Trotskyist left today. It believes it can somehow fool the working class into becoming socialists by dreaming up this or that economistic campaign or clever short cut (in this case, not so clever). For a start, the cost of living crisis is not “coming” - it is very much already here. There have been a number of campaigns which tried to organise ‘the masses’ around that - among them the People’s Assembly and Enough is Enough - with very little success.
This is the kind of campaign that an existing party of the working class could perhaps organise - with mass occupations, local organising committees, etc. But it will not work the other way around - especially with the dwindling numbers of people involved in both the Socialist Federation and the Connections network. There are maybe 150 people currently remaining in both, and many of them are of the ‘keyboard warrior’ variety, with many different political outlooks (all effectively brushed under the carpet).
A real party of the working class will have to be built by patiently discussing what we are actually in favour of - what kind of party, what kind of political culture, with what kind of programme. This is the total opposite of the approach by much of today’s Trotskyist left, which builds confessional sects and/or ‘broad fronts’ with swampy politics, but has no understanding of the need for a party of the working class that fights for extreme democracy. No wonder Workers Power first wanted to do away with the statement discussing some of those issues. Once again led by their former (?) leader, Richard Brenner, they have also been arguing for Grassroots Left to meet in secret and to adhere to Karie Murphy’s demands for confidentiality (part of the reason why it imploded, as we explained in last week’s issue of the Weekly Worker). This is the opposite of the culture of transparency, accountability and democracy we need.
Although the motion went through at the convention, there was little enthusiasm for it, with most people abstaining and a few opposing it. We have no doubt that this particular ‘campaign’ will go absolutely nowhere.
Carla Roberts
email
Atheist chime
I’d like to chime in with some musings originally inspired by Jon Hochschartner’s letter of May 28. Because I’ve delayed so long to reply to that letter, I can now also comment on Conor McC’s response to the same (Letters, June 11).
Comrade Hochschartner’s letter was, in essence, a plea by a socialist Christian that “religious tradition and historical materialism” can be “reconciled”. Comrade McC’s reply repudiates this contention, arguing that allowing a “divine foot in the door” obstructs our ability to gain an accurate understanding of the world we live in, and thereby also obstructs our ability to organise politically around a programme to change it. He concludes his letter with this line: “So the question remains not whether we can hold both perspectives at once, but rather whether we should.”
Whether we should, indeed. Should we (I take this to mean the members of the organised socialist movement) each as individuals hold atheist or hard agnostic views on the question of religion? And if the answer to that question is yes, should we - this time meaning as a democratic collective decision made by our party - take measures to induce that minority of religious party members to leave their supernatural beliefs behind?
I ask these questions because the issue of religion is notoriously one of the most difficult things to change someone’s mind about. People that choose to die rather than accept another or no religious creed are celebrated as ‘martyrs’ in the Abrahamic faiths. Atheists and agnostics (and most deists), lacking a belief in supernatural life after death, typically weren’t as enthusiastic to die for thoughts that had no direct life-and-death relevance, but fictional accounts of atheist martyrdom still exist: for example, Percy Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, who are both burned at the stake for their role in leading an atheistic failed revolution against the Ottoman state.
Therefore it is right to call religion a question of conscience, because individual beliefs about religion can sometimes contradict the will of the individual himself. For example, I myself was raised as a Christian, but I privately did not believe in a god from almost as early as I can remember. For more than a decade I tried to force myself to believe in the supernatural claims underlying the system of ethics, and I only fully accepted my atheism after I was won to socialist politics and read Marx and Engels.
As a result of this I think we should make no attempt to ban religious worship, ban religious believers from holding party office, or otherwise try to induce atheist beliefs by force. This position has very wide acceptance on the socialist left, including in the CPGB-PCC’s programme. Its more controversial stance on religion comes from this later passage:
“The Communist Party says that the state should consider religion a private matter. However, from the point of view of the party itself, religion - whether it be an established cult or a residual belief in the supernatural - is not a private matter. Our party cannot be indifferent to the ignorance, gullibility and irrationality religion engenders in the minds of the masses. The CPGB therefore conducts atheist propaganda.”
That gets at the real policy I think we need to debate: should our socialist press conduct atheist propaganda? If so, how ardently should we pursue our atheist evangel? Is it worthwhile to persuade socialists to become atheists, if at the same time we dissuade religious believers from becoming socialists?
Looking back at the five or so years I’ve been reading the Weekly Worker, I have a hard time remembering examples where I’ve seen atheist propaganda being conducted. Almost all of it comes from Jack Conrad, typically around Christmas time, based on what I assume are extracts of his book on the historical Jesus. Granted, I also can’t remember any examples of religious propaganda (the letters page excluded), but secularism is now the norm in most political publications, from the centre-right leftwards. It does not directly challenge “the ignorance, gullibility and irrationality religion engenders in the minds of the masses”.
The most classic examples of atheist propaganda seen historically in the socialist press have come from our obituaries: “the greatest living thinker ceased to think”, having “peacefully gone to sleep - but forever”, and so on. No matter how poetically things are put, the thought of sleeping forever is unsettling, compared to the religious presumption of thinking forever in heaven (and it is always presumed to be heaven and not hell; visit almost any 21st century gravesite today). Despite this, most of the heroes of the Marxist left made a point of writing these implicitly atheist obituaries.
For what it’s worth, I remember Eleanor Marx being especially eager to use the eternal sleep metaphor for her writings in Commonweal; we can deduce that the daughter of Karl Marx felt it was important to challenge the religious beliefs that were much more prevalent in Britain than in continental Europe. Also, for what it’s worth, I went back to the Weekly Worker’s memorial coverage for its deceased comrade, Kevin Bean, and saw none of this implicit atheist propaganda. I don’t know exactly how comrade Bean felt about religion, but I feel pretty confident in assuming he was an atheist.
The press affiliated with the Socialist Party of the United States during the Second International era provides us with an interesting example of a secular compromise in a party made up of widely varying viewpoints on religion. I really need to go back into the archive to dig up some more precise statistics on this question, but my impression from reading the socialist press is this: first- and second-generation immigrant socialists were mostly atheists, while native English speakers were mostly Christian. The socialist immigrants came first from Germany, especially during the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878-90), and then later from the Russian empire; ironically, ethnic Jews were the most notoriously militant atheists in the party.
On the other hand, seemingly a majority of the native English speakers in the party kept their Christian faith, and often claimed it was the force that inspired them to become socialists. Among the party’s native-speaking intelligentsia, I can only recall two confirmed examples of writers who left their childhood Christianity for “agnosticism”: William English Walling and Robert Rives La Monte. Compare them to John Spargo, Robert Hunter, JG Phelps Stokes or George D Herron (to name a few) as devout Christians, writing mostly secular socialist articles and books.
The result of this unusual melting pot is that I have never once seen an eternal sleep metaphor in US Socialist obituaries. This includes a case where I confirmed that both the deceased and the writer were self-described agnostics. Open atheist propaganda was surprisingly rare, although it did occasionally appear, mostly in the form of translations from German, such as Kautsky’s Origins of Christianity. On the other hand, openly religious sermons from socialist pastors were fairly regularly printed without comment in publications like the New York Call.
I get the impression that the Call’s editorial team, in keeping with the attitude of socialists in general, was trying to avoid printing any statements that could be quoted as endorsements of atheism. To that end, I’m pretty sure that most socialist ‘agnostics’ used the term as a euphemism for atheism; similarly, I think the widespread use of the term, ‘economic determinism’, was meant to avoid the atheistic connotations of ‘materialism’. In book-length works of socialist theory from that era, typically either Jesus is claimed as a socialist (“there is a lapse of nearly two thousand years between the birth of the first International and the second”, writes Robert Hunter in Socialists at work), or the topic is artfully avoided. William English Walling broke this silence and dared to declare in his book, The larger aspects of socialism, that “the majority of socialists are firmly convinced that socialism and modern science must finally lead to a state of society where there will be no room whatever for religion in any form”. The quote then became a favourite of anti-socialist propagandists for years to come, and I remember at least one socialist local coming out to disclaim the statement.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of an editorial conspiracy of silence in the US socialist press is the fact that its letters pages were packed to the gills with debates over religion, particularly in cooperatively run enterprises like the Call - debates so common that I stopped reading them before I started taking systematic notes. I can’t therefore give you an idea of how the question of atheist propaganda was dealt with, but I can tell you that, when the movement fractured over the question of opposing World War I, the debates over religion continued as if nothing had happened. It is true that immigrant socialists in the US remained anti-war to a far greater extent than native-speaking socialists, but it doesn’t appear to me that religion was a reliable dividing line in the split. Spargo and Stokes were Christians that supported the war, true, but perhaps the most vociferous pro-war renegades were the ‘agnostics’, Walling and La Monte. Walling went as far as cheering on the sometimes decades-long sentences imposed on his former comrades for “sedition”; La Monte went a step further by enlisting in the military at the age of 50 and willingly crushing anti-war strikes on the ‘homefront’.
So far I have only dealt with the Socialist Party of the US. On the subject of religion I would be remiss not to mention street agitation of the Industrial Workers of the World, which was surpassed only by the anarchists in anti-theist invective. Many of us here have heard the IWW song, ‘The preacher and the slave’, and its chorus, “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die”; what you may not know is that the song is set to the tune of a Christian hymn, and historically it was mostly sung to mock the street preachers that soap-boxers competed with for attention. Bill Haywood, the IWW’s most famous celebrity, was an outspoken atheist. While the IWW apparently officially disclaimed “anti-religious propaganda” by 1920, there’s no doubt that a lot of informal propaganda took place, and that members of the IWW opposed World War I and, moreover, joined what became the Communist Party at a far greater rate than the socialists.
I’ll wrap up with some provisional conclusions of my latest historical anecdote from America (if you, my mostly British audience, are lost or bored by these, please let me know!). I have come to believe that the American socialist movement, in the course of its political struggle against anarchism in the 1880s and 1890s, began to espouse an implicit orthodoxy that would hamstring its ability to respond to the political crises of 1914 onward. I don’t have space to explain what I think that orthodoxy was, except that I am now adding one more dogma to the list: a commitment to neutral secularism that ignores the need for atheist propaganda.
Socialism is compatible with the Christian virtues of neighbourly compassion and human brotherhood, true; socialism is not compatible with orders for “slaves” to “obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ”, in the hope of supernatural remuneration after death. The most admirable Christian cults sought to bring about the ‘Kingdom of Heaven on Earth’; we socialists don’t want a kingdom: we need a democracy; and we don’t want a saviour, because we need to free ourselves.
Bill Wright
USA
Imperial China?
I would like to address the International Socialist Alternative’s response (Letters, May 21) to my own criticism (Letters, April 30) of their article, ‘Just so stories’ (April 23). First of all, I apologise if poor reading comprehension led me to misidentify them as Spartacists. My bad. I am also willing to concede that I was overly enthusiastic with my accusations of Communist Party of China apologism. Having revisited their initial article, and with the helpful clarification of their subsequent letter, I believe that I was hasty in judging their arguments as being motivated by partisan support for China. Nonetheless, I maintain my fundamental disagreement with their assessment of China’s position in the global order.
With many of the ISA’s points, a comparison with the rise of imperial Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is useful. Indeed, one can often directly swap out a few words in the ISA’s sentences and find that they transform into arguments for why the Second Reich was not imperialist.
For example, “… instead of constituting a new imperialist power - the CPC leadership have accommodated US imperialism as part of their strategy for export-oriented economic development within the US-dominated system” becomes: ‘… instead of constituting a new imperialist power - the German leadership have accommodated British imperialism as part of their strategy for export-oriented economic development within the British-dominated system.’
This is a great deal more than a superficial similarity. The Second Reich rose to prominence in a world dominated by the British empire and sterling. Its economy was deeply intertwined with that of Britain. Its development was largely dependent on exporting goods to the UK, which absorbed 18% of German exports by as late as 1911 (greater than the proportion of China’s exports currently absorbed by the US). Most significantly, German growth in this period was totally dependent on a global system of trade underpinned by sterling and routed through the City of London.
Meanwhile, German expansion in Africa was only possible because it was, to use the ISA’s wording, “tolerated by” the UK, on occasions where the UK viewed the Reich’s presence as complementary to its own. More broadly, the two powers collaborated on a number of colonial ventures, from Venezuela to China. During the 19th century especially, given the UK’s naval dominance, Germany’s escapades overseas were only possible with the consent (and often support) of Britain.
Despite all of this, I am sure that ISA comrades would not call the Second Reich non-imperialist. Then, as with now, it was certainly true that the insurgent power had much invested in the established order. But to end the story there would be to miss out a great deal. Insurgent powers have to play ball with the existing system, insofar as they are not yet powerful enough to change it. This does not mean that they are not independent actors. Despite operating in a system dominated by another power, China, like Germany before it, makes great efforts to probe at that system’s boundaries and further its own ambitions. It is easy to draw parallels between, for example, Germany’s motivations in establishing the Berlin-Baghdad railway and China’s motivations for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Similarly, just as Germany sought to circumvent the City of London by establishing ‘Auslandsbanken’ in South America and elsewhere, so too has China looked for ways to loosen the bonds of the dollar.
Simply put, there is a dual character to the relationship between rising and established powers under capitalism. Established powers can benefit from and even encourage the rise of their competitors, whilst at the same time viewing it as a cause for alarm. Insurgent powers benefit from and exploit the existing global infrastructure, whilst at the same time being constrained by and seeking to undermine it.
Beyond this general picture, a few specific points the ISA makes should be addressed. First of all, the contention that, for China to be imperialist, it must have “somehow managed to redivide the world without fighting a single war”. First of all, no-one is claiming that China has redivided the entire world: merely that they are pursuing an imperialist agenda, insofar as they are able to. In any case, imperialism is not just or even mostly about armed invasions of places. It is much more about diplomatic manoeuvring and economic leverage. Though the US has obviously instigated a number of bloody wars, its global position is not primarily a product of military conquest. In fact, the majority of places the US has under its thumb did not need to be invaded at all. Considering Djibouti, for example, whilst both China and the US have bases in the country, neither fought a war to obtain them. Meanwhile, the German experience in Africa demonstrates how expansion can take place without triggering warfare between imperialist powers.
Secondly, the ISA argues that China is “not currently compelled by economic circumstances to create a distinct imperialist bloc”. The immediate response to this is to point out how significant China’s domestic construction overcapacity has been in its decision to embark on massive infrastructure projects overseas (the BRI rears its head once more). But, beyond this, it is too simplistic and static to understand imperialism as only being about clear, distinct ‘blocs’ in competition with one another. There are shades of grey, degrees of influence, directions of travel. Again with the Second Reich, for much of the 19th century, you would have been hard pressed to identify much of a German-led ‘bloc’. At least until, at a certain point, the great quantity of acquired ports, guarantees, alliances, trade agreements and everything else became a distinct new quality. It seems strange to say that this moment of transformation was the moment that Germany became imperialist, and that it had merely shored up the British system in every moment before. Something similar can be said of China presently.
Kieran Jeffs
email
Left patriarchs
I’m researching in order to write about how the problem of the patriarchy, as expressed within the left, is one of our biggest stumbling blocks to success. Many enlightened socialist men know that we cannot end capitalism without simultaneously ending the patriarchy - the two are completely intertwined. But there are still a considerable number of men on the left who refuse to acknowledge this, and will not reflect on and adjust their own behaviour accordingly.
Can you please ask your readers to let me know their experiences/knowledge of sexism generally - and sexist bullying of women by socialist men especially? I’m also interested in the ways in which both individual men and certain socialist organisations react, when they are accused by women of being male-dominated and/or sexist. One particular way in which this happens is when women themselves are then immediately accused of something, in a classic ‘DARVO’ move, in order to avoid addressing the actual problem or criticism.
And an especially ugly instance of this mechanism, which I have seen in operation a couple of times recently, is when the conversation is twisted in order to unfairly accuse the woman of being transphobic, when all they were doing is pointing out sexism on the left: ie, that men dominate by sheer numbers in organising groups, and that they dominate the debates by speaking more than women. This weaponisation of transphobia in order to silence women, especially intellectual ones, is something I find particularly concerning.
What’s your readers’ experience of all this? All input regarding the topic, ‘male domination of the left’, is welcome. Please contact me at https://substack.com/@deborahwafoulkes.
Deb Foulkes
email
Mind control
Paul Demarty’s piece on Henry Nowak’s murder proves that most of the left aren’t aware of the machinations of elements operating within the deep state mind-control network (‘Explaining Henry Nowak’, June 11).
The stabbings we have seen recently (in the US it is usually shootings), which appear to the general public as random attacks by people from ethnic minorities, are actually being orchestrated by elements within the deep state, using mind control.
In Britain, the pattern which has clearly emerged is that someone from an ethnic minority launches an attack on innocent members of the public. This leads to demonstrations and rioting ... The knife attackers are all people previously known to the police. This in itself should ring a loud alarm bell. Vickrum Digwa, who killed Henry Nowak, was previously known to the police, like all the other knife attackers. With the recent Belfast knife attack by Hadi Alodid, the Police Service of Northern Ireland was quick to announce they had no previous connection with the assailant. This again sets off the alarm bells. Alodid, I read, was himself a former policeman, but he behaved in a way completely at odds with what would have been his police training.
Like we have seen in the US, these deep state assets are secretly programmed to carry out horrendous attacks on members of the public for a definite purpose. But to understand what is going on you need to know what the deep state agenda is. The agenda is to help generate social instability to eventually provide the pretext to introduce a police-military dictatorship which replaces parliamentary democracy. The problem is that most of the left is not aware of the existence of the deep state and its criminal operations. The left needs to become aware of the deep state and what they are capable of doing, using their mind-controlling assets. For instance, a deep state mind-controlled slave can be sent into a public meeting being held by a leftwing group to kill someone, or attack the people at the meeting. The assailant will be passed off as a nutter or perhaps a rightwing extremist by people not aware of the deep state connection,.
In Trance: formation of America, a book about the experience of former mind-control slave Cathy O’Brien, she wrote, in reference to the US: “People are literally waking up to the mind-control reality, because there is an obvious lack of logical explanation for certain sensational news events. What really happened at Jim Jones’ Jonestown with Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinkley, and Lee Harvey Oswald? And more importantly, why did it happen? The simple common denominator existing among these persons has been publicly stated by the media, based on research of their medical histories, to be mind control”. In fact, mind control goes even further than Cathy O’Brien realised at the time.
We on the left in Britain need to be aware that the deep state exists and fascist elements within it are seeking to destabilise society and create the conditions for the introduction of a police-military dictatorship. We also need to be aware that in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 30s the far right used crimes committed by individuals from ethnic minorities to divide the working class and drum up support for fascism ...
Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism
Far-right march
The growth of the far right in Britain and the north of Ireland has been met with impressive, mass anti-fascist mobilisations, like in Brighton last weekend, but the race riots of previous weeks are a stark demonstration of the growing need for militancy on a broad scale.
Already we have far-right street mobs burning houses and holding check points - but we must also consider the looming threat of what they could do under a Reform government. Nigel Farage is open that his answer to imagined ‘two-tier policing’ will be to set the police - and likely, in Trumpian style, his proposed immigration force - against the left. The show trial of the Filton 4 and proscription of Palestine Action are the latest high-profile instances of state repression of the left (without mentioning the Spy Cops inquiry… or so many other cases).
Anti-fascists on the ground at any number of recent mobilisations can attest to the police physically beating a path for the far right to march - what will they be doing under Reform? Various mass anti-racist organisations choose to distance or even undermine militant anti-fascist groups, but they must be asking themselves now if the image of establishment respectability is more valuable than doing what it takes to defend our communities and our organisations.
Not everyone can be front-line, but part of the work of all serious anti‑fascists should be to support those who are.
Anna Price
South Wales