Letter from a reader in a major UK city
I have been a volunteer driver for a refugee charity in my city for the last 4 years. Yesterday, when I went in to the office to pick up any deliveries required, it was eerily quiet. This is the effect of the intimidation we’ve seen on our streets from far right thugs in the past week.
The premises are normally alive with the bustle of staff and volunteers providing a safe space for refugees and asylum seekers. But many of the volunteers who are refugees themselves have chosen to avoid the city centre because of the risks they see to their lives from the far right.
The refugee volunteers are at the heart of the charity. Some of them cook communal meals. Some of them just make themselves available to listen and talk to people in their own language. There are activity sessions for the children, English language sessions and more. The charity represents the very best of the city I live in. Donations arrive continuously from individuals and organisations.
This positive approach to welcoming refugees and helping them integrate is the polar opposite of the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far right and their apologists in Reform UK and the Conservative Party. I’ve listened carefully to people calling radio programmes saying they have ‘genuine concerns’ about the behaviour of what they call ‘illegal immigrants’. These people are just parroting racist lies that abound on social media (and are encouraged by Elon Musk, Nigel Farage, Andrew Tate etc). They clearly do not spend any time with immigrants and asylum seekers. The refugees and asylum seekers I meet during my volunteering are incredibly determined to settle and contribute here. If you were to believe the far right, they are just here to take rather than give. This is a travesty of the reality.
I believe that the way to defeat the far right lies in the mobilisation of the Labour Movement. This starts with activists from the movement joining demonstrations and encouraging more and more of their fellow workers to join them as the seriousness of far right politics becomes evident.
But there is also a very human aspect to this question that I feel strongly about. In fact, I think as a child I was an anti-racist before I ever understood what socialism was. When I dropped off my deliveries yesterday, the recipients seemed so happy. On television and in the media they were seeing images of far right intolerance, but in their community they were seeing care and understanding.
On a bus trip through my city today I saw many people who had not been intimidated to stay at home. I saw a woman in a hijab and a white woman politely offering each other onto the bus first. I saw a white man and his young daughter of mixed heritage getting off the bus. I saw two white men and an Asian man sitting having a beer together. These are clear signs of cohesion in our society that the far right want to disrupt. They will not succeed.
The featured image at the head of the article shows a demonstration by the far right at the Cenotaph in London on Armistice Day 11 November 2023. The image is from Wikimedia Commons. Attribution: Stephen Richards / Scenes from a demo (4) / CC BY-SA 2.0
