Tony Greenstein | 08 August 2024 | Post Views:

The Night that Brighton Sent the Fascists Back to their Sewers

Tonight was the night that people came onto the streets in their thousands, all over Britain, to say no to the fascists and their GB News and BBC sponsors. Farage and the rest of the Westminster political slime can eat their heart out.

Sir Kid Starver had a phone round to Labour MPs instructing them not to attend the anti-fascist mobilisations and Stella Creasy in Walthamstow had people chanting ‘where are you’.

When I went to see my probation officer yesterday I was told they were closing the offices today because information had been received, presumably from the police, that fascists and neo-Nazis were going to descend on Brighton in order that they could attack.

Comrades of mine were worried about whether we would be sufficient in numbers to be able to confront and see off the fascist hordes who were set to descend on Brighton. Careful plans were laid to go to the rallying point in large groups just in case.

I even advised my two twenty something children not to go because I didn’t want them to get hurt but I needn’t have worried. Thousands turned up.  I would estimate that between 4,000 and 5,000 occupied half of Queens Road leading up to Brighton station. If the Police hadn’t been there doing their usual job of protecting fascists they would, literally, have been massacred.

I am the historian of Brighton fascism having written the only history of Brighton’s fine anti-fascist record. We have had large demonstrations against the fascists in the past.  In 1981 we mobilised about a thousand people. A similar number put Oswald Moseley’s henchman Geoffrey Hamm in hospital with a broken jaw in 1948. In 2012 up to 1,500 took to the streets to send the EDL back to the sewers but last night was  by far the largest anti-fascist mobilisation ever seen in Brighton.

And not just in Brighton. There was a massive demonstration in Walhamstow in London. People have become sick to the back teeth of corrupt and rotten politicians like Yvette Cooper, Sunak and Farage demonising asylum seekers. It is these scumbags who create the atmosphere in which Tommy Robinson can exist. They accept that refugees are a problem and of course the fascists have much more simply solutions than a drawn out deportation process. They either force them out immediately or kill them.

After all that’s what our politicians are supporting in Gaza.  Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing.  So why not here?  And of course it wouldn’t be limited to refugees. Every non-White person would be a target as we have seen with the attacks on Black people. And like the Greater Manchester Police, the filth will protect the fascists and arrest their victims.

We should be clear. Refugees are welcome in Britain. The reason they are here is because we were and still are in many cases in their countries. That is what our ‘defence’ budget is about. Intervening in other countries to change their regimes if they don’t serve our interests. The £80 billions on ‘defence’ could be spent on the NHS, schools etc. Instead it goes on imperialist wars and supporting the fascist state of Ukraine.

Economically migrants benefit a country because they tend to be young people who don’t use social services or claim benefits because they want to work. This idea that a migrant takes someone’s job is economic   illiteracy.  As if unemployment is a function of the size of a population.

Likewise this argument about it lowering the cost of wages. What lowers the price of labour isn’t immigration but weak and useless trade unions. When British unions were militant they served their members interests.

So we should rebut the whole of the racist narrative of the main parties and also challenge the media monopoly of the racists – be it the BBC, Sky or GB News. They each sing from the same hypocritical song sheet.

Of course even the bourgeois abolishment became somewhat worried that the right-wing riots were getting out of hand with their smashing up of property. So we had the absurd and once-in-a-lifetime experience of the Daily Express and Mail paying tribute to the thousands of anti-racist/anti-fascist demonstrators last night. Even the BBC had a half-decent report.

As the old saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue!

Tony Greenstein

Posted in

Tony Greenstein

Leave a Comment





This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.