Working with Stand up to Racism - the good, the bad, the deeply annoying

At the start of August, I was one of the organisers of the demo outside the Thistle Barbican hotel. That protest was called by a meeting of 50 people representing around 20 anti-racist groups. We were a counter-protest to an event calling for the hotel to be closed on racist grounds. There were two anti-fascist protests which merged, with about 800 people in the streets at our mobilisation’s height. We were many more people than the right, whose 250 supporters stood in silence behind a metal barrier looking despondent. The most important people there, the refugees in the hotel, waved at us and took heart from our presence.

Broadly the protest was a success, and I’m proud of it given that it was the same weekend as events in Manchester which went worse with Britain First ounumbering both moderate and militant anti-fascists. Our demo worked because – while there were sectarian elements in our camp – they were criticised by other people, we restrained them, and were able to keep focussed on the enemy.

Success doesn’t mean, though, that we should be silent about problems on the left. Now that the demo has passed, I’m able to describe some behaviours which tended to destroy collectivity in our campaign. If they happened on a large, successful, protest – then you can know the same will be happening, with far worse consequences, when anti-fascists are losing and when our people are in danger.

In the piece that follows - which is a personal opinion, not the position of any group - I’m going to focus on one organisation, Stand up to Racism (SutR), and the party (the SWP) which leads it and provides almost of its activists. I didn’t vocalise to my local allies in advance of our first meeting my doubts about SutR. I could have tried to insist we refuse to work with them, although it would have been difficult to make that case without seeming sectarian - people with little experience of SutR assume it’s a more worthwhile campaign than it is. Because I worked with them, therefore my own organising was to some extent shaped by our alliance. In criticising them, I am also criticising myself for being pulled along behind them.

Before I get on to what were a series of failures by that campaign, I want to start with the weakness which underpinned all of them. Whatever the name of their campaign, Sutr seem to believe that there is only one kind of racism worth fighting, that of the far right. They believe further that the British far right (starting with Reform, and going right from there ) are also all “fascists”.

It’s as if they have a memory of the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s, and are convinced that this is the only way to stop the right. But, if that’s the vision, they are misreading the lessons of that campaign, for reasons that were explained back in 2018 in the book which remains the most detailed history of that movement. Calling the National Front Nazis in the 1970s worked for specific reasons: because the leaders of that campaign has been Hiltler fans in the 1960s, and had left behind a series of images of them in Nazi uniform, which anti-fascists could share. It also helped that the leaders were now posing as something else, electoral populists, so that the accusation that they were Nazis open them up to another criticism, of dishonesty. Anti-fascists could draw on another factor missing today, many of the people who went on NF marches or attended NF meetings initially believed the claim that they were mere populists; but the group had in its membership a series of people who really were nostalgists for Hitler or Mussolini, liked to wear uniforms, liked to play Nazi marchings songs, and quote approvingly from Mein Kampf. The result was that there was a constant stream of non-fascist right-wing defectors from the NF, being quoted in the press, who amplified the left’s attack line that the Front were indeed Nazis. Calling the NF fascists was an effective tactics in 1976-9; in every year since then the same same approach has shown diminishing returns for anti-fascists.

Part of the problem comes about from a failure to see clearly how the right is growing now, which is through a particular and recurring claim - that the people living in the refugee hotels are sexual predators. The accusation seems to many socialists who become mute in answering it. We just don’t like talking about the subject of sex. The right present themselves as merely concerned mums, life-long left-wingers who’ve had no choice but to take up this issue for the women and the children’s sake. Sutr (and other anti-fascists too) respond that the right are really Tommy Robinson fans in disguise. What they won’t ever do is say that the charge of predation is itself a racist lie. They duck the politics, in other words, just as they also dodge it when it’s trans women who are facing very similar attacks.

The refugees are not abusive men; but 40% of those arrested after last summer’s riots were. Anti-racists occupy the physical spaces between the right and the hotels - hunting for Nazis means we absent ourselves from the ideological terrain. (And, while I’m criticising Sutr in this piece, plenty of other anti-fascist suffer the same problem, even on the left of the movement which are my natural allies). The SWP and SutR demand to be interviewed on TV, and are given platforms thbere, but because they’ve taught themselves to ignore the argument taking place in front of them, they waste their opportunities. They leave the right’s myths unchallenged.

In recent months, the range of critics of this approach has grown: Sita Balani’s book Deadly and Slick does a brilliant job of writing about how race is constituted through fears of sexuality. What could be a clearer illustration of that dynamic than the way the anti-hotel campaigners label every migrant arrival a predator?

Colin Wilson was part of the crowd defednding the Thistle. Shouting Nazi, he writes, is of little value when directed “at a community which accepts some racist ideas … My experience was that local people aren’t hardened racists who will tell a leftist where to go – they have a mix of ideas and will talk to you. We can hope to win them over – starting with the thing we agree on, the political bankruptcy of the Labour government. Making no distinction between them and a smaller core of far-right organisers – which is what we imply if we lump them all together as ‘fascist scum’ – makes that harder to do.”

Jonas Marvin wrote after last year’s race riots how false it was to think of our enemy as only fascists, and how toxic it was for organising: “After a decade in which organised street fascism has been relatively weak, different wings of the antifascist movement had become pretty comfortable in their tactical and cultural siloes.” The answer, he suggested, was to look for ways of bringing the two wings of the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement back together. “These two wings could be contiguous, with genuine cooperation opening up the possibility of a dialectic of accountability, but they need to be conceived and practised as such.”

His recommendation - tone down the sectarianism and work together us, I think, is what the main groups in the Islington coalition wanted to do. We were trying to show in practice that anti-fascists could co-operate, even if that meant we were drawn into a critical alliance with Stand up to Racism. For the reasons I’m about to set out, that arrangement proved much easier as aspiration than reality.

In the argument that follows I’ll treat Stand up to Racism as interchangeable with the SWP. This is a simplification, but not by much. Sutr and its predecessors date back to 2003. When the group was set up, it was supposed to be an alliance between two Trotskyist groups who would make the decisions and employ their staff as its full-timers: the SWP and Socialist Action. Sutr has a steering committee largely made up of members of the TUC Race Relations Committee. Years ago, I used to sit on it. (Personal history klaxon: I was a member of the SWP from 1991 to 2013).

The SWP’s minority status on Sutr’s steering committee is no encumberance to that party because Sutr does not keep contacts lists between events, nor do any of the constituents beyond the SWP have a geographical structure, like the SWP with branches in two dozen of Britain’s largest cities. (Socialist Action for example has no local structure worth comparing to the SWP’s). Non-SWPers in Sutr have no choice but to rely on that party’s branch strucutures. Every Sutr event, without exception, therefore begins with a group of SWP members declaring themselves no longer a party but a coalition, and announcing that they are Islington or Southampton or wherever’s Stand up to Racism. In practice, if you ever meet someone describing themselves as representing Sutr, the person you’re meeting is an SWP member.

SutR’s dogmatism - its insistence that its activists have been doing this for years, know better than anyone else what the moment requires - leads to a destructive and unearned arrogance. The group treats anyone else they have to work with as “non player characters” whose views don’t count. You can try to restrain them and keep them on a strait path; but, beyond a certain point you’ll fail. That bad politics manifests itself in certain recurring behaviours:

-an inability to listen

Stand to Racism (SutR) came late to our campaign, sending five of the group’s national representatives and just one Islington activist to our first planning meeting. Every other group in the room agreed on the principles of our protest:

• we did not want a standard “left” demo with routinised chants (“Nazi scum off our streets”);

• we did want a cultural event with many performers and few speeches;

• we were going to build a protest that would make sense to the refugees we were defending, few of whom spoke English;

• we wanted an event that would feel open to local residents.

No far-right organisation was backing the anti-hotel protests. The motivation on their side appeared to be a hostility towards single men, which was based on racist notions about the sexuality of foreigners. The key organisers of the campaign were all women, and they had a local base. After the demo was over, activists would still face the problem of having to isolate them. All this would take time, the best the demo could achieve would be a breathing space before the real work began.

The five SutR people in the room all insisted on speaking (at what was billed as a short meeting with an absolute time limit of 1 hour). Their speeches copied one another. They made boring, generalised, interventions of no relevance to our situation. Yes, racism and fascism are bad: the people in the room didn’t need to be told it, that’s why they’d come to our organising meeting. When challenged, Paul Holborow of Sutr refused to say whether he’d be willing to work along the lines of the bullet points I’ve set out above, and had to be rescued by his son Lewis the Nielsen National Secretary or leader of the SWP (but declaring himself as “Lewis Neilsen, Stand up to Racism”) who promised that yes, they’d follow whatever line the coalition wanted. Nielsen, at least, was capable of giving an answer to a simple question.

What we got on the Saturday of the protest was an SutR presence which took the form of familiar, routine, chants. They took control of the PA - the single biggest mistake we’d made at our initial meeting was accepting that they could organise it - they refused to allow one of the agreed musicians (Orchestrated Discontent) to perform. They accepted some speakers from the agreed set list, imposed others which no one had agreed and who’d played no part in the campaign but belonged to the SWP’s list of its long-term allies (eg the People’s Assembly). A number of SWP/Sutr stewards wouldn’t take direction from the non-SWP chief steward, but stood passively at the front of the march doing nothing as the police brought out their batons.

The SWP (with their SutR hats on) were able to take control of the march because they were able to bring along a large all-London crowd - i.e. their members from Haringey, from Hackney and all over the city. At every point until then, SutR had been the minority in the coalition; but not on the day of the protest. They focussed on holding the PA, and kept everyone else at arms’ length. The other Islington activists saw with frustration that the protest had become exactly what our meeting had argued against, a left mobilisation done on muscle memory, led by people from outside the borough, shouting “fascist scum” over and over again at a right-wing protest in which there were, as far as the rest of us could tell, no actual fascists, certainly none anywhere near the leadership of that event.

-rerouting the campaign through the SWP…

What we had assembled, in Islington, was a campaign of two dozen groups, in which large sections of the left participated. But when SutR were putting demands on the campaign, they wanted us to agree that SWP members would be the link to the mosques, would choose the slogans, etc. If someone asked, “Do we have someone in UNITE we can talk to?” an SWP member would always propose another SWP member. What the party was trying to do was slowly hollow out the coalition by replacing, at each point, a diversity of views with its own political monoculture.

-while keeping the party away from the rest of our activists

The SWP insisted that it had to build the protest separately from everyone else on the left. So, there were SWP branches leafletting on behalf of Sutr, SWP branches flyposting not the agreed poster but one they’d designed by themselves which ignored 18 of the 20 groups who were building the protests… In the shared whatsapp group, we were shown pictures of of happy young SWP members leafleting, with no one over 30 in the images except for the same SWP veterans we were negotiating with. This instinct of keeping others at a distance was baffling. The party was desperate to protect its movements from the movement. It felt as if the SWP veterans were terrified of letting these young members talk to anyone else for fear that they might encounter, as well as our interest and goodwill, our criticisms of the bad job their leaders was doing at intervening in our campaign and our alternative vision of a protest which would be relevant to refugees in the hotel and other residents.

The SWP must have delivered more than 10,000 leaflets in the north half of Islington - in Finsbury Park, at Highbury Corner, at Caledonian Road station. That was an impressive effort - it was better, of course3, that they did it than standing aloof from the protest. But the distance from the latter tube stop to the hotel around which we were organising is more than 2 miles; around 150,000 people live between the two addresses. SWP/Sutr members did not come to south Islington, which is where the hotel is and where the racists were organising. Every other group was willing to do this – ACR, AWL Left Unity, rs21, the radical bloc, the Communist Party… quite a number of these various activists found themselves being shouted at by residents – but the SWP clung to the northern edges of the borough, at a distance from which you could never meet one of the anti-hotel racists, still less argue with them.

Distributing many leaflets at a vast distance from the affected area, while talking to no wavering residents, then bringing an all-London crowd to a protest to shout at racists many of whom had come from the nearby estates, all played into the far-right narrative that our protests were outsiders and the far right locals.

-lying repeatedly

At multiple points, two Stand up to Racism and SWP leaders (Paul Holborow and Weyman Bennett) lied to other people in the coalition.

I don’t like to labour this, but what I’m describing it true, and is a kind of systematic dishonesty that you just don’t encounter from other groups on the left. Bear in mind also, that I was also working in alliance with Sutr for less than 10 days altogether - in that incredibly short amount of time, the lies were continuous, brazen, unapologetic. Bear in mind also, that the SWP wants to work with people like me; their strategic plan is to put down anti-fascism at the earliest opportunity and to reinvent themselves as loyal members of the Corbyn party. What I’m describing is the SWP on “best behaviour”. I have a very long history of following different groups on the left, their tendencies to sectarian or cultish behaviour - I dont’t think there’s any other group which would have lied so carelessly as the people I was working with.

In the run-up to the organising group’s first meeting, Paul Holborow told other groups that if we worked with SutR we would control (i) the protest, (ii) its start time, and (iii) be named as the people who’d called it. We asked him to pause on any announcement until the groups had decided our plabs. He agreed and promised he would wait for us. Within minutes of speaking to us, he had however authorised the publication by Sutr of a leaflet which announced the protest – before anyone had called it – and badged the event as a Sutr protest only. When we complained, he denied ever making any promises to us. He tried to sustain the denial in front of a room fifty people with more than one speaker reminding him of the words he’d used when speaking to them (“But this is what you told me, Paul…”). His lies were obvious, just such horrible politician-speak - like Wes Streeting but on steroids.

Holborow then was back in the same mode two few days later – changing the start time of the protest in a second leaflet, without asking anyone in the campaign. He denied he had changed it, and was shown the leaflets he’d authorised (which were circulating on sicial media). He had to admit changing the time but said we couldn’t stop him as the leaflet had already been printed. (It hadn’t been).

Without telling anyone else Holborow - who represented less than one fifth of the people involved in the orgabnising group - instructed the SWP’s Weyman Bennett to negotiate with the police on behalf of a campaign that Holborow didn’t control and who hadn’t been asked about Bennett’s appointment. When challenged, both Holborow and Bennett insisted that we were mistaken, and no, nothing had been said or agreed. Bennett promised he hadn’t been asked and wouldn’t speak to the cops. Bennett wrote to activists, in his words, “I’ve not had contact re police.”

But when negotiators finally spoke to the police, two days later, they reported back on the three conversations Bennett had already had with them – the times he’d spoken to them, and what he’d said. The gist of which was that our numbers would be fewer than they were (“no more than 500”) , we wouldn’t get in the police’s way and we’d be happy to leave as early as the copes wanted. He’d signed up already to a vision of a protest in which everyone on the left would shelter in pens.

The other campaigners didn’t know this, made clear he didn’t have our consent, and declined to agree anything with the police. The negotiators were put in the humiliating position of having to explain that Bennett had no relationship to them, had no legitimacy to negotiate on the group’s behalf, and had gone into negotiations without knowing anything about what the protesters wanted.

In short, Sutr were arrogant, dishonest with other activists, and willing to tell the police whatever they wanted to hear. If I call them a liability, I’m being too polite.

-casual about safety

SWP/SutR tactics put their own members - and everyone who works with them - in two kinds of unnecessary risk. One is in relation to the far right. The organisation doesn’t make any effort to understand the right we’re facing. The SWP imagines that behind all far-right activity there is a fascist party in the background, made up like their adversaries in the 1970s of people who want to emulate Hitler. Activists whose best days were in that decade squeeze the present in their heads until it fits their memories of the past. You get the most maximalist slogans, talk of how the police are protecting the fascists, pledges to smash them off the street. SWP and SutR promise a fight, but it’s one they have no intention of delivering – if they did, they wouldn’t be sending Weyman Bennett out before every protest to negotiate with the police the metal barricades from which the SWP and Sutr refuse to stray.

Sometimes – the first two protests at Epping, or in Manchester at the start of August, or in the same city least weekend – these slogans put SWP members at risk. People are promising a physical conflict they are ill-equipped to fight. The SutR core are students (good), are women (great), are an older core of retirees who stride off to the café within 30 minutes of the event starting (they’re part of the movement too!) - but they’ve lost the disaffected, young, working-class social base that anti-fascism had in the 1970s, and was still clinging onto twenty years later.

In its anti-fascist work, the SWP behaves like a smaller and oddly dishonest version of the CP of the 1970s. It negotiates with the cops, it relies increasingly on the police to guarantee its members’ safety. But it combines both those behaviour with a verbal militancy it can’t deliver. We’re going into a period where the far right is likely to grow. I worry (a bit) for those young, naive, SWP members for whom this strategy will deliver cut lips and broken ribs sooner rather than later. Frankly, I worry rather more for the unaffiliated anti-fascists who will take the kicking which the SWP’s bad tactics will deliver us. Unlike the SWP members, we won’t have the satisfaction of thinking that in being beating up we’re were doing what the SWPs older comrades wanted. People with no conception of the SWP, and a naievte about its record will be bullied and lied into taking that hit; they’ll suffer because of Sutr’s bad politics.

Sutr supporters are also getting insufficient help from their organisation in terms of protecting themselves – or anyone else – from the police. Outside the Thistle Hotel, the radical bloc had bust cards, lawyers and a plan if people were arrested. After the protest ended, they made sure that no one left the police stations on their own. There are good reasons why non-Sutr anti-fascists take police support seriously. Often, for example non-Sutr anti-fascists have been involved in spikier forms of Palestinian activism. They understand how lonely it can be waiting in a police cell.

There was none of this on the ICI/Sutr moderate wing of the demo. No bust cards, no request to movement lawyers in advance. In fairness, when one person was arrested they did take the arrestee’s number, and did try to contact them - a few days later. (My thanks to the people who did that, on both scores. Whatever criticisms I have Sutr as a group, I’m not criticising those activists personally). But there was little to zero understanding that an arrestee is entitled to be met out of the station and comforted on their release rather than being left to navigate the police station alone.

If I was a non-SWP SutR supporter, these are the changes I’d be pressing for: I’d want an organisation which took a chill pill rather than insist on claiming the credit for every demonstration in which they participated. I’d give up badging protests as if the SutR were the only people who took part them but use the diversity of support as a source of strength. Anti-fascist veterans reading this might remember how in 1993, SutR’s predecessor the Anti-Nazi League in a position of some difficulty in the build-up to Welling insisted that the protest was a “unity” march, produced posters with more than fifty supporting organisations named on them. More of that please….

I’d stop the endless lying, which only causes distrust. I’d choose between the two approaches: either you’re the militant minority in which case stop cosying up to the police, or you’re the more peaceful old guard. Either approach is legitimate on its own terms, you make yourself look daft by pretending to be both. Sutr just needs to learn to take much better care of people - including Sutr and the SWP’s own people, as well as everyone else who’s joined their march.

Anti-fascism deserves better leaders than the ones we’ve got, a better, more open culture. The near future is one of Reform growth - they’re the favourites to win the 2029 election. In the US, Trump’s success in 2016 gave the street right a shot of adrenaline, and it wouldn’t be any different here. We’re going to need many more anti-fascists, and soon. If they build the present Sutr way, then it will be more incidents of rubbish activisim, more of a movement being made needly weak without any advantage being gained, more disaffected allies, another twenty years of decline in terms of anti-fascists’ ability to mobilise numbers and to out-think the right.

In Islington, a group of us did work with SutR for as long as we could, tried to keep the organisation under pressure and honest in its dealings with others. Others, including Islington Palestine Solidarity Campaign, chose not to work with Sutr. Because we kept the moderate wing of the anti-fascist movement large and open, we brought in larger numbers of people. I stand by the decisions the broader left made to work with Sutr and to make our best efforts to restrain them. But someone else can play the role of diplomat next time.

In the week leading up to the protest I was spending an hour every day or more just clearing up the chaos SutR had left behind. The SWP, and SutR, are nothing like what they pretend; they aren’t a group of useful activists who can work in a low-key, non-dogmatic, way which will keep everyone else onboard. I understand why so many activists have taken the decision not to work with them.