MARCHES in London, Glasgow and Cardiff this weekend will assert the working-class and grassroots character of anti-racism in Britain.

The Stand Up to Racism and trade union-organised demos could hardly be more timely. A hard-right government, egged on by Britain’s billionaire press, is whipping up Islamophobia in its bid to delegitimise the peace movement.

In the same breath as it smears such moderate representative groups as the Muslim Association of Britain under a new definition of extremism, it indulges racist hate speech against Britain’s longest-serving black MP from a top Tory donor — all while sidelining courts in its pursuit of a shameful and illegal policy of deporting refugees to Rwanda.

We must reclaim the anti-racist cause from politicians who daily abuse the term, building an anti-racist mass movement of the street and workplace to counter both the far right and the stifling authoritarianism of Westminster politics.

The Tory narrative must be turned on its head. Rishi Sunak warns of “forces at home trying to tear us apart” and those exploiting Israel’s invasion of Gaza “to advance a divisive, hateful ideological agenda.”

His words would be more accurately applied to the media misrepresentation of entirely peaceful demonstrations for a ceasefire as “hate marches,” intended to sow enmity between Britain’s Jewish and Muslim communities.

Michael Gove tells officials they should not engage with groups that do not maintain “public confidence in government.” 

The mocking retort that this would certainly rule out the Tories is if anything too narrow. 

Parliament as a whole is responsible for popular distrust of politics. It’s rightly seen as in hock to corporate interests, as an institution that not only turns a deaf ear to majority opinion but increasingly views the public as a distasteful adversary. 

That’s true on a wide range of issues, reflected for example in the gulf between popular demands for public ownership and a political elite invested in the privatised gravy train. But at key moments it gets thrown into sharp relief. 

One, as Speaker Lindsay Hoyle acknowledged in 2022, was in the years of Brexit wrangling that followed a straightforward referendum result instructing the government to leave the EU. 

Hoyle’s own anti-democratic antics, blocking a vote on a Gaza ceasefire, are now central to another such juncture. The people want a ceasefire, the movement for one is huge, passionate and determined: and the response of politicians is to lie, to smear, and to seek measures formally instructing decision-makers not to engage with the organisers of the movement.

You will not find Gove, or Sunak, or for that matter Keir Starmer, on this weekend’s anti-racist marches. For them racism is an accusation to be deployed cynically for factional advantage, not an evil to be confronted through standing in solidarity with its victims.

So Starmer can condemn the Tories for permitting racist abuse of Diane Abbott, while ignoring a leaked report into Labour officials’ racism including multiple instances directed at her, and blandly brief that “disciplinary processes take time” when challenged over her ongoing suspension as a Labour MP — though 10 months in, we know the party hasn’t even spoken to her. Some investigation.

So Sunak can retort with another attack on the left — repeating the lie that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership tolerated anti-semitism — a jibe eagerly accepted by Starmer.

These people cannot be trusted to oppose racism. Even their performative anti-racism is often racist (as in the insinuation that Muslims are a threat to Jews, or Labour’s disproportionate crackdown on Jewish anti-zionists).

They are the “forces at home trying to tear us apart.” They do so because nothing scares them more than people power: than a mass movement for peace that challenges British imperialism, today, as for centuries, one of the main drivers of racism.