THIS week, two of the most reactionary pieces of legislation to come before the House of Commons since the second world war were being debated.

The Policing Bill and the anti-refugee Nationality and Borders Bill (NBB) were being heard and discussed as the truth emerged about the “party that never was” at Downing Street last Christmas.

While an institutionally racist (and sexist) police force was being given extraordinary new powers to limit protest and attack the rights of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, the Policing Bill also targets Black Lives Matter activists.

In the Nationality and Borders Bill, the right to claim asylum — developed in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust — was being fundamentally undermined.

The Tories are playing a supercharged version of the politics of divide and rule.

Despite the tragic deaths of at least 31 innocent people while crossing, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson are going ahead with lethal “pushbacks” in the Channel and pressing on with their vision of an Australian-style asylum system, with offshore detention centres and all the injustice that represents. 

Clause 9 of the NBB, proposed in July and updated in November, exempts the government from giving notice of a decision to deprive a person of citizenship if authorities do not have the subject’s contact details or if it is not “reasonably practical” to do so.

This astounding clause, if implemented and not resisted and scrapped, will have a devastating impact on many, leaving many of those settled and living in Britain in a vulnerable and precarious state that they could at any point be forced to leave their home without notice.

The government was exposed and embarrassed over the outrage of the Windrush scandal, and yet it has the gall to push this shameless racist attack in its aftermath.

Johnson’s “party that never was” reflects the government’s callous and hypocritical attitude towards working-class people. 

While many were unable to visit loved ones as they were dying or hold funerals — never mind the much larger number of us who were unable to be with friends and family in isolation over the Christmas period last year — the Tories were laughing at us.

This attitude is underpinned by the reality of institutional racism and the massively disproportionate impact Covid-19 has had on black communities during the pandemic — a reality denied by the Tories in their “whitewash” Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report of March 2021.

It’s urgent that we build real resistance to this government’s negligence and incompetence.

Otherwise, the distrust in their handling of Covid-19 can be diverted down problematic avenues. The “anti-vax” movement has attempted to play on the justified suspicion of government by millions of people — including those in black communities.

As in the EU the far right — and even fascist forces — legitimised by the racist rhetoric coming from government are attempting to use the Covid-19 crisis to grow and gain influence.

The unfurling of far-right banners attacking refugees and supporting “white nations” defending themselves at the Blackwall tunnel just days after the tragedy in the channel is a sign that racists and fascists believe government policy is giving them the oxygen necessary to grow.

Two things are necessary to oppose the growth of racism and  fascism.

First, we need to confront the racism of the government head on and mobilise the anti-racist majority.

From the mass community mobilisation against dawn raids in Pollokshields, Glasgow, to the efforts to welcome refugees as they land on the beaches of the south coast, to mass support for footballers taking the knee against racism and cricketers opposing racist abuse — we can see that the majority of ordinary people reject Tory racism.

In every town and city, workplace, community and campus we have to build anti-racists’ confidence.

We must be robustly explaining that it’s not migrants and refugees that slash NHS spending or who left our loved ones to die during the Covid-19 crisis — it’s the government. We need to mobilise to get Johnson out.

People are right to be suspicious of the government — but anti-vax and Qanon isn’t the answer, united resistance is.

Next year, working with the TUC, we are calling for the biggest possible Covid-19 safe mobilisations and activity to mark UN Anti-Racism Day on Saturday March 19, when there will be major demonstrations in London, Glasgow, and Cardiff on Sunday, March 20.

The internationalist backdrop will be similar and simultaneous demonstrations will take place across the world.

We have to get the positive anti-racist agenda out there otherwise we can see what the future could hold by looking at the situation on the Polish border with Belarus, where refugees are beaten, water cannoned and tear gassed, or in France where politicians compete with the fascist right to fuel Islamophobia, anti-semitism and anti-migrant and refugee racism.

Unity is the key — both against institutional racism and against attempts to reboot the fascist right within the context of the pandemic.

Black Lives Matter exposed the endemic racism at the heart of our society. That’s why the Tories have spent months trying to roll back the gains it made and the debates it started around Britain’s brutal history of colonialism and slavery.

The deaths in the Channel, followed so closely by the rejection of even limited changes to the Nationality and Borders Bill, show just how far the Tories will go to curtail opposition to racism, and open the door for the far fight to grow.

Let’s show the Tories and the far right that whatever racist legislation is forced through parliament, the movement will mobilise the anti-racist majority on a mass scale in support of Black Lives Matter and to welcome refugees and migrants.

Weyman Bennet is co-convener of Stand Up To Racism.