Electorally, support for Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform is rapidly growing. On the streets, racist attacks are escalating. But the Union Jack and St George’s ‘England’ flag-covered rally was very much a spectacle orchestrated by the global far-right, who not only funded the event, overwhelmingly attended by people from outside London (many of whom were fairly well off) but have funded the rise to global visibility of ‘Tommy Robinson’ (real name: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and his rabid Islamophobic rhetoric. The star speaker at the rally was South African-origin tech billionaire Elon Musk, who hysterically proclaimed that ‘we either fight back or die’. Musk has been responsible for promoting Robinson on ‘X’ after he bought and renamed Twitter, where Robinson had previously been banned for hate speech. Another US tech billionaire, Robert Shillman, a close ally of Israel and Netanyahu, has extensively funded Robinson, who was earlier unknown outside Britain where he was a fringe figure, a violent racist who has a string of convictions for assault and fraud.
As he has shifted from generalized racism to a focus on Islamophobia, Robinson has also been embraced by several Hindutva groups in the diaspora and in India. In 2022 he was invited to speak on the RSS’s OpIndia channel in the wake of Sangh-orchestrated communal violence in the British town of Leicester, and claimed he would send men to help ‘defend’ Hindus. And after the September 13 rally, he was platformed on News 18 to wish the PM happy birthday and express his deep admiration for Modi. Robinson has condemned the horrific racially motivated rape of a young Sikh woman in Oldbury (see below) but only on the basis that Hindus and Sikhs – unlike Muslims - should be considered ‘good’ immigrants who have ‘integrated’. Needless to say, such distinctions between South Asians are not made by the racists on the streets inspired by Robinson and Farage, as racist attacks become ever more frequent. As well as the Oldbury attack, recent days have also seen a Bangladeshi teenager brutally assaulted with a baseball bat when trying to defend his mother from having her hijab pulled off by racists, and a 9-year old child being fired at with pellet guns by two white men who shouted racist abuse at her.
As well as established Muslim communities, the other major focus of hate for this latest incarnation of Britain’s far right are recently arrived migrants and refugees (also coded as Muslim). The summers of 2024 and 2025 have seen violent demonstrations outside the hostels and hotels where asylum seekers are forced to live, while being denied the right to work. In a classic example of fascist scapegoating, the far-right has claimed falsely that these people, many of whom are fleeing imperialist conflicts in which Britain is deeply involved, are ‘living in luxury’ at the state’s expense while local communities are starved of resources. Fascist rhetoric, as elsewhere, seeks to conceal the fact that deepening poverty, unemployment, homelessness and the collapse of the National Health Service is driven by successive governments’ neoliberal austerity policies, policies which the billionaires who fund Nigel Farage’s Reform party and Tommy Robinson want to see further intensified. In reality too, working class people of colour, including South Asians, are among the worst affected by austerity.
As explained in the statement below, the current racist upsurge has been heavily enabled, rather than confronted, by the Labour government under Keir Starmer, who has tried to position his party as ‘Reform-lite’ in an obviously self-defeating strategy. Starmer’s rhetoric on migration has mirrored the far-right and his government’s immigration policies, under which no legal routes remain for refugees to enter the country (with the exception of those from Ukraine), have further dehumanized migrants. He has also embraced Islamophobic myths about Muslim men as the primary perpetrators of sexual exploitation through ‘grooming gangs’.
This juncture inevitably evokes past struggles against acute racism in Britain which succeeded in the 1970s and 80s. Among South Asian communities this period saw unity between those of different countries of origin and religions – as well as with others facing racism, particularly Caribbean communities – which it is essential to rebuild today, challenging the undermining of this unity by the rise of fascism in India and the rise to centrality of Islamophobia in global racist ideology. This is why the united statement by more than 40 organisations calling for justice for the survivor of the Oldbury rape, reproduced below, was significant. Reactionary elements prominent in the survivor’s community locally have tried to prevent, using violent threats, any protest against the rape, claiming that any protest would be ‘taken over by Muslim fundamentalists and left extremists’. Despite this however, the wider community came together for a diverse and well-attended Vigil in support of the survivor, just days after the attack.
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Justice for the Survivor of the Oldbury Attack! Fascists Off Our Streets!
As organisations representing South Asian, Black, migrant, and refugee communities and those fighting racism, we are horrified and enraged by the attack on Tuesday 9 September on a Sikh woman in Oldbury, Sandwell, in what police are describing as a racially motivated attack. The 20 year-old woman was raped and viciously beaten in broad daylight by two white men who reportedly told her: "You don't belong in this country, get out." We express our deepest solidarity with the survivor and pledge to stand by her unconditionally. We acknowledge her tremendous courage in coming forward to report this horrific crime of sexual and racial violence.
We pledge to work together to get justice for the survivor, and to counter the rise of the far-right, facilitated by successive governments, which has given rise to this heinous crime. Our long history of fighting racism in Britain has taught us that we can only resist and prevent such attacks if all communities facing racism act unitedly. The British state has made every effort to divide us in recent decades but we must not allow this strategy to succeed, or succumb to racist 'good/bad immigrant' narratives.
Misogyny and gendered violence has always been deeply embedded in racism and white supremacy. There are numerous instances of sexual violence against Black and racialised women by the police and other agents of the state, which go unreported or the survivors are not believed. In the last few years we have also seen the far-right weaponizing women’s and children’s safety to spread racist and Islamophobic myths such as the tropes that ‘grooming gangs’ primarily consist of Muslim men and that migrants, refugees and trans people are the source of sexual abuse. They have used these myths to organise the racist violence which is now happening on a huge scale. Meanwhile, while the far-right claims to be ‘protecting’ (white) women, it is no surprise that at least two in five of those arrested for participating in last year’s racist riots had previous convictions for domestic violence. The far-right racists, like fascists everywhere, target racialized women for particularly vicious violence, viewing them as dehumanized symbols of their communities. This is what has led to the horrific Oldbury attack.
We also hold Keir Starmer’s government responsible for facilitating this ongoing violence by pandering to the far-right. He has embraced the far-right narrative that migrants are responsible for what are in fact the effects of successive Tory and Labour governments’ policies of austerity. Starmer’s notorious ‘island of strangers’ comment inspired by Enoch Powell, his repeated dog-whistle invocation of ‘small boats’ and his government’s increasingly oppressive immigration policies have fuelled the racist and misogynistic violence that we are now experiencing on our streets.
It is shameful that, at the time of writing, no government minister has made any statement of condemnation or concern about what happened in Oldbury. On the contrary, the Home Office appears to have instructed the police not to use live facial recognition (which is routinely used for surveillance and harassment of Black communities) on the participants in the massive fascist demonstration in London just four days later, despite the fact that police are still searching for suspects in the case.
We demand justice for the survivor of the Oldbury attack!
Fascists off our streets!
Keir Starmer: stop pandering to the far-right!
(Signed by South Asia Solidarity Group, Million Women Rise Movement, Black Lives Matter UK, Sikh Women’s Aid, Birmingham Black Sisters, Indian Workers Association (GB), Nijjor Manush, Women of OWAAD, Migrants’ Rights Network. Shaheed Udham Singh Welfare Centre – Women@the Centre Group and 36 other organisations. More info @ https://southasiasolidarity.org/justice-for-the-survivor-of-the-oldbury-attack-fascists-off-our-streets/)
