LAST Friday night, a racist gang attacked and seriously injured a teenage asylum seeker in Croydon.
The Kurdish Iranian boy, age 17, was waiting with two friends at a bus stop when he was set upon by about eight racists. The attackers asked the boy where he was from before attacking him. His friends suffered minor injuries in the attack, but the teenager is reported to have sustained a fractured skull and a blood clot on his brain. Police said he remains in a ‘serious but stable’ condition.
Four men and two women were arrested on Saturday night. They were all held on suspicion of attempted murder or violent disorder, the Metropolitan Police said. Speaking about the attack, Chief Supt Jeff Boothe said: ‘A number of bystanders and eyewitnesses tried to intervene and say to the attackers that enough is enough. By all accounts they didn’t actually stop until the sound of police sirens was heard in the background.’
The next day, a fascist march was held near Trafalgar Square under the banner ‘London Under Attack’, organised by the Britain First Party, and the English Defence League (EDL). This march was correctly challenged by the Unite Against Fascism group, who confronted the right wing march and were then attacked by the police who arrested 14 of their number.
The march was held ten days after the Westminster terrorist attack on parliament which gave the fascists their opportunity to make their bid to rally behind their banner the most backward sections of society. In fact, asylum seekers and all refugees are welcome to the UK because they are the victims of terrorism.
Their countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya have all been destroyed by the imperialist powers from Blair and Bush down to Trump and May who are continuing with these terrorist attacks. It is the imperialists who are the terrorists, whose deeds created ISIS and put it into the shade!
The fascists are tools of imperialism, who come on the scene to blame the victims of imperialist terrorism for the carnage that the imperialist powers have themselves set up. This is not the first time that they have come onto the scene in this way. In the 1950s, when West Indian workers came to the UK at the invitation of the government, the Mosleyites, just released from war time internment, came onto the scene to make West Indian workers the scapegoats for the appalling conditions that workers in areas like North Kensington lived in.
They organised race riots – Mosley stood for parliament in North Kensington, where on May 15th 1959, a West Indian carpenter Kelso Cochrane was stabbed to death by a gang of racists. Cochrane’s murderer Patrick Digby wielded the stiletto and was arrested but never charged by the police.
The Socialist Labour League put out a pamphet calling for ‘Workers Defence Squads for Notting Hill Gate’, and mobilised the working class to fight the fascists and drive them off the streets. The Tories meanwhile brought forward Enoch Powell to make his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech urging to ‘send them back’.
The working class mobilised and defeated the fascists and racists in the 1950s and 60s.
Today, with world capitalism in its greatest crisis, the fascists are being mobilised to make another attempt to split the working class so that blood-soaked capitalism can survive for a couple more decades.
The working class must now be mobilised to drive the fascists off the streets. But not just that. The whole population, led by the working class, must be mobilised in the struggle for a general strike to defend the National Health Service, to bring back free state education, and to nationalise the banks and the major industries to put an end to bankrupt capitalism and bring in socialism.
This struggle is not unique to the UK, as the mass demonstrations and huge clashes that are taking place in France and Greece, to name but two countries, over attempts to bring in permanent austerity programmes, show.
The whole of Europe is ablaze. Now is the time for the workers of the UK, together with the workers of Europe to push forward, to welcome all refugees and to bring down the bosses’ and bankers’ EU and replace it with the Socialist United States of Europe.
