WEDNESDAY night was promoted as the night the right-wing mobs would take over the streets of Britain, burning Mosques and hotels that have housed refugees while targeting lawyers representing asylum seekers amongst others.
This message was amplified across the social media with its right-wing web sites and by the mainstream press, who repeated details of 100 cities and towns across the country where it was promised these right-wing thugs and fascists would control the streets.
The police organised the biggest mobilisation of its forces to counter the expected violent confrontations.
The offices of civil rights lawyers were shut down, high street shops boarded up, GP practices closed up early and MPs were advised to work from home in case they were threatened.
But instead of a right-wing riot, tens of thousands of workers and young people took to the streets of London, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and Brighton determined to protect their communities and deal a crushing blow to the right-wing.
While the right-wing mobs generally failed to turn up in the face of this massive demonstration coming out to physically challenge and defeat them, those that did found themselves cornered and relying on the protection of the police before slinking away.
In Brighton, a small band chanting anti-immigration slogans who gathered outside a law office, had to be protected by the police from 500 counter-protesters chanting ‘Off our streets, Nazi scum.’
Walthamstow in east London, saw one of the biggest turnouts with an estimated 10,000 anti-fascist demonstrators dominating the streets in anticipation of a far-right march with placards proclaiming ‘Nazis off our streets’.
The massive response of workers and youth on Wednesday night has completely sabotaged the plans by the ruling class to whip up a hysterical mob as a provocation to justify bringing in draconian state attacks on the working class and its trade union organisations.
It was a blow to the police who had been urging people not to demonstrate against the fascist mobs as it would only ‘inflame’ the situation.
Workers and youth took no notice of the police and Starmer’s ‘standing army’ of police ended up protecting fascists from workers standing solidly with all those fleeing from imperialist wars seeking refuge in the UK.
As the banners on display at all the demonstrations clearly stated: ‘All refugees are welcome’, in a complete refutation of the right-wing mantra that immigrants are the enemy of workers.
The working class knows full well that the enemy is a capitalist class of bosses and bankers that have lorded it over workers, demanding more and more austerity cuts and privatisation of public services in order to keep them in profit.
They wouldn’t tolerate any more savage austerity cuts causing poverty for millions from the Tories and they are not prepared to tolerate it from a Labour government – just as they have demonstrated they won’t tolerate fascists on the streets.
Starmer, who pledged to the capitalist class that his Labour government would ‘do what is necessary’ to keep British capitalism and the profits of the bosses and bankers from collapse, revealed the weakness of his Labour government in the face of a working class determined not to be driven into poverty by a bankrupt capitalist system, and to defend to the bitter end their democratic right to withdraw their labour.
This week, it was announced Labour would scrap the Tory anti-strike law which made it legal for employers to force workers to cross picket lines to break strikes.
The Tories couldn’t enforce their law and Starmer has been forced to see that he is also too weak to crush the unions, just as the right-wing have been shocked to learn that the working class is more powerful than all the plots to drive forward a police state.
The working class must now take action by instructing the TUC to immediately order the Labour government to carry out policies to expropriate the bankers and bosses, placing the banks and major industries under the management of the working class. Refusal by Labour to carry out this policy must result in the TUC calling a general strike to bring down the Labour government and bring in a workers government and socialism.