Socialist Party member Deji Olayinka spoke at CWU conference on 10 May, arguing for the trade unions to take the lead campaigning against racism but putting class politics to the fore
I heard a story of a Black woman from Epping in Essex who had witnessed a sexual assault. Horrified by it, she went to a protest called in response. When she arrived, she found it being led by the far right, chanting racist slurs because the attacker was a migrant.
Across the road, she saw another group led by Stand Up to Racism shouting: “Nazi scum off our streets”.
Good, but ultimately she went home, frustrated that no one there was serious about stopping sexual violence. Others in her position would have just joined the far-right demo.
To stop the growth of the far right, the trade union movement needs to push anti-racist class politics, to drive a wedge between racist scum leaders and the working-class people that are being misled into their hands.
Polls prove that we have a way in. Over a million former UKIP supporters voted for Corbyn in 2017. Reform supporters back renationalisation: 87% for water companies, 65% for energy companies, and for our Royal Mail, 77%. Farage doesn’t want that, but neither does the Labour Party.
To defeat the right, our union needs to build working-class political campaigns. In 2018, the TUC agreed to launch a campaign for ‘jobs and homes, not racism’. They didn’t, but the union movement must do that now, because the others won’t.
I went to a Stand Up to Racism demo outside a Reform rally in Croydon. For two hours, it was chants of “Reform racist” and “racist scum”. At points, there were more black and brown people queuing for that Reform rally than with us. Not a single one of them would have had their minds changed.
Stand Up to Racism’s election campaign was simply ‘don’t vote Reform’. Worse, the charity bosses in the Together Alliance leadership blocked that slogan for being too political! So they just said: “Register to vote”.
We can’t defeat the right by funding organisations where well-meaning charity bosses and liberal politicians block our bread-and-butter class politics.
Reject this motion and let’s build a real united front campaign, bringing Unite housing union reps and renters’ union activists to the next migrant hotel counter-demos, pushing placards and chants calling for ‘jobs and homes, not racism’, and demanding to build council homes for us all.
Those wanting to protest homelessness and housing waiting lists, but misled by the far right, might join our side. And if landlords and councillors refusing to do so, don’t join us, then so be it.
The unions must organise and lead a working class, united front, anti-racist movement. So, at the next Reform rally, we can have our posties alongside NHS workers calling for renationalisation, not Reform privatisation, saying: ‘Save our NHS from Farage’s funders’!
