My talk on a panel at the Midlands TUC/Stand Up To Racism summit 18 September 2021

Thanks for inviting me .

In two weeks’ time I will be march with other anti-racists through East London, then co-chair a rally marking the 85^th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street – a famous victory for people’s power when Jews and non-Jews, including many trade unionists, formed a mass blockade and put up barricades to stop Oswald Mosley’s Fascists violently invading the streets where 60,000 Jews were living. Our side pushed back against thousands of police who tried to clear a path for the fascists. 79 anti-fascists were arrested; some served custodial sentences.

Our commemoration happens every five years. Sadly, this will be the first one without the living voices of brave veterans from 1936. That sadness, though, will be offset as we will hear from relatives, who share their parents lifelong anti-racism.

We will hear especially from Jewish and Bangladeshi speakers, celebrating a shared heritage of resistance, whether in the ‘30s against Mosley, the 1970s and ‘90s against the National Front and BNP, or more recently EDL and Britain First.

That resistance, and our victories were achieved through unity in action. We did not have to agree on every political issue to unite against a common racist enemy.

Despite those victories, though, racist beliefs, discrimination violence still scar our society. Whether from individuals, organised groups, police or government, racism threatens and diminishes the lives of longstanding minorities as well as recent migrants and refugees.

Yet, this summer there was massive support for England’s footballers defiantly taking the knee. Right now there is widespread sympathy for Afghan refugees, far beyond the ranks of activists for refugee rights. But less appetite to reverse the whole hostile environment.

We need to seize this moment in ways that are challenging and persuasive, to say all migrants and refugees to Britain, deserve support, friendship and dignity in their lives. 

We have to push wide open a debate about how a hostile environment can be transformed into a welcoming environment, and fight for our demands against what Shami Chakrabarti rightly described recently as a “Far right” Tory government, that is happy to polarise society through racist and nationalist culture wars, and, by doing so, give oxygen to small and splintered openly fascist groups waiting in the wings.

We need to shed some of our own comfortable myths. I often hear anti-racists say: “Britain has a proud record of welcoming refugees.” It hasn’t. My Jewish grandparents were not welcomed by the British state. They got in and survived despite being targeted by Britain’s first hostile environment that led to Britain’s first peacetime immigration law with its ugly name: the Aliens Act. That act, and others passed in that same mean spirit, made it so hard for refugees fleeing Nazism to enter. The British state did nothing for them; determined individuals and voluntary groups did everything.

Britain took very few Holocaust survivors from DP camps. In the ’50s British citizens from the Caribbean were invited for their labour, but their presence was soon condemned by organised racists. They faced abuse, discrimination and violence. The case for migrants and refugees is not about  tolerance but because they are human beings with human rights. We fight to protect free movement, sanctuary when needed, for all human beings, at all times.

We live in dangerous times, emerging slowly from the worst of the COVID crisis, into an economic crisis, where fear, scapegoating and conspiracy theories gain traction. Disparate groups are being convinced by these theories and mobilised. I saw that in early summer as my partner and myself were leaving a People’s Assembly demo in Parliament Square. Just at that point a far, far bigger, noisy, demo of anti-vaxxers was passing. Mainly white, multi-generational, some clearly aligned with the far right, real hatred in their eyes.

We were stuck there for quite a while. I heard later that an Indian friend also trying to get home was shouted at for wearing a mask, then punched, by a man wearing a t-shirt that said “freedom”. It is when the forces of hate commandeer the language of rights, freedom, liberation, and say they are oppressed, that they become so dangerous.

I read a report this week on antisemitic incidents in Britain between January and June 2021. It had a photo of a very striking but sickening example: a billboard advert showing two people enjoying a beautiful view defaced with a swastika and  graffiti saying: “COVID is a lie. Holocaust is a lie. Fuck the Jews.” Similar incidents have happened elsewhere, not just in Britain.

Anti-Vaxxers marching in Western Poland in July, were chanting: “Jews are behind the pandemic”, “Jews rule the world”. Similar mobilisations have occurred in Hungary where people are being influenced by conspiracy theories presenting themselves as “anti-elite”, or “anti-Western” but suffused with antisemitism. In both countries antisemitism flourishes alongside Islamophobia, anti-Roma, anti-refugee sentiment.

Our Tory government has the closest, warmest relations with their counterparts in Hungary and Poland who enable far right ideas to flourish. They will never challenge them on the antisemitism they enable, any more than on their Islamophobia.

We need convincing counter arguments to these lies and conspiracy theories, exposing the role of the far-right within these movements, and build real solidarity with anti-racists and anti-fascists in Hungary and Poland.

I know, as a Jew, that the light sleeper of post-war antisemitism, wakes up in dangerous times. The incidents we meet are far fewer than attacks on Black and Brown minorities, but they are growing and must be countered with the same determination. In the first six months of 2021, antisemitic incidents in Britain were higher than similar periods in previous years.

Threats and abuse glorifying the Holocaust and Hitler are growing. Physical assaults especially on visible ultra-orthodox Jews have increased significantly, with perpetrators sometimes using stones, eggs, bricks and bottles.

Two patterns should especially concern us: Most antisemitic incidents are usually done by adults. This year, incidents involving younger people – school students – have increased (against pupils mainly, but in some cases, teachers).

Secondly, the proportion of threats and assaults on Jews by those who themselves face racism has grown – each of us needs to counter that by explaining that the only safety for all minority communities is in solidarity with each other.

A final word – we can get very depressed about all of this but we must never lose sight what are we fighting for: justice and equality for all, in a world without fear and without borders.