By David Renton

This weekend will feel awful, but once we’re through it, there are things the left could do to turn the situation around.

The reason why things will feel bad is that Tommy Robinson has rebuilt his street movement, back to where it was in 2018. Robinson has his social media accounts back (thanks to Elon), and we’re back to a situation where he can mobilise around 15-20,000 people whenever the mood takes him.

To make things worse, this time, he or his followers have been calling local mobilisations rather than relying on the sterile environment of central London rallies. We’ve seen the results this week in Southport, and last night in Sunderland.

Between now and the end of Sunday, Robinson still has another 28 local rallies planned – if all happen (many won’t) at least two-thirds of those that do are likely to go unchallenged by anti-fascists. Tonight and tomorrow there will be several more cities go like Sunderland yesterday (a crowd, unchallenged as it attacked Muslim men, and started fires) and fewer Liverpools (where the Robinson supporters were outnumbered and forced to retreat).

Anyone who’s serious about anti-fascism knows the weakness of our tradition over the past four years: in the main cities, where there were groups, they are weaker now than they were in 2020. Anti-fascists have picked up many bad habits that would take a lifetime to unlearn (protesting at a mile’s distance from the threat, militant-sounding slogans with nothing behind them). But rather than dwelling on the bad, I want to focus on the positives – the objective weakness of our enemies, the relatively small number of things we would need to do differently to make anti-fascism work again.

It helps enormously that the main far right group is led by Robinson. Charismatic he may be, experienced, a genuine ‘name’, all of that is true. But he is also, very obviously, leeching off his own supporters – monetising his relationship to them, while having no idea at all to build beyond this point. Ally with fundamentalist Christians, sell his contact list to Reform, cast big moon-eyes at Kemi Badenoch if she won the Conservative election – he would be happy to do any of these, and may well make fumbling steps towards all of them at once, even though they point in opposite directions, make his politics incoherent, and the further he goes down any of those routes the more certain is it that he’ll set one faction of his followers fighting against another.

Further, part of why Robinson’s crowd seems bigger than the left’s is that he can concentrate all his forces (he has no competitor on the street right) while the far left is, quite rightly, trying to do many different things at once: march for Palestine, take direct action against arms companies, occupy universities, protect trans people, etc. Anti-fascism comes quite a long way down our list.

At a certain point, this spreading of left-wing forces can be turned to our advantage. There are many people who also identify with anti-fascism who will be willing to defend a mosque from attack, so long as you have a group of people in your town who are willing to take this work seriously. Leaflet the anti-war marches, that’s where anti-fascists can find a base capable of outnumbering the far right.

Finally, we’ve had examples in the past few weeks of anti-fascism working. France is the best case – where a genuine unity attracting Socialists, Communists, Greens, Trotskyists, and the sorts of people who 20 years ago might have had half an eye on George Galloway – combined to defeat an electoral far right which has spent 40 years doing that and nothing else.

There are all sorts of lessons you could draw from that experience: if you want to make unity work it has to be a deep unity, a visible convergence of people who are publicly setting aside their differences; it can’t just be one national network that’s done the same things for 20 years with diminishing returns. But even if people don’t learn those lessons, it’s enough for the moment that we can say that people outside Britain have faced similar problems and they’re holding the line.

In France, they stopped an almost certain far right government. We have our own threat and, like them, we can defeat it.

David Renton is a barrister and the author of Against the Law: Why Justice Requires Fewer Laws and a Smaller State, which was published by Repeater in 2022 and of Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, which was published by Routledge in November 2022. This article was taken from his blog Lives; Running and was originally published here.

Image: Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson). Author: Shayan Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.