Every left-wing person watching the British general election results come in will do so with a heavy heart. The new Tory government is set to be headed by the absolute worst elements of the Etonian ruling class – a vicious, racist, anti-working-class regime with the vile Trump-loving Johnson at its head. 
Many will draw conclusions similar to those drawn by the ALP and the media here after "Smoko" Morrison’s victory – that left-wing politics cannot appeal to working-class people, that working-class people are increasingly right-wing and racist and that only a Tory/Liberal-lite party can win. 
This narrative will be championed loudly by the Labour right who have done their absolute best to undermine Jeremy Corbyn in their efforts to maintain Labour as a neoliberal party absolutely committed to their role as capitalism’s plan B party. They will argue that this result confirms that the sensible centre is the only way forward in politics. 
Yet the story of this election is not a wholesale shift to the right in British society – but a dramatic decline in Labour’s vote. Those people who come to bury Corbyn are in large part to blame for this. Alongside their allies in the media, the Lib Dems and the establishment, the majority of the parliamentary Labour party have spent the last 4 years attacking both Corbyn himself and the more left wing policies he has championed. The attacks have been vicious and unrelenting, with Corbyn dishonestly portrayed as an antisemitic, authoritarian, Communist cult leader. At every turn they have undermined the growing left wing sentiment that put Corbyn into the leadership in the first place and saw him achieve the second best post-World War Two swing to Labour in the 2017 election. 
They have been as responsible for making this a Brexit election as Johnson – with the aim of using it to crush Corbyn. They will be much happier with this result than they would have been with a Corbyn victory which cemented his position.
They posture as progressive pan-Europeans, but the small-l liberal opinion-makers of the BBC, the Guardian, the Liberal Democrats, and the centre-right of the Labour party have waged a savage campaign to slander and destroy Corbyn – and in so doing, they’ve ensured a heavy majority for Johnson’s reactionary pro-Brexit government. That shows their real priorities. For all their huffing and puffing about Europe, their main priority was stopping Corbyn from having any chance to implement a left-wing economic policy. They have used the most despicable slanders in the service of this cause, notably totally cynical accusations of anti-Semitism against anyone associated with even the mildest support for the Palestinian national movement. The impact of this ideological war will weigh heavily on the broad left in years to come. It was an ultimately successful counter-attack to the ascension of Corbyn to the Labour leadership.
In the past year they have mobilised huge numbers on the streets in the cause of Remain, have succeeded in winning Labour to support a second referendum, and contributed to the polarisation of British politics around this issue – as opposed to the class questions of inequality, austerity, education and the NHS which saw a strong result for Corbyn in 2017. Their strategy has succeeded – not in stopping Brexit, but in ensuring Labour lost votes at both ends. 
Working class communities in the Labour heartlands have borne the brunt of neoliberalism since the early 1980s. Both Tory and Labour governments have carried out policies that have further entrenched the vast inequalities in British society that have seen a cycle of unemployment, poverty and neglect. For many of these people, voting for Brexit was a reflection of their anger and bitterness at politicians and the establishment. Labour in their areas represent that establishment – as the local councils, the Mayors and MPs. It was this disillusionment that outrageously created the space for Farage’s Brexit party to portray itself as the voice of the voiceless – a rhetoric reinforced by Labour’s support for a second referendum. The ultimate defection of Labour voters to Johnson’s Conservative Party in those areas, when Labour has been running on its most pro-worker platform in many years, represents a dramatic weakening of class consciousness amongst those long-suffering workers in the years since the Brexit vote. But in this election, many of them just didn’t bother to vote at all.
Corbyn’s early surge pointed to the potential for a different expression of that anger at neoliberalism. Hundreds of thousands of young people especially were drawn to Corbyn’s vision of socialism but that hope was consistently channelled into electoralism instead of mass action and struggle. 
It is more accurate to describe British society as polarised than on a right wing trajectory. Corbyn received a positive swing in some constituencies like Liverpool and Manchester. The British Social Attitudes survey in 2019 showed, for example, that 86% of people believe the NHS faces a “major” or “severe” funding problem, up 14 points since 2014. 61% “would be prepared to accept” tax rises to increase NHS spending, up 21 points from 2014.
But aside from one demonstration two years ago Labour failed to mobilise its over ½ million new members into any increase in mass protests or strikes. 
Neither did Corbyn put up a serious fight against the continual onslaught within his own ranks – capitulating at different times on the Trident nuclear weapon program, free movement of people, and the deselection as candidates of the Blairite MPs hell-bent on his destruction. 
Without an increase of struggle and mobilisation, even popular and radical policies could not overcome the disillusionment sewn by decades of Labour betrayals from the Iraq war and privatisation to the response to the global financial crisis and austerity. This cynicism towards politicians, even more left ones like Corbyn, is in fact based in a certain reality about the world.
Even if Corbyn had won, his parliamentary approach would not have been able to overcome the right wing resistance of the bosses, the media and his own MPs to be able to implement even his moderate social democratic agenda. The woeful experience of reformist governments in Greece and Latin America demonstrates this.
The world is now witnessing an upsurge in struggle from below, from Lebanon to Iraq to Chile to France and beyond. The same anger that puts millions on the streets of Paris, Santiago and Hong Kong exists in London, Glasgow and Manchester. 
Corbyn’s Labour received overwhelming support among young people, even in the Leave-voting areas of the north of England and southern Wales, alongside the Remainer stronghold of London. Those young people who tried to vote to defend the NHS, renationalise privatised industry, and reject Johnson’s reactionary politics can play an important role in building resistance to the attacks to come.
But that will be squandered if it is spent in more years of electoral work seeking power on the terrain that most favours the ruling class – building electoral majorities through official politics. That seemingly easy option has undermined the desire to resist austerity and neoliberalism in country after country. Waiting 5 years is not an option. And parliament is not where our power really lies anyway. We need the politics of struggle from below, and revolutionary, not parliamentary socialism.

Moira Leahy

Josh Lees

After Corbyn's defeat, a new struggle is needed

The British general election scheduled for 12 December should result in prime minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party being reduced to a rump. It is taking place against a backdrop of internal division, strife, the departure of many leading Tories from high office and a level of bickering and back-stabbing reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s final weeks in the early 1990s. Even Johnson’s own brother, Tory MP Jo Johnson, couldn’t stomach being in a government led by his opportunist sibling and resigned in September.
It is a crisis that has resulted in three Tory leaders in as many years. This may not seem like a big deal to Australians, but it created shock waves in one of the oldest and most stable political institutions in the modern world. The Tories received a mere 1.5 million votes in the 2019 European parliament elections – equivalent to the party’s membership in 1968!
US president Donald Trump’s ringing endorsement of Johnson on a recent radio programme and his threat to visit during the campaign should alone be sufficient to ensure the result is a disaster for the Conservatives, given that around 300,000 people took part in a weekday protest against his visit to London in 2018. 
However, the failure of Jeremy Corbyn’s 650,000-strong Labour Party to build on the wave of anti-Tory feeling that swept him into the leadership in 2015 means that a Labour victory is far from guaranteed. This is not because Corbyn is too left wing to get elected or because “quiet British” people will turn out in their droves to defeat socialism. It is because the terrain of the fight is how best to strengthen British capitalism: by leaving the European Union or staying in it.
Both the rabid Tory nationalists and the neoliberals in Labour hope that this will be a “Brexit election”. That has been made more likely as a consequence of Labour and the union leaders’ approach, which has prioritised electoral success over building campaigns, mass protests and strikes during the biggest crisis of the Tory party since the 1840s.
The left reformists around Corbyn want to unite the Labour Party under his leadership. That in part means making peace with the centre and right wing. Without that party unity, their project of a reformist Labour government is all but impossible. But that has strengthened the hand of the right. The right wing Labour parliamentarians, who are first and foremost committed to running British capitalism, have increasingly set Corbyn’s agenda. Their obsession with stopping Brexit in the interests of big business has infected the Labour Party and drained momentum from Corbyn's project.
Even for capitalists who support the EU, it is very advantageous to have a Brexit election: it would make the contest's central debate about whether the national interest of British capitalism is best served by leaving or remaining in the EU. The raging obsession of the political class with this question has pushed matters of pressing concern to ordinary people – the continuing privatisation of the National Health Service, Grenfell, zero-hours contracts and poverty pay – to the margins.
Corbyn himself has tried to drag the election back to class questions. A little goes a long way: the British working class have strong grievances that want redress. At the opening of the campaign, Corbyn launched attacks on prominent British capitalists and focussed on the NHS. But an effective struggle to defend social welfare programmes, confront the bourgeoisie and advance the cause of the working class can’t be waged by any parliamentarist party, let alone one still dominated by Labour politicians trained under Kinnock and Blair.
According to the shibboleths of the liberal media, no left wing person could support Brexit. The dominant narrative is that it is battle of multiculturalists versus racists, cosmopolitans versus Little Englanders, urban versus rural and, most perniciously, the educated, sophisticated southern middle class versus the brutish, backward northern working class. As with most explanations for the election of Trump, this “Remain vs. Brexit” narrative is a simplified and distorted view of history, designed to resurrect the sensible centre of British politics represented by the rejuvenated Blairites of the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the “wet” Tories.
The Brexit vote in 2016 meant different things to different people. For one wing of the Tories and the far right, it was certainly about ramping up vicious anti-immigrant, pro-deregulation policies. They played on the sense of crisis in British society resulting from the 2008 global financial crisis to portray themselves as political outsiders, a voice for those unheard and disaffected by the failings of the political mainstream. Much research since the Brexit vote suggests that it certainly galvanised a racist constituency. But for many people, a vote for Brexit was not primarily motivated by racism or a desire to return to the imagined glory days of the British empire. Rather, their disaffection with neoliberalism and austerity meant they were voting against the status quo.
The Remain campaign unified many of those responsible for the decades-long destruction of working class communities: most of the Tory party, the overwhelming majority of the British ruling class, the City of London and the Liberal Democrats (who notoriously betrayed their key 2010 election promise to scrap university tuition fees in order to join David Cameron’s Conservative government). For many, a vote for Brexit was a vote against the political establishment and its self-serving insistence that Brexit would be a “disaster” for the economy. For many working people, especially in towns and cities ravaged by the wilful destruction of manufacturing and heavy industry, disaster was already a daily reality.
The utter disbelief that greeted the referendum result attested to just how out of touch politicians and the liberal media were, as does the Remainers’ dogged insistence that anyone who voted for Brexit was just racist, ignorant or probably both. Yet the Tories under Cameron and Labour under Tony Blair – both Remainers – were responsible for the development of anti-immigrant feeling. Both whipped up Islamophobia, both tightened immigration controls and both responded with borders and barriers to refugee crises their governments created. Corbyn’s once principled defence of freedom of movement crumbled under the pressure of the Remainers inside the Labour Party – hardly an advert for their anti-racist credentials!
The earthquake that was Brexit was not the only expression of the fracturing of stability in the world’s oldest parliamentary democracy. The 2011 riots sparked by the shooting of an unarmed young Black man, Mark Duggan, quickly spread to involve thousands of young people and others suffering from deteriorating living conditions while surrounded by the gleaming skyscrapers that now dominate even the poorest of Britain’s cities. Corbyn’s shock election to Labour’s leadership was a different expression of alienation from establishment politics and a reflection of the widespread desire to reverse decades of attacks on social welfare, living standards and pay.
Yet this sentiment has been funnelled away from mass struggle and into Corbyn’s reformist project. The heady euphoria that moved hundreds of thousands to join Labour to back his leadership has been repeatedly dissipated by Corbyn prioritising party unity over fighting against the right wing’s attacks and rebuilding mass struggle on the streets. This has only strengthened the position of those determined to see the party fulfil its role as capitalism’s plan B. And while early signs are Labour will run a more left wing campaign than might have been expected, it may not be sufficient to reinvigorate those demoralised in the meantime.
This is particularly tragic because the recent Tory and Coalition governments have provoked enormous anger across Britain, creating the potential for resistance. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, working class people have suffered enormously – nearly 20 percent of pensioners and 30 percent of children (that’s 4.1 million) are living below the poverty line. Real wages have fallen by 23 percent in the last 10 years, and around one million people in regular employment have joined millions of unemployed regularly depending on food banks to feed their families.
The systematic underfunding of the National Health Service provoked large mobilisations in January 2018. But the possibility of more radical action fizzled as the focus shifted to the elections later that year. The narrow focus on parliament as the key arena of struggle against the Tories has helped establish Brexit as the major issue in British politics and has enabled Johnson to regain some of the momentum lost by the Tories under Cameron and Theresa May. Opposition to Johnson’s proroguing of parliament should have provoked mass demonstrations around the question of democracy. Though some of the left both inside and outside Labour have tried to make this a focus, the dominant mobilising force against Johnson has been the Remainers.
Working people have nothing to gain from throwing their lot in with the Remainers. Instinctively, many young and left wing people are horrified by the blatant racism of Johnson, Nigel Farage and the recently formed Brexit Party. Like millions around the world, they think that refugees should be welcomed, and they stand against deregulation and the privatisation of the welfare state. 
But the EU is not the answer, and no amount of wishing will make it so. The EU is and always has been a bosses’ club – a means for one section of global capital to organise itself against rival blocs of capital. It regulates the trading within that bloc and disciplines member states that don’t comply with its rules, as has happened in Spain, Portugal and Greece. Even the minor reforms promised by Corbyn would likely be met by strong EU resistance. At the same time, the EU consciously allows thousands seeking refuge in Europe to drown in the Mediterranean each year. It also bankrolls military regimes and dictators – such as funding the training of the Sudanese troops that massacred people in the Sudanese revolution earlier this year.
Support for one section of our rulers against another leads only to passivity on our side – such as the sight of Corbyn refusing to allow a general election three times and giving Johnson, the man who shut down parliament, space to present himself as the defender of the people’s right to vote. And what a message to send to the millions who are angry about austerity – Brexit is more important than getting rid of Johnson and the Tories. It also emboldens those who respond to the paralysis in politics with right wing audacity – Brexit gives Johnson, Farage and other far right politicians the opening to be much more proactive in fighting for their ideas, pushing British politics further to the right.
Despite the mass membership that flooded into the Labour Party in response to austerity and the collapse of neoliberal centrist politics, Corbyn and Labour have so far demonstrated the inability of reformist politics to take advantage of this crisis. They may yet succeed in pushing issues of class inequality to the forefront of the election campaign and, if successful, could perform better in the election than most commentators and polls are currently predicting. But they have not so far delivered a decisive blow against the Tories. Nor have they helped to rebuild union and social movement strength on the ground. And they demobilised many of those who might have been part of such a movement. 
The mass sentiment against austerity, the overwhelming support for the school student strikes and the thousands involved in the Extinction Rebellion protests in the past year point to the possibilities of mobilising the millions who will vote for Corbyn because they hate the Tories. Their actions could deliver the radical change so desperately needed.

Brexit and the British election

As revolutionary socialists originally from Britain, we were both very saddened by the recent death of Colin Barker, a lifelong revolutionary socialist in the International Socialist tradition, from which Socialist Alternative arose. 
We have been inspired by his fantastic writing about socialism from below – and were both very privileged to personally fight alongside him for some of the time we were active in the Socialist Workers Party.
Colin’s life and politics are a great counter to the cynics who sneer at young people for fighting for a socialist future, dismissing it as the rebellion of misguided youth. Colin was a revolutionary for more than 60 years, and his belief in the power and potential of ordinary people to transform themselves and the world remained strong throughout that time.
He joined the IS whilst a student at Oxford University in the early 1960s, moving to Manchester shortly afterwards. He helped build the revolutionary left while a lecturer, writer and trade unionist in Manchester. He worked very closely with Tony Cliff, the founder of the IS tradition, contributing much to the development of Marxist theory. 
From the very early years, Colin combined revolutionary theory and practice. He was always excited whenever struggle broke out and threw himself into the political debates around strikes and campaigns as well as building practical solidarity. In the late 1960s, for example, Colin was deeply involved in a dispute in a small factory just outside Manchester, where the bosses were trying to destroy trade union organisation. The pamphlet he wrote was adopted by the strike committee and sold thousands of copies. 
This engagement with struggle would characterise the whole of Colin’s six decades as a revolutionary – spanning the periods of worker militancy in the early 1970s, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism in the late 1970s, the great miners’ strike of 1984-85, through to the anti-capitalist and massive anti-war movement beginning in the early 2000s.
Anyone who ever met Colin was struck by his unrelenting belief in socialism from below. 
This belief can in part be attributed to Colin’s first-hand experience of the massive struggles of Polish workers in the Solidarnosc movement of 1980-81. Together, Colin and his lifelong partner Ewa, herself of Polish descent, produced an entire issue of the International Socialism Journal about the tumultuous events that rocked the Stalinist regimes in Poland and across Eastern Europe.
Ewa and Colin’s observations about how mass struggle can shake even powerful regimes influenced the focus of much of his later writings and his infectious excitement about the possibility of lasting social change. 
Among the many engaging articles and books Colin wrote and edited, Revolutionary Rehearsals is a must read for those wanting to understand how mass struggle has erupted in more economically advanced countries and why revolutionary moments are a regular feature of capitalism.
Our memories of Colin are of someone who loved to spend time with young activists engaged in the day to day business of building revolutionary organisation.
His wealth of knowledge and experience in both British and international politics meant that he could always contextualise a particular struggle or campaign you were involved in, offering relevant comparisons and insights.
Colin brought gravitas to the debates and discussions in which he took part, but he wore his experience lightly, believing that you could always learn from others. Regardless of whether a comrade had been involved in the struggle for many years or a few months, Colin took them seriously. 
Though our struggles alongside him took place in separate decades, we both remember him as someone who valued our contributions to building both campaigns and revolutionary organisation.
He loved the energy and enthusiasm of younger comrades, often getting just as caught up in the excitement of a relatively small protest as he did about the big struggles he had been a part of in the 1970s.
In meetings and discussions, Colin’s contributions always deepened your understanding of the immediate issue at hand by connecting to the lessons of history, making Marxism accessible and relevant to today’s struggles.
Though Colin was someone who was involved in revolutionary politics for a long time, he embraced each new struggle and campaign with the enthusiasm of a new activist participating in their first action. He showed passion and commitment to winning as many people as possible to the politics and activism necessary for success.
In the build-up to the launch of Unite Against Fascism in the early 2000s, for example, Colin spent hours persuading many key figures in the trade union and socialist movement in the Manchester area to throw their support behind the initiative. He was also willing to walk the streets of the city centre, getting shops and cafes to display leaflets and posters. 
Colin was a real inspiration to many socialists through his activism, meetings and writings – both in Britain and beyond. His writings are essential tools for all of us seeking to understand the world better in order to transform it. 
Our solidarity goes to Ewa, Hannah, Nancy and everyone who was more convinced of the need for socialism by their connection to him.

Kerri Sinclair

Colin Barker, 1939 – 2019

Spurred on by the rise of Islamophobia, anti-refugee brutality and the victories of Trump and Bolsonaro, neo-Nazis have entered the mainstream in places where it once seemed unthinkable. 
In Germany, Hungary, Poland, France and Brazil, fascists now hold seats in parliament and use these positions to spread their racist filth, divert blame for the evils of austerity to society’s most vulnerable and win more supporters to their far right ideology. 
It is imperative that anti-fascists build movements to confront and stop the fascists and the far right wherever they are gaining strength. 
The success of the British Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in smashing the Nazi National Front (NF) in the 1970s is both instructive and encouraging on this score. 
In 1977, the NF attracted more than 119,000 votes in the Greater London Council elections, beating the then third party of British politics, the Liberal Party, in a significant number of seats. In the south-east London district of Deptford, it won 43 percent of the vote, coming in second place behind Labour.
In a climate of horrific racist attacks and murders targeting Bengali, Indian, Pakistani and African Caribbean immigrant communities, particularly in London’s east, the NF was building both an electoral base and a violent street movement. With an estimated membership of more than 15,000 in the mid-1970s, it seemed to be an unstoppable force in British politics. 
The Battle of Lewisham and the subsequent launch of the ANL changed all that. In only a few years, this fascist organisation was broken and defeated. The NF’s national organiser, Martin Webster, credited the ANL with playing a significant role in its demise. 
By the 1979 election, the NF vote had shrunk considerably. By 1982, the organisation was bankrupt and defunct, its membership greatly reduced, facing splits and plagued by infighting. 
The Battle of Lewisham was the catalyst for the creation of the ANL – an organisation that would mobilise many thousands of activists across Britain via more than 600 local groups. 
The ANL was launched in 1977 after 5,000 local people united with 5,000 trade unionists, Black and Asian activist and community groups and Labour Party members, led by the revolutionary left, to stop the fascist thugs of the NF from marching through Lewisham, an area of south London. 
In determined, united opposition, those 10,000 people occupied the route that the fascists intended to take through Clifton Rise, a centre for the Black community in the area. 
Despite a vicious and sustained assault by the police – wearing riot gear for the first time on the British mainland – the anti-fascists held their ground for several hours, smashing the Nazi march in two, sending hundreds of them scurrying away with their Union Jacks torn and trampled. British socialist David Widgery’s brilliant book Beating Time captures the spirit of the day wonderfully: 
“In New Cross Road … People gently milled; here surging forward under banners that sprang and swooped like kites, there breaking out into feminist war whoops, elsewhere shouting recognition in noisy South London patois … At the front, a jam-packed contingent of South London Afro-Caribbeans cordially but expertly blocked off the police’s first attempts – uphill and on foot – to open a way for the NF procession. Up on a traffic bollard a Trinidadian giant with a hand megaphone was thoughtfully advising the crowd, rather as a cricket captain might place his field.” 
Paul Holborow was the chief steward for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that day. In an article in the party’s newspaper, Socialist Worker, on the 40th anniversary of the battle, he explained the effect the Nazis’ defeat had on anti-racists: “People felt absolutely elated. It was the first time since Cable Street in 1936 that we’d given the Nazis a bloody good hiding”. 
In the days afterwards, hundreds of people contacted the SWP, eager to seize on the momentum of Lewisham to further turn the tide on the Nazis. A mass, anti-racist campaign was born. 
Yet only a few years earlier the growth of fascism had seemed unstoppable. 
Just as Blair Cottrell and his fascist cronies have recently latched onto the anti-African racism of the media and mainstream politicians, the NF had also grown in strength by piggybacking on mainstream racism. 
Nazis targeted Lewisham because it was a focus of the London police’s “crackdown” on mugging, a campaign that in reality involved the harassment and arrest of young Black men. The NF hoped to benefit from the racist climate and further scapegoat a community already under siege from the media and police. 
Mass disillusionment with the Labour government bolstered the NF’s electoral support and confidence. Labour’s response to the economic crisis of the mid-1970s was to attack the conditions and pay of millions of workers. And in the face of anti-immigrant scapegoating, whipped up in the 1960s by Tory MP Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech, Labour tailed the Tories’ racism. 
In 1976 the Labour government introduced the racist Immigration Act in an attempt to shift the blame for the hardships imposed on the working class onto immigrants as it managed capitalism on behalf of Britain’s wealthy. 
The NF ran 90 candidates in the 1974 general election, compared to only eight in 1966. Their 113,844 votes sent a message to revolutionary organisations in Britain that something had to be done to stop them. 
For the next few years, socialists tried to organise mass counter-protests every time the fascists marched. Lewisham provided the breakthrough because, for months on end, socialists in the SWP and local Black activists argued that it was both possible and necessary to stop the Nazis in their tracks by mobilising the local community and anti-fascist organisations together. 
They did so in face of the endless parroting of the “anti-fascists are just as bad as the fascists” line by the mainstream media and, sadly, the leadership of the Labour and Communist parties, which argued that the ballot box was the place to defeat the NF. 
The balance of the argument shifted with the success of Lewisham – and the ANL was launched. The revolutionary left, the Indian Workers’ Association, key African-Caribbean groups such as the Mangrove Community Organisation, left Labour MPs and some important trade union officials were all involved in its creation. 
Labour activist Peter Hain, Ernie Roberts of the engineering union and Paul Holborow of the SWP were central to bringing different forces of the left together. 
One of the beautiful things about the ANL was that it strove for genuine unity around the question of defeating the NF. If you were against the fascists and believed it was necessary to organise against them, then you were in. 
The ANL’s two-pronged strategy contributed enormously to its success. 
First, there was a mass propaganda campaign to expose the NF as the heirs of Hitler. The sponsorships of 10 national trade unions and 50 Labour MPs helped raise funds for an impressive propaganda campaign. Six hundred local groups met to organise postering, leafleting and doorknocking whenever Nazis stood in elections or threatened to organise. 
School students, teachers, engineers, firefighters, gays, vegetarians all carried the anti-racist message in their leaflets and newsletters. It became commonplace to refer to the NF as the “Nazi Front”, especially after photos of their leaders doing Nazi salutes were plastered across walls in many town and cities. The slogan “Never again” linked their racism to the Holocaust. 
In total, 9 million leaflets were produced in a four-year period – with initiatives such as educational packs produced by anti-Nazi teachers and fanzines produced by Schoolkids Against the Nazis developing the key ideas in more depth. 
Second, the victory at Lewisham showed many people that mass numbers on the streets whenever the Nazis tried to march were essential to breaking their organisation. John Tyndnall, the leader of the NF, had echoed Hitler when he argued: “I believe our great marches, with drums and flags and banners, have a hypnotic effect on the public and immense effect in solidifying the allegiance of our followers, so that their enthusiasm can be sustained”. 
After Lewisham, every attempt to sustain that enthusiasm was met with bigger numbers than the Nazis could muster, leading to the demoralisation of many thousands of their less committed supporters, and a dwindling of their numbers. In Leicester, Southall, Hackney and elsewhere, the fascists did not march unchallenged – and were often stopped in spite of sometimes massive police operations to protect them. 
Rock Against Racism (RAR) was also hugely important in mobilising hundreds of thousands of young people in opposition to the attempts of Nazis to co-opt punk and skinhead culture. Four massive carnivals in London, Leeds and Manchester attracted between 50,000 and 80,000 Black, white and Asian young people, headlined by bands from across the punk, reggae and two-tone scenes, including Steel Pulse, X Ray Spex, the Specials, Buzzcocks and – most famously – the Clash. 
The impact of RAR was huge and helped shape the politics of a generation of young people. Only a few short years earlier, giants of British pop such as Eric Clapton and David Bowie had flirted with fascism as the NF grew. With the advent of RAR, it became commonplace for bands to emphasise their anti-fascist credentials during gigs and interviews to better relate to their potential audience. 
The success of these mass protests and carnivals depended on the determination, doggedness and political clarity of those at the heart of the ANL and RAR. Revolutionaries organised by the SWP were at the centre of arguing for a mass movement and had the political conviction to stand up confidently to attacks from the media and those sections of the Labour Party which labelled them “red fascists”. 
Of course, within the ANL socialists and anti-racists activists engaged in discussion and debate about the links between fascism and mainstream racism, why socialists oppose all immigration controls and why fascism is not an aberration but a product of capitalism. But these discussions took place as people from different political traditions linked arms in mass demonstrations against the fascists and the police protecting them wherever the Nazis tried to march. 
The fascists in Britain were defeated for a generation by these efforts. 
Anti-fascist politics offered hope and unity in the face of division and bitter racism. It gave confidence to young Blacks and Asians in Britain, second and third generation immigrants more willing and able than their parents to stand up to racist lies, police violence and the inequalities that were the legacy of empire. 
One example to illustrate this was provided by Darcus Howe, a leading African-Caribbean campaigner for over 40 years, who was at Lewisham in 1977. 
At a memorial meeting for David Widgery, a central figure in the ANL and RAR, he described how the last of his five children would have a different experience from that of her siblings because of the efforts of Widgery and the ANL. Instead of battling intense racism like her siblings, she had the chance to grow up “black at ease” with “space” to develop her personality. 
There is increasing recognition of the need for anti-fascist politics and activity once again to turn the tide against Nazis and the far right. In the US last year, 40,000 mobilised in Boston, Massachusetts, in the days after neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, and murdered left wing activist Heather Heyer. Two hundred and fifty thousand rallied in Berlin against the far right in Germany, and there is a growing movement against Orban in Hungary. 
While the current momentum of the fascists and far right has not yet been decisively checked, the example of the ANL in Britain shows that it is possible and points to the sort of action needed to beat them.
----------
Before coming to Australia Moira Leahy was a socialist in Britain for 20 years. She was involved in the Anti-Nazi League when it reformed in the 1990s.

After Corbyn's defeat, a new struggle is needed

Brexit and the British election

Colin Barker, 1939 – 2019

British Anti-Nazi League: how fascists can be beaten

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