What we are witnessing is not an isolated event. Across Britain and Ireland, reactionary forces are attempting to channel anger over declining living standards, crumbling public services and growing insecurity into hatred of migrants, refugees and minorities. The same political forces driving anti-migrant agitation are also leading attacks on trans people, seeking to divide working class communities and create scapegoats while the rich continue to profit from crisis and austerity.
The last two summers have demonstrated perfectly the relationship between the ruling class and the semi-organised street fascist movement. The Southport riots and events following it in 2024, and then the harassment of hotels housing asylum seekers and continued attacks against minority communities in 2025 were the product of inflammatory media coverage of similar events to those that have caused the current far-right upsurge. These actions, often organised by fascist organisations, provide ammunition for attacks on migrant people by the British state and mass media. This tends to strengthen the right-populism of Reform UK and Restore Britain, the latter of which has fascist groups operating openly within it. So whilst the fascist movement in the UK is not at present likely to take state power, it exists as a radical flank of the ruling classes’ own racism and state repression, creating space for further attacks on migrant people and shifting the Overton Window to the Right.
Rather than confronting the racist narratives that underpin these outbreaks of violence, Labour has repeatedly sought to accommodate them. The government has tightened immigration controls, restricted and lengthened routes to settlement and family reunification, increased deportations, and adopted ever more punitive rhetoric towards migrants and asylum seekers. Far from challenging anti-migrant politics, Labour has attempted to prove that it can manage the border regime more effectively than its opponents. In doing so, it accepts the reactionary premise that migration itself is a social problem requiring harsher controls. Every concession to this logic legitimises the scapegoating of migrants and shifts political debate further to the right, strengthening the forces that organised the violence in the first place.
In response to this, we the Democratic Socialists, reiterate that Britain as a country has been shaped by Empire and migration, and we fight for a society that is committed to justice for all its inhabitants regardless of race, ethnicity or national origin, and stands against the violence of the border regime.
The campaign against trans liberation and the campaign against migrants spring from the same reactionary politics. Both seek to convince ordinary people that their enemies are the oppressed rather than the capitalists, landlords and governments responsible for declining living standards. As socialists, we reject every attempt to stoke hatred within our societies along the lines of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender identity etc. Along with this, the current campaign against migrants, and in particular asylum seekers, exists to legitimise the brutal and worsening border regime of the UK, a key tool in undercutting the civil rights and bargaining power of migrants, increasing powers to the police and border agencies, and strengthening the nationalism of an imperialist and militarist power.
These developments are taking place amid a deepening global crisis, where imperialism is spreading chaos and destruction, where the natural world is beginning to buckle under capitalist exploitation of our planet. Workers are being asked to pay the price for crises they did not create while reactionaries parasitically latch on to the confusion and worry to further their reactionary aims whilst covering for the classes and forces responsible. In this moment the need for an organised mass socialist alternative, built on solidarity in words and deed, could not be greater.
As the struggle for that socialist political alternative goes on racists and fascists must be confronted politically in every workplace, union, college and community. We support the building of mass mobilisations across Ireland and Britain to defend migrants, refugees, trans people and all those targeted by the far right. We also encourage members to mobilise and organise community self-defence against mobs that seek to attack minority and migrant members of our communities. Over the next few weeks, there are mass mobilisations against fascists and solidarity events with migrant people in:
- Glasgow on 13th June assembling at 1pm on Buchanan Steps
- Brighton on 13th June assembling at 11am on Queens Road (more information here)
- Newcastle on 13th June assembling at 11am at the Civic Centre (more information here)
- Sheffield on 13th June assembling at 11.30am by Sheffield Town Hall (more information here)
- London on 13th & 14th June starting at 9.30am, Migrant Justice Summit (more information here)
- Birmingham on 20th June assembling at 11am in Victoria Square (more information here)
- Manchester on 20th June starting at 2pm, Break Up the Border (more information here)