Scotland risks being dragged down by the Anglo-British nationalist far right

The far right rally which was organised by the criminal thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon in London last weekend is an alarming harbinger of what is to come. Scotland needs to pay attention, because if we don’t take action to assert our right to self-determination, those far right demonstrators massed in the streets will be our future too.

Those marching to blame migrants for society’s ills represented a classic case of what old lefties used to call false consciousness. In 1870, Karl Marx wrote in a letter to Siegfried Mayer and August Vogt: “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker… This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.”

The only difference between then and now is the identification of the out-group who are demonised by the comic papers – social media is the modern analogue – and the press. Those with power and wealth have a vested interest in giving those who are excluded and marginalised from power and economic security a target against which to direct their justified anger, but a target which does not threaten the power and wealth of those who benefit from the political and economic system as it is currently constituted.

It’s important that we recognise that most of the ordinary working class people who joined Yaxley-Lennon’s march do have genuine grievances, they are just blaming the wrong people for the issues which blight their lives and are fueled by the lies and misinformation promoted by the far right and legitimised by the media. Certainly there were a great many racists amongst them, and the organisers of the rally, Yaxley-Lennon and his ilk, are certainly racist, but we run the risk of making those who are toying with the idea of voting Reform sticking their fingers in their ears and refusing to listen if we dismiss them as racists.

It’s a fundamental rule of racism, just as it’s a rule of homophobia and transphobia, that those who are bigoted and hateful refuse to acknowledge their bigotry and hate. They’re just “protecting women and children” or “standing up for traditional family values.”

There is real and genuine anger across the UK just now, anger that young people struggle to find affordable housing, anger that gas and electricity bills and food bills soar, so that people who have worked all their lives live on a precipice, one pay packet away from destitution. There’s anger that the NHS is underfunded and over-stretched and people find themselves stuck in long waiting lists for essential treatment, waiting lists that can be over a year long if the condition is not life threatening. There’s anger at the deterioration of public services, the reduction in the frequency of bin collections, the rising cost of public transport amidst the cancellation of vital train and bus services. There’s anger at the enshittification of everything, the inability to speak to a real human being when you have an issue with your car insurance or broadband.

The far right offers an easy answer to all of this. It’s the fault of migrants. The white working class people who are the targets of far right propaganda can see the effects of migration. They notice people of colour and women wearing hijabs in the shops or on public transport, they hear foreign languages being spoken on buses and trains. But they don’t see the super-rich whose greed is the real cause of their woes and whose avarice sucks wealth out of the public domain. The super-rich are invisible behind the walls and fences of their country estates, being whisked to their exclusive town houses in luxury private cars. It’s human instinct to blame your problems on something you can perceive instead of putting the blame on something which is invisible to you, even though the greed of the super-rich is the real cause of the problems which beset white working class communities, people of colour, and migrants alike.

The far right misdirection is aided by a barrage of media stories telling the public there’s a “migrant crisis”. Have you ever heard the BBC or Sky News once mention the greedy super-rich crisis? Of course you haven’t. But every single day they carry stories on the “migrant crisis”, an invented crisis which is no real crisis at all.

In so doing the media legitimises and normalises the messaging of the far right. It’s a vicious circle, people think that immigration must be a serious and pressing issue because it’s always in the news, so they tell polling companies that immigration is an important issue for them, which drives political parties to adopt ever harsher policies on immigration, which in turn causes the media to carry ever more stories about immigration.

Those who tell the truth about migration to the UK, that there is no crisis, that it’s a chimera, an illusion created in order to distract from the real cause of societal problems, are marginalised and ignored. No one is allowed to say that the emperor has no clothes. The UK could easily absorb all those who come to Britain if public services and housing were properly funded and if the wealthiest paid their fair share in tax.

Meanwhile the obscenely rich take their helicopters to their Highland estates or sail their super-yachts to the Caribbean, safe in the knowledge that no one is threatening their wealth or talking about putting limits on their greed.

But this so-called Labour government has no intention of tackling the real roots of public dissatisfaction. It is a creature of the corporate interests which despoil the public sector. A party which intends to expand the presence of the private sector in the NHS is only going to contribute to the leeching of even more public money out of public services and into private bank accounts. But the media will continue to tell us that the crisis is a “migrant crisis”.

What this means, alarmingly, is that the far right and its demonisation of minorities will keep on gaining traction and the UK is trapped in a doom spiral with the far right emboldened to lie and deceive, telling  telling us that the “left” is responsible for terrorism when most political violence is committed by the right, teling us they are the champions of free speech as they silence their opponents.

The far right claims to be the champions of free speech, but what they really mean is that they demand the right to gaslight, to abuse, insult, and threaten their enemies with impunity. The truth is that the far right represents the biggest threat to freedom of speech. The right is shutting down anyone who dares question the myth that the British Empire was a force for unalloyed good, cancelling anyone who dares to point out that Charlie Kirk was a far right peddler of hate and that his murder is being weaponised by the right in order to shut down their critics. There has only been crickets from Farage and Badenoch, those self-proclaimed defenders of free speech, at the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrrorist organisation, or the arrest of four members of Led By Donkeys for the alleged crime of projecting an image of Trump and Epstein onto Windsor Castle on the eve of Trump’s state visit.

Make no mistake, advocates of Scottish and Welsh independence and Irish unification will sooner or later come into the sights of the Anglo-British nationalist far right. When that happens, those so-called defenders of free speech will only cheer.

Scotland is at risk of the far right’s false consciousness too, but Farage and his minions have not gained the same traction here as they have in England. Scotland’s traditions of communalism and civic nationalism offer a measure of protection, but England’s descent into far right authoritarianism will drag us down too. Independence is a moral imperative if we want to save Scotland for democracy and decency.

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