UN Anti-Racism Day on March 22 is our chance to show that we can prevent fascism and racism scarring Europe’s future in the way it has scarred its past.
We enter these European elections with fascist and extreme right parties likely to increase their seats.
In France backing for Le Front Nationale is at an all-time high with predictions of 25 per cent support.
This pattern is repeated across Europe, with extreme right, neonazi parties or their more “mainstream” populist variants looking like they will be the big winners in the coming Euro elections.
In Britain the effective broad campaigning of Unite Against Fascism with its allies in the labour movement against the neo-fascist British National Party – along with its own internal divisions – have roundly defeated that party.
But instead, Nigel Farage’s Ukip is making the running with its platform that calls for an end to all immigration while having nothing to say about alternatives to cuts and austerity.
Farage has said he finds it “uncomfortable” to be surrounded by different languages on a London train.
However he is quite comfortable being co-president of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) European parliamentary group with Italian rightwinger Francesco Speroni, who has expressed agreement with some of the views of Norwegian extreme right mass murderer Anders Breivik.
Despite this, the mainstream media have yet to scrutinise Ukip’s distasteful alliances. Instead it gets free promotion through hysterical headlines spreading myths and lies about “benefit tourism,” scare stories about the imminent descent on a “full-up” Britain of unmanageable hordes of east European migrants and demonisation of the Muslim community.
There is no doubt that the growth of the populist and extreme right across Europe has occurred in an environment where its divisive policies are legitimised by mainstream parties and given currency by the media.
They have not just gone along with policies that scapegoat immigrants, attacks on the veil, kosher and halal practices and initiatives like the referendum to ban all immigration in Switzerland but have driven them forward.
In France it was Nicolas Sarkozy’s government that banned the full face veil in public places, in an attempt to win back votes from the Front Nationale.
In Britain the Tories are desperately trying to out-bid Ukip to be the hardest on immigration.
But by capitulating to this agenda the mainstream parties feed a process where today’s unacceptable becomes tomorrow’s norm.
In response the far-right just escalates its demands. Ukip started out calling for limits on immigration. As the Tories adopted its agenda they shifted their position to no immigration at all.
In Hungary the mainstream agenda has moved so far to the right that it has led to the downplaying of the Holocaust. The covering up of collaboration in the nazi deportations of Hungarian Jews led to the Jewish community boycotting Holocaust commemorations in protest.
In Britain, Unite Against Fascism has organised an anti-fascist movement that has helped to drive back the danger from overt neo-fascists, seeing off the British National Party electoral threat and defeating its street-fighting counterpart, the English Defence League.
As well as bringing people together on the broadest possible basis to oppose the extreme right, Unite Against Fascism has always made the need to celebrate and defend our multicultural society part of its response.
Saying: “Don’t let the racists divide us,” it has brought people together on the basis that we are one society with many cultures.
This approach has broadened the mobilisations to defend mosques, Pride parades or ensuring fascist, anti-semitic views are exposed like those of the Hungarian neofascist party Jobbik in London earlier this year.
In colleges and universities students have taken this up under the slogan “one campus, many cultures” to reject the extreme right and attempts by college authorities to ban the veil or target Islamic societies.
But we cannot afford to be complacent about the retreat of the latest wave of British fascism.
At present the populist anti-immigration policies of Ukip are gathering up the votes, but the legitimisation of these views tends the ground for the regrowth of fascism.
That is why we have called the Stand up to Racism demonstration on March 22 as part of UN Anti-Racism day.
The event is timed to be a positive statement opposing the racist scapegoating of migrants in the run-up to the European election.
Scapegoating immigrants and ethnic minorities divides the response to the real culprits for the assault on living standards and has a destructive impact on vulnerable communities.
It will also be a timely statement of the positive contribution of immigration to Britain’s successful multicultural society.
Aaron Kiely is NUS black students’ officer.
The Stand up to Racism, No to Scapegoating march and rally on 22 March 2014 assembles at 11am at Old Palace Yard opposite Parliament and goes to Trafalgar square. Speakers include Diane Abbott MP, Claude Moraes MEP, TUC president Mohammed Taj and Cable Street veteran Max Levitas.
