THOUSANDS of trade unionists will be marching against racism in London today to oppose the refugee-bashing demo called by “Tommy Robinson,” as far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon styles himself.

The rise of the far right, with Reform UK now enjoying a steady lead in the polls, was a theme stalking this week’s TUC Congress, with panels and fringe meetings on how to counter it. As Leeds East MP Richard Burgon put it: “If there were a general election tomorrow, it would be likely that for the first time in our country’s history we would have an extremist, far-right government. Nigel Farage as prime minister, Lee Anderson perhaps as foreign secretary — imagine what that would mean for minorities, for public services — for trade unions.”

What’s the reason the issue of immigration — and particularly asylum-seeker hotels, though irregular migration is a small part of the whole — has taken off in Britain in the way it has?

“Reform are making immigration their dominant narrative,” National Education Union leader Daniel Kebede told the Morning Star, “and we have a Labour government that has failed to challenge that.

“I think we have to be clear that there are an awful lot of issues and problems in society, but refugees are not to blame for those. They’re not to blame for being held in the hotels in the first place — they didn’t come up with that policy, the Tory government did.

“They’re often forced to become refugees off the back of military interventions, often British ones. And of course they’re not responsible for wider problems like the lack of housing, the lack of investment in education, a crumbling NHS and so on.

“It’s what the powerful have always done — scapegoat the most vulnerable to maintain their own power.” Kebede highlights the specific far-right claim that asylum-seekers are a threat to women: “Sexual violence has no race or religion, we want justice for the survivors of abuse, and we can’t allow racists to divide us.”

Today’s street rally and the hotel protests are part of the same picture as Reform, he says. “Nigel Farage is Tommy Robinson’s megaphone in Parliament.”

Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for a post on social media last year inciting people to set fire to hotels with asylum-seekers inside, was feted as a guest of honour at the recent Reform conference.

And as my colleague Andrew Murray put it to me recently, much of the traditional British right has now become “fascist-adjacent” — with Telegraph columnists calling for military coups or the King to collapse the elected government to “restore order.”

The current TfL strike has provoked another wave of vicious anti-union rhetoric from the right. While unions might once have been able to dismiss as fringe lunacy the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg calling for all striking workers to be summarily sacked — in a GB News panel discussion that dripped with class hatred, depicting transport workers as lazy, dishonest and superfluous — that kind of extremism could be the new reality if Reform isn’t stopped.

“Reform is peddling a vicious, racist narrative that’s anti-migrant and anti-Muslim in particular — but also its entire programme is to put Britain up for sale to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, to strip our public services to the bone,” Kebede notes.

That turns the spotlight on what Reform’s policies would actually mean for working-class communities. The need for trade unions to step up as the true voice of working-class people if they are to stop Reform’s present, quite successful, self-presentation as that was another theme returned to by multiple Congress speakers.

And that means fighting for a complete overhaul of the British economy and revisiting the whole culture of left-wing campaigning, RMT leader Eddie Dempsey holds.

“The politics of anti-austerity, arguing over who gets a share of a shrinking pool of public expenditure, is a dead end,” he told the same Trade Union Co-ordinating Group fringe meeting that Burgon addressed.

“The problem of our economy and in public finances is structural.

“The level of public spending relative to GDP is broadly what it was before Margaret Thatcher came into office, but nothing works. The issue is where the money goes,” he points out, noting that privatisation and outsourcing have diverted much public spending into private profits.

“Our economy is geared up to the financial sector and services. We’ve got no real economy — we’re a collection of banks with a country attached.

“We need to have a plan for becoming a country that makes things again, because we cannot stand on our own two feet in the global economy by relying on being a centre for financial transactions, and frankly financial fraud.

“The globalised system is coming to a cliff edge. There are big trade blocs developing, we’ve seen the tariffs. We’ve got to acclimatise to a new reality and the Labour government has to get a grip on this.

“We have outsourced our entire future, our political direction, to the markets. We’re complete hostages to the markets. You’ve got Chancellors of the Exchequer afraid to so much as turn around in case the bond markets throw them out of a job — but who elected the bond markets?”

The resulting sense of powerlessness, of our inability to decide anything about how our own country is run, is exploited by the far right peddling racist conspiracy theories which the left can only explode through its own account of how we “take back control.”

“We’ve sold off so many of our assets, so much of our national infrastructure, that we’ve lost the ability to deal with that. We’ve got a political class that doesn’t understand any of that any more,” Dempsey says.

“So it’s not just about arguing over where public spending goes. I don’t believe in cutting welfare, about half of which is basically a subsidy for low wages — but that means direct subsidies to corporations. We need wages that are high enough to live on — that’s what we should focus on.

“More public spending that only ends up inflating those parts of the economy already dragging wealth and assets out of the country is no good.

“A major part [of the economy] needs to be brought into public ownership — we cannot have a manufacturing base in this country if we don’t own energy. We don’t own our public energy grid, our infrastructure, storage facilities, transportation.

“There’s a reason our infrastructure is crumbling, a reason why nothing works and the country feels like it’s falling apart. So my argument is: move away from simplistic anti-austerity politics, let’s start talking about what it’s going to take to rebuild the country, empower workers.

“[Jeremy] Corbyn had the right idea — we need a public investment bank funded by seed capital that can drive strategic investment in parts of the economy, where we will build proper unionised jobs, good work that will take the country forward instead of leaving us at the mercy of the money markets. One breeze on those markets and this country’s in the doldrums — because we don’t have an economy of our own any more, we’ve offshored it, privatised it, we handed it to the markets — it’s time to get it back.”

Dempsey’s compelling account of what’s wrong with Britain and how to fix it has the potential to win working-class people away from the far right’s version of events.

But, as Burgon points out, the stitch-up that excluded the left from Labour’s deputy leadership contest means these arguments — the alternative economic strategy the left needs to win a mass audience for — continue to be marginalised at Westminster.

Hopes that they could be put back at the heart of the national debate are kindled for some by the new left party being founded by Corbyn and Zarah Sultana; for others by Zack Polanski and the Greens.

Ensuring that a resurgent left works to unite rather than divide working-class people is the big challenge, however, and this rests above all on rebuilding an ambitious and militant trade union movement as the collective voice of the class.