IN 1978 Phil Piratin, once Communist MP for Mile End, came to address a meeting of the Hackney branch of the Young Communist League. It was quite a coup for us — Piratin seldom spoke in public by then.

Our political activity centred around confronting the fascist National Front. Every weekend we went to Brick Lane to challenge the fascist presence in London’s East End.

Piratin had a message for us: “This is not the 1930s. Comparing our struggles with those of 40 years earlier he ticked off the differences.

“The National Front were not backed by major European states, as Oswald Mosley had been. It had no sympathetic media promoting it in the way the Blackshirts were backed by the Daily Mail. The NF leaders were risible figures, unlike Mosley, who had been a Labour Cabinet member.

“Moreover, the labour movement was far stronger than it had been back then.”

He was right — neither through the streets nor the ballot boxes did the National Front threaten to take power. The anti-fascist movement of the 1970s helped keep it that way.

And now? One wing of the far right, Reform UK, leads the polls with nearly a third of the electorate declared behind it.

The other, led by an overt fascist with a string of criminal convictions in Tommy Robinson, has organised the biggest street manifestation by neofascism in the country’s history — at least 100,000 people and, judging by the aerial photography, considerably more.

This mass movement of the right draws on the support of key sections of traditional press, like The Telegraph, new-minted vehicles like GB News and the powerful manipulation of social media, unavailable to Mosley.

It also has the ringing endorsement of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who on Saturday called for the violent ousting of the government, a call which Keir Starmer’s Downing Street contrived to see as totally normal.

And hovering over all this is the leadership of the most powerful capitalist state in the world, Trump’s US, openly promoting Maga-style movements in other countries wherever it can.

In today’s Germany, centrist politicians speak of some form of “firewall” to exclude the neofascist AfD from government office. No such restraint here, where Robert Jenrick, Tory leader in undisguised waiting, attempts to outbid Nigel Farage in anti-migrant posturing.

This movement aims to oust the government well before 2029, when the next electoral opportunity to do so falls due. Some, like Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, have got a bit ahead of themselves and urged a military coup, presently a most unlikely contingency.

The right egged on disorder outside hotels housing refugees, hoping for a rerun of last summer’s riots following the Southport murders, leading to a state of civil disorder and some form of a crackdown. That failed to ignite.

They switched to an orgy of flag-waving as a display of presence, doubtless building powerful networks the while.

Now, Saturday’s demonstration, uniting both mass turnout and, inevitably, street violence. The alliance of interests on display on Saturday was encapsulated by a mini-parade within the gathering.  

It consisted of a middle-aged man bearing a framed picture of the murdered racist demagogue Charlie Kirk aloft, followed by one wearing both the Union Jack and the Stars-and-Stripes entwined, with a still younger man — no women involved — waving a banner announcing “Christ is King” bringing up the rear.

Trumpism, imperialism, fundamentalist religion, racism, Atlanticism and Horst Wessel-style martyrology all right there in a toxic far-right stew.

By Piratin’s criteria, we are in a degree of trouble.

Their triumph is far from unavoidable. Last summer, anti-racist mobilisations considerably outgunned Robinson’s rioters in towns and cities across Britain when the far right went on the offensive.

The capacity of anti-fascists to defeat this newly empowered movement, which aims in practice to force an early general election leading to Farage coming to power, as the gateway to a Trump-style neofascist offensive, exists, at least latently.

It rests on the trade union, anti-racist, anti-war and other people’s movements uniting to defeat the far right in both its parliamentary and brownshirt expressions, as John McDonnell and others have urged.

It cannot depend on the Labour government, for sure. By acts of omission and commission, it has capitulated to the far right’s advance, mutely endorsing its arguments, failing to challenge its principles and cracking down on its peaceful opponents.

In the face of Musk’s insurrectionary rhetoric, it took 48 hours to say anything at all.  

One Cabinet minister, Peter Kyle, even appeared to endorse the Robinson protest, dubbing it a “klaxon call” to the government.

This is consistent with Starmer’s approach of only challenging Farage on practical grounds. It is four square with his prostration, to be luxuriantly displayed again this week, before Donald Trump, the main instigator of the resurgent far right internationally.

And all this indulgence of the right avails Labour precisely nothing electorally, since the government fails to address the multiple discontents of a country broken under 15 years of austerity, 40 of galloping inequality and riven by official support for Israel’s genocide.

Most Labour members — many MPs even — can see that this is not the leadership the moment is demanding. Democracy cannot afford Keir Starmer right now.

The Prime Minister relies on the state to hold back the tide. We cannot make the same mistake.

Saturday’s mob threw bricks and bottles with abandon and broke a few police bones. Twenty-five arrests at time of writing.

The previous weekend, the same police force managed to detain nearly 900 entirely peaceful, often elderly, pro-Palestinian protesters for holding placards challenging government policy.

That is not accidental. An anti-imperialist movement challenging Britain’s relations with Israel and, above all, the US, strikes to the heart of the British elite’s place in the world order.  

Farage and Robinson do not, genocide endorsers that they are. Thus the chant directed at the Met on Saturday — “which side are you on” — is a glaring stupidity.

Not that the far right have a monopoly on stupidities. The government has been a competitor from the moment it first drew breath.

The shameless grifting for free suits and tickets, the appointment of Peter “Filthy Rich” Mandelson as ambassador despite his known long association with a paedophile, the naming of a man who had lobbied to keep Thames Water in private hands as a Downing Street economic adviser, the creation of a “budget board” of City and business leaders to oversee the miserable Chancellor… ordinary people know they are being played.

An anti-fascist front that aspires to include Starmer risks losing credibility at the outset, however many Labour members may join the struggle.

It is the Starmer gang which has over the last five years, expended all its energy attempting to destroy the left, thus preparing the way for the far right.

Labour no longer presides over any potent political or social coalition to be drawn into the struggle, beyond its increasingly atrophied and transactional connection with trade unions which need to be won away from their passive approach to the government, whatever their formal affiliate relations with the party may be.

It is, as an analysis in last week’s Economist showed, a party of the wealthier above all and no longer has any great purchase on workers’ search for political expression.

Democratic rights need popular defence when threatened by the reactionary Trump-led, Musk-funded, wing of bourgeois politics. But that defence must rest in the hands of the people themselves.

“Refugees are welcome here” is a necessary and defensible slogan, but the issue of asylum-seekers is too remote from the immediate concerns of most people, and appears as a moral issue rather than a practical one in many communities.

Anti-racism is a major ingredient, but only one, in a resistance that should foreground democracy and the need for profound social change.

More generally, class not identity must be the political pivot if Reform/Robinson are to be challenged on their own terrain.

That way, more exalted goals than seeing off the conmen and chancers of the far right come into view.  

Nigel Biggar, imperialist historian and Tory peer, put a name to the Establishment’s deeper fears in the Telegraph: “Nigel Farage is exploiting the justified disillusionment by making extravagant promises he’s not going to be able to keep. If we were to elect a Farage government, I think political disillusion would plummet even more deeply. Then, God help us, we might have a Corbyn government.”