base #3 / London, June 2018 base basepublication.org 2 / 3 proximate and, at least potentially, solvable. These Today we should focus on similar considerations: how Contents conditions are often not so easily reconciled among to balance opposition to far-right provocations and other forms of organising around a broader combi- the racism going on in institutions and neighbour- 6 / FASCISM IN THE UK 17 / HARM, ABUSE AND nation of oppressions. Peer-to-peer and mutual aid, hoods; how to strengthen bonds between anti-racist ‘Fascism in the UK’ ACCOUNTABILITY: A often working through many months and years of networks and communities; the role of accountability charts the emergence DISCUSSION casework and solidarity activity, can often be quite and understanding the limitations of accountability and continuance of An abridged messy to unpick and silo into a particular action or processes. All these questions require historical far-right trends on conversation between policy. This method of organising, which moves within documentation of successes and failures, so that the streets and through 5 people discussing and without more formalised political spaces - en- social movements can learn from the rich institutional party politics, offering accountability in our compassing support through legal processes, access memory of struggles against popular and state racism a critique of anti-fascist everyday lives and to housing, social care, food and medication - can that is so often obscured from view. focus and mobilisation spaces, offering a critical be difficult to quantify and make visible, but it has a discussion about harm, strong multiplier effect. The development of collec- It seems to us that opposition to racism and fascism abuse, gaslighting tive means for engaging with and making demands (1) must be able to perceive both far-right alliances 11 / THE ABOLITION OF and identity GOOD NEWS IN A on institutions hostile to providing these resources, with liberalism as well as nativist currents on the so- CARCERAL FORMS builds a general literacy of the specificities of their cialist left (2) critical of what CARF called the ‘macho This article seeks HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT oppressive functions, developing local knowledges flexing’ cultures of anti-fascism, and (3) consider pos- to re-orientate the 25 / DEAD CANARIES and methods of resistance. itive alliances between extra-parliamentary groups focus of abolition A look at the social and those parts of the socialist left that are anti-racist to all carceral forms, within the technical: Following months of sustained campaigning against In a 1992 issue of Campaign Against Racism and and anti-nationalist. from prisons and surveillance, cryptoculture the collection and processing of nationality and Fascism (CARF), anti-fascist organisations are urged immigration detention and digital life. country-of-birth data by the Against Borders for Chil- to embed themselves in such local knowledges. In The strength in many successful extra-parliamentary centres to mental health Responding to the dren campaign (Schools ABC), the Department for their own time, they refer back to earlier lessons in activities is that they are not politically aligned to a inpatient facilities, death of Riseup.net’s Education announced that it will end its collection of anti-fascist organising: party or career-building. These processes are also where the formations warrant Canary in 2016, pupil nationality data. This immense, joyful outcome necessitated by the experiences of those marginal- of structural violence the authors consider follows similar campaigning, action and subsequent This was summed up in 1978 by a member of the ised by a politics of “citizens” and “workers” that fails permeate all trust and affinity in victory by North East London Migrant Action (NELMA) Bengali Youth Association, an organisation set up to . respond to the demands of the most vulnerable this context when, at the tail end of 2017, the High Court found a to contest the most extreme and consistent racial amongst us, or centre a politics which responds to the Home Office policy for the detention and deportation violence and harassment in Britain at the time. Hav- concerns raised there. These activities are not drawn 14 / FUCK THE SWP: of European Economic Area rough sleepers in the ing just witnessed yet another left rally and march from forms of theoretical exceptionalism - that this or CARE & AFFINITY IN 30 / STIGMATA UK to be unlawful. Some of the victims of this policy to remove the NF paper-sellers from Brick Lane’s that position is the correct one - but the approaches CONFRONTATION [CN Sexual Violence] are now beginning to received substantial damages. Sunday market, he told the organisers as they left for they employ and the critical understandings they car- A piece on the Lynsay Hodges presents Both victories and other recent partial ones, which home that night, ‘Now you’ve had your curries and ry with them, as well as their ability to form networks experiences of a group the dichotomy within secure material changes of policy from fundamen- cleared your consciences, fuck off back to where you with other groups and individuals whose campaigns of people organising which rape survivors tally hostile state institutions, came as a result of came from.’ That does not mean, however, that we and underlying aims are not substantially different to challenge the are positioned: countless hours of organising, campaigning and should cease to challenge the fascist groups through from their own. These are long-term strategies, but SWP, collectivising simultaneously awareness-raising. marches and demonstrations and pickets, but that they’ve been repeatedly demonstrated to offer confrontation, objectified by a we should destroy fascism at its racist roots and not sustainable forms of organising which are more than antagonism and care disciplinary gaze, their The British government’s ‘Hostile Environment’ merely react to it. capable of racking up multiple, overlapping victories. in the process [CN SWP / history interrogated in approach to immigration has seen it extend border sexual violence] perpetuum for cracks enforcement and surveillance into an ever-expand- ing dragnet across public services and civil society. The policies ask or compel teachers, healthcare professionals, banks, landlords and various employ- ers to become border guards. Schools ABC and NEL- MA are just two examples of what can be achieved by extra-parliamentary organising that mobilises around particular areas of a much broader systemic injustice. Many other campaigns are working to chal- lenge the state’s structural violence within health- care, housing and welfare, bank and building society base —This publication is funded solely by donations accounts, as well as detainee support and practical and is sustained by the voluntary efforts and enthusiasm migrant solidarity. of the base collective, contributors and readers. Individual campaigns that have a clear and fixed base #3 objective as well as being rooted in material concerns London / June 2018 and needs, have a solid benefit in that the message basepublication.org and method of campaigning can appear more focused, #HungerForFreedom demonstration outside the Home Office, London - 28 Feb 2018 6 / 7 James Poulter “Anti-fAscists need to look At how the fAr-right hAs In 1993 the BNP, then under the leadership of veteran former Labour activist and trade unionist who has been orgAnised in the pAst And is currently orgAnising if they Nazi John Tyndall, had its first ever electoral success involved in anti-Muslim street activism for a number Are to hAlt the rise of A potentiAlly resurgent fAr-right.” when Derek Beacon was elected to be a councillor for of years. While her party will adopt far-right positions the Millwall ward of Tower Hamlets. But it wasn’t until on law and order, immigration and Muslims, early signs 2002 that the party was to taste electoral success suggest it will be taking social democratic positions again. Under Griffin’s leadership the party pursued on a number of social and cultural issues. Waters’ ten- a strategy of organising in local communities before dency is civic nationalist rather than white nationalist. standing in council elections. This strategy saw them White nationalists argue for nationality to be defined stand hundreds of council candidates across the in racial terms, in Britain that only white people can country over the following decade, at one point having be British. Civic nationalists, on the other hand, argue 55 elected councillors. Their showing in these votes that nationality is defined by citizenship. So Waters’ acted as a platform for further electoral battles. In tendency does not appear to encourage discrimina- 2009 the party had two MEPs elected after winning tion against individuals based on their “race” per se, 943,598 votes in elections for the European Parlia- but instead argues for increasing what amounts to ment – the highest ever number of votes won by an structural racism, such as stripping all Islamist terror openly fascist political party in Britain. suspects of their human rights or ending immigration Fascism in the UK from predominantly Muslim societies. Sometimes the But the BNP imploded after this election. Griffin’s line between white nationalism and civic nationalism appearance on the BBC’s popular current affairs panel can be blurry, particularly in the realm of rhetoric. Fascism was imported to Britain from Italy, much like show Question Time was widely panned and is seen by activists. This was the British Democratic Party (BDP). the Stone Island jackets popular with football casuals many as a trigger for the party’s collapse. But internally Brons had attempted to replace Griffin as BNP leader The main political party for the white nationalist part in the UK. But rather than being the genuine article, the party had to deal with allegations of financial cor- two years earlier and many of his supporters felt the of the British far-right is what is left of the NF.