The same logic that obliterates Gaza also demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white nationalist narratives
~ Blade Runner ~
Far-right mobilisation continues across the UK, with protests flaring this weekend in Manchester and Newcastle. In London, a far-right protest was held on Saturday 2 August outside the Thistle Hotel in Barbican, targeting asylum seekers housed in the neighbourhood. Nick Tenconi of the fascist UKIP addressed a crowd made up of ultra-nationalists and local residents.
Stand Up to Racism mounted a counter-mobilisation, and a grassroots Antifa bloc blocked the main junction just outside the designated protest area. This prompted police harassment, resulting in a few arrests before the bloc withdrew on its own terms.
While anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left continue to mobilise in the streets, we continue to appear disconnected from local communities and show up as external actors, since we have little presence in the neighbourhoods or connections with the refugees themselves.
The fascists are succeeding in presenting themselves as defenders of working-class communities, aided by media and government narratives portraying a “migrant invasion”. This is part of a broader domestic and international counterinsurgency that enables the far right to embed itself within Western societies. At the same time, the left struggles to confront the full scale of today’s collapse—ecological, economic, and social—while the ruling class doubles down.
Popular rage is redirected into elections and racist myths: the Great Replacement, the civilisational threat, the refugee invasion. In the run-up to Brexit, widespread economic frustration and regional decline were channelled into xenophobic narratives, blaming migrants and EU bureaucracy and transforming class resentment into anti-migrant votes. These stories have fractured communities while preserved legitimacy for elites. Meanwhile, the gulf between the excluded and the zones of consumerist comfort becomes an unbridgeable chasm.
Labour now steers a reactionary domestic front, claiming to combat far-right voter drift while doubling down on anti-migrant policies and rhetoric. Simultaneously, the state intensifies protest repression through the proscription of Palestine Action and the expansion of AI-driven surveillance and predictive policing.
A globalised world order
These domestic developments are not isolated from the broader shift toward a de facto wartime economy—aligned with Western military-industrial strategies. We face the sharpened edge of a militarised, racialised social order, preparing for war abroad and repression at home.
The far-right resurgence in the UK mirrors trends across Europe and the US, backed by capital and unfolding amid post-imperial restructuring, genocidal violence, and expanding military alliances. Nationalist militarism is global capitalism’s go-to strategy for managing crisis. It demands a compliant population conditioned to accept racism, austerity, and surveillance in exchange for hollow promises of “security” and “sovereignty.”
Globally, capital’s deepening crisis drives ruling classes to turn to militarism and repression to maintain control. War restructures society through displacement and discipline, rendering people disposable—and it is always racialised.
New waves of migration toward the prosperity citadels will continue, driven by war and climate breakdown. Migrants will remain scapegoats for the crises they did not cause. In the Middle East, this scapegoating takes genocidal form. Palestinians, once a key source of precarious labour in Israel, have been rendered a surplus population. In the 1970s and ’80s, around 35–40% of Gaza’s workforce was employed in Israel; by 2021, that number had fallen to near-zero.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Palestinian workers were systematically replaced by migrants from Thailand, the Philippines, Romania, and later Malawi and Sri Lanka. Today, racism against Palestinians is so dehumanising they are treated as disease-carriers. Israel’s ongoing assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and beyond serve not only to maintain military dominance but to further the long-term erasure of the indigenous population and consolidate a Greater Israel aligned with US regional interests and settler-colonial permanence.
The same logic that obliterates Gaza also demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white nationalist narratives. Racism and Islamophobia are central to this logic, justifying both foreign aggression and domestic repression. Liberalism cloaks this in the language of rights and civility—but its function remains control. For example, the UK’s Public Order Act 2023 claims to preserve safety and democratic freedoms, but in practice, it criminalises protest and expands police powers. Such measures show how liberal governance wraps repression in procedural fairness.
Building to survive the wreckage
Some on the left continue to back authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West. But true anti-imperialism is not about choosing sides in a geopolitical chess game. It means grounding struggle in the lives and resistance of the displaced, the exploited, and the exiled. We need to build trust in our communities—but that requires rethinking ideological habits that isolate us and make us appear as just another lifestyle cult.
For those who separate Palestine or climate collapse into “different” issues, we must show that internationalist solidarity must stretch across all fronts: Gaza, Calais, Epping, Rojava. Our enemies are not abstract “isms” alone, nor just tanks and cops, but also patriarchy, borders, data centres, and propaganda systems that sustain the global war economy and drive precariousness even in the heart of consumer abundance.
As global restructuring accelerates, the left–right binary is becoming irrelevant. Direct action beyond party politics is gaining traction among a new generation of radicals. We must reinvigorate our revolutionary imagination and resist the cynical pessimism that often accompanies rigid ideological orthodoxy. We need to focus on grassroots counter-information and deep community engagement. And we must have honest conversations with leftist allies: hoping for a more competent party (“our party!”) only leads to disappointment and deepens our alienation from the working class.
Antifascism must be both rooted and visionary. It means building counter-power while we are defending our communities by creating spaces of refusal. It means crushing the snake eggs before they hatch. Because the challenge is not just to “fight fascism”, but to confront the system that rewards it—and fears only our capacity to live ungovernable.
Image: “Le Lecteur” by Louis Marcoussis. Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash