Tag: stephen-yaxley-lennon

There is a Real Divide Between Left and Right

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.5.26), tangentially addressing last week’s extreme meltdown of the political centre of politics in Britain. More than 1400 Councillors were elected for the Reform UK last Thursday, including openly racist and fascist representatives, an historic shift to the far-Right in British politics. Or at least, a shift towards the extremes, the centre ground emptied. As part of the essential campaign of opposition to the far-Right I felt it important to state what fascism represents here and now.

Below is the unedited longer version, and the pic of the much reduced published article:

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Leftie? If so, those who have usurped the national flags to impose a culture of racism and misogyny, those who want to see a million migrant workers forcibly expelled from Britain, those who protest with their children outside schools, intimidating staff and pupils alike, want you to shut up and be shut down.

The far-Right in Plymouth have broadened their focus to not only include scapegoating people of colour but also openly threatening “Lefties” and, in particular, socialists. This is not a tussle between two clubs or rival gangs – it is the current condition of general politics in our society – divided towards the poles.

The far-Right, individuals and organisations of right wing ultra-nationalists, racists and fascists, is currently stoking anti-refugee and anti-Muslim racism, throwing-in classic accusations that black men are a threat to children. They seek white male supremacy, lauding Western colonialism and campaigning to Restore Britain with the return of the military British Empire.

The Left, meanwhile, is a broad spectrum of individuals and organisations that recognise and value all of life on Earth, of diversity, democracy and human rights. 

So there is a real and present divide, a gulf, between Left and Right. The Left recognise the danger of the climate crisis, oppose imperialist war, demand full rights for women and Trans people, expose and challenge genocide and ethnic cleansing, stand for the rights of the disabled and demand social welfare paid from the common wealth of taxes and corporate profits.

The Right seek self-advancement at the expense of others. Beyond their own clan they hate humanity. And humanism. The far-Right add attributes to their desired dog-eat-dog world including white-skinned, male, heterosexual cultural domination. Their end result is the defence and protection of unbridled capitalism through an autocratic totalitarian and militarised state – see fascist Italy, Spain, Germany and the Axis powers of the twentieth century. A reactionary conservative creed.

Being “on the Left”, for the Right, does not require a commitment to socialism. Anything “progressive” is deemed “woke”, a term of abuse used by the far-Right. 

Not all of the Left are socialist. Many seek reforms to the harshest and sharpest edges of the global and local system of Capitalism, accepting that Capitalism is here and probably inevitable, but can be tamed and controlled. Many reforms have elements of socialism: a universal health service paid for through taxation to be free at the point of need. Subsidised public transport. Fee State education paid for from the public purse. Welfare Benefits to those who cannot fully manage on their own. Social Security ”Council” Housing, the stock owned and maintained by the local council tax payer ensuring decent and affordable housing for all (a thing of the past thanks to previous and current right-wing governments). 

Capitalism can have a mixed economy containing elements of socialism just enough to sustain the working class. The Right hate the Welfare State and cannot understand why anyone should pay taxes towards anyone else’s needs. Until, it seems, they become homeless or sick or infirm and complain that the services are not there, because of immigration rather than spending cuts and privatisation.

Socialists are a left section of the Left. In essence we want a different construction of socialist society. Socialism is a society based on meeting the needs of people and the environment, not maximising the profits of the rich. It would be a radically democratic society, with ordinary people collectively running things for ourselves.

A socialist society would be one where items are produced because they are needed, rather than because they are profitable. It would mean an end to a system where millions of people struggle to make ends meet while the rich sit on piles of money. In a socialist society, the working class would collectively own big industries and services, democratically deciding what to produce and how to use the Earth’s resources.

Socialism is therefore international, recognising we each impact upon everyone else, migration and global trade being ancient human attributes that benefit and bind us together as one human race. 

Fascism asserts national identity and geographic boundaries in order to accentuate individual competition and bind the people to an internal collective fear and hostility of “the outsider”, “the Alien”, “the Other”.

Fascism is the absolute power of the capitalist. Presumably, that’s why it is considered to be of the “Hard-Left” to seek an end to Capitalism. Although, the redistribution of wealth downwards away from billionaires and multi-millionaires to eradicate child poverty and unemployment should appear perfectly reasonable. 

Not least, it’s increasingly obvious that the Capitalist dream of becoming super-rich is sheer mythology – a propaganda tool to tie us to the yolk of wage-slavery. The super-rich are a class apart, managing the State, the laws and social culture to maintain their power and keep all the wealth inside their families and Corporations, preventing social mobility.

Fascism gives this Capitalist ruling class absolute power inside a totalitarian State. An autocratic corporate dictatorship. The fascists pander to the super-rich in the hope of receiving crumbs from their table. In reply, the World’s billionaires, especially the techno-billionaires, are currently funding the rising fascist media and organisations here and across the world. 

But why would working class people want an even harsher administration of capitalism in which we are even further atomised away from any mutual aid and self-organisation? Fascists destroy trade unions.

Why would we want to live in a hostile neighbourhood of State-snitches dobbing each other in on false accusations of proscribed relationships, unpatriotic activities or subversive thoughts? How could we condone paramilitary snatch-squads funded by the state and private corporations, smashing-in the door of our family members, friends or neighbours and stealing people away to be disappeared as “enemies of the State”?

Humans have experienced long periods of fascist society all across the world. Fascism adapts to its local conditions, but we all know what fascism looks like. So let’s be clear. That’s the end game of the fascist “Tommy Robinson” and the far-right parliamentary-wing represented by Farage’s Reform UK. Fascists lie and deceive and threaten in order to achieve absolute power. Fascism is not what anyone voted for last week. But fascism is here, now, and must be actively confronted and opposed. We will oppose Tommy Robinson in London next Saturday, and local fascists day-and-night from now on.  

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UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.01.2026) making the links between ICE in the USA and the political direction of travel in the UK. It’s obvious really. If you agree, please build the largest ever anti-racist/anti-fascist protest in London on 28th March. You have time to recruit at least 10 of your colleagues and friends, through patient explanation and exposure of the implications of a far-Right government in Britain by 2029.

UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!

The media headlines were bold. “Bring ICE to Britain, says Farage” and “Trump should put Starmer on trial, says Tommy Robinson”.
The racist ultra-nationalist, Farage, multi-millionaire owner of the ReformUK brand, would wish to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people of colour from across Britain snatched from their homes and workplaces and forcibly expelled.
The fascist misogynistic white-supremacist, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is so keen on national sovereignty that he would like a foreign President to reign over us, and accepts cash from fascist groups from across Europe and the USA. He wants to see millions of Black and Brown British citizens rounded-up and deported.
The violence implicit in both far-right leaders is for all to see. Britain’s far-Right are applauding the violence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Trump’s federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security. In 2025 more than 131 people died while in ICE detention, agents filmed pepper-spraying clergy and medical staff, tear-gassing children and systematically terrorising Latino communities.
ICE is a $12BN armed paramilitary wing of the central State, empowered to carry out armed raids on schools, hospitals, courts, places of worship, weddings, funerals and workplaces. These involve raids by masked agents carrying automatic weapons who drive unmarked armoured vehicles.
ICE targets people of colour, anywhere and everywhere, regardless of their status.
ICE is a paramilitary group, intentionally recruiting from the volunteers of the organised far-Right, encouraged to pursue a racist white-supremacist ideology. Trump openly targeted the Somali community in Minneapolis, calling them “garbage”.
The video of a high court judge, a Black citizen, assaulted by ICE in a supermarket car park offers one picture of the millions of public assaults taking place across the USA with, as vice-President Vance insists, total immunity from legal challenge or charge. No rules.
Other film shows women being dragged across tarmac roads and beaten, children forcefully taken from private residencies, families crammed into wired cages without proper sanitation or drinking water. This is the imagery of a fascist state, of Hitler’s militia in 1930’s Nazi Germany, of the concentration camps across fascist Europe a century ago.
The murder in Minneapolis of Renee Good, 37-year old mother, shot three times in the head by an ICE agent, was greeted by Trump suggesting she deserved to die and labelling Renee as a ”professional agitator”. Thankfully, more than one thousand protests took place across America last weekend by those who do care, chanting “ICE is Trump’s Gestapo!” and “No justice, no peace—get Ice off our streets!”
A month earlier more than 7 million Americans marched against Trump. Opposition and challenge to the President’s federal boot-boys is rising, from elected officials and Police through to local white citizens outraged by such flagrant injustice and ready to defend multiculturalism and democracy.
The anti-racist majority in Britain today, thus far quite quiet and acquiescent, had better get out in the streets too. We have to show the far-Right that we will not accept the equivalent of ICE in the UK.
Whilst Starmer and Mahmood seek to appease the racists with tougher immigration laws and the incarceration of civil rights protesters, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are preparing for power. They are stating their racist intentions should Farage be prime minister. Yaxley-Lennon is building his Black Shirt street squads in preparation for a far-Right government that will target and scapegoat minorities in order to divide the working class and rule by fear. Trump offers them a blueprint, and they are applauding him.
We have to get organised and get active here, now. Down with racism and fascism! Join and build https://www.togetheralliance.org.uk

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Defend Workers Rights and Defeat Fascism

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.9.25) challenging the media censorship of the words “fascism” and identification of active fascists in the UK. In the course of a broadcast BBC interview with me, editors clumsily cut my sentences to ensure the word fascist” wasn’t included. That is a sophisticated editorial decision, and probably institutionally dictated. This was published before the violent protest by the fascist Tommy Robinson supporters on Saturday 13th September 2025, an historic turning point with upwards of 250,000 supporters racist Islamaphobe surrounded and kettled 15,000 anti-racists, boot-boys looking to assault us all. We were kettled for over three hours, the Police having allowed the mobs to encircle us in Whitehall, the seat of UK Governance. The Nazi-saluting Elon Musk addressed the huge gathering, having donated towards the costs of coaches from across the countries and thousands of nationalist flags, to state that the current British government must be dissolved, and the gathering should prepare to fight to defend themselves. My article had not anticipated the grotesque scale of the rise of organised racism in Britain, but the point is made in print, in time. We need to call out fascism, everywhere, all the time.

The unedited version below:

There are fascists in Britain. Organised fascists. And they are organising. But we don’t talk about them.
Across Europe there have been fascists ever since Mussolini first adopted the political concept of a mass movement for authoritarian rule. Political descendants of Hitler’s National Socialist “Nazis” in Germany and Franco’s authoritarian Falange militarist party in Spain still hold positions of power and privilege today, their street supporters numbering millions locally identified and opposed.
In the United States various fascist organisations parade with their guns demanding male white supremacy, allied with or spawned from the Ku Klux Klan and their vigilante lynch mobs.
In Britain, with the historical echo of us fighting and beating the fascists in the Second World War, tolerance of fascist speech and fascist organisation has been understandably very low by comparison. Low until now. British fascists are on the streets once again, funded by those in Europe and the USA.
Post-war Britain saw working class mobilisations destroying the fascist organisation of Moseley’s Blackshirts – his street thugs finally routed in the Battle of Cable Street. In the 1970’s we organised a mass movement against the fascist National Front through the Anti-Nazi League, in the ‘80’s and 90’s we beat-back the BNP through Unite Against Fascism. This century we mobilised against the English Defence League organised amongst the violence-obsessed ultra-nationalists on the football terraces.
But now we have a new breed who have studied and analysed their previous defeats and built a militarised cadre of organisers across Britain. Some fascist groups are proscribed, but new forces imported from the USA are permeating local housing estates and community organisations.
The largest fascist group, the Homeland Party has emerged from the neo-nazi “Patriotic Alternative” as a front-runner here, preaching white-supremacism and “white nationalism”. The “National Rebirth Party” and the previously defunct UKIP group led by the fascist Nic Tenconi are also competing for leadership. With links to American groups they’re helping fund the “Fly the Flag” ultra-nationalist protests across the UK, in competition with the “Britain First” fascist group, their leaders identified at the “Flag” demonstrations in Plymouth last week. They brandish Nazi salutes of Seig Heil and lead the chants of “let them drown”, whipping-up racist division.
Fascists are peddlers of myths and superstitions, lies and conspiracies. Fascists feed on fear and guilt and powerlessness. Fascists use individual force and violence to remove all opposition, weaponising individual traits to victimise entire minorities, creating division inside the working class. They currently lead the “anti-woke” brigades, opposing multiculturalism, gay and trans-rights, action on the climate emergency, and women’s rights. Fascists are misogynists and antisemites to the core.
Today, as in the past, the fascist organisations are funded by the super-rich and billionaires internationally, tolerated if not fed by mainstream politicians. Why? Because democracy can get in the way of unregulated profiteering and exploitation. Fascists may propagandise against “The Establishment” but theirs’ is no anti-capitalist revolution – on the contrary it is a promotion of dog-eat-dog exploitation and a reaction against any call for equality and human rights.
Today, Capitalism is in crisis and the billionaires are taking control. We are heading for war and climate collapse.
The definition of Fascism is the melding together of the big business corporations and the State. Trump is militarising American cities, placing corporate executives in charge of the military, and encouraging racist scapegoating of migrants. Elon Musk is funding the UK far-Right. Italy’s Meloni is drowning refugees. The fascist Le Pen is set to be France’s next President, fascist street gangs are killing migrants in Spain, and the fascist AfD now controls half of the German republic.
The Centre will not hold. Democracy is in peril.
The international working class is beleaguered and demanding change. The fascists are seizing the opportunity. Trade unions oppose racism and fascism for obvious reasons. The aim of fascism is the atomisation of the working class and liquidation of the Left as a progressive social force. The Capitalist ruling class have let the fascists off the leash for their own self-defence. It’s our job to defend workers rights and defeat fascism once again.
Trade unions will be mobilising for the national counter-protest against the fascist “Tommy Robinson” demonstration in London next Saturday. Standuptoracism.org.uk

It Is OK to Support the People of Palestine!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.7.25), written to evade censorship and to a deadline 12 hours before the Netanyahu/Trump talks. There, they finalised a plan to transport 600,000 of the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza to the destroyed city of Rafah in the far South, as the first trenche of clearing North and Central Gaza completely.
They are looking to create a beach-side Mediterranean holiday resort for the super-Rich, Trump part of the billionaire property-speculating investments. Partying on the bodies of tens-of-thousands of Palestinians. This is Capitalism/Imperialism on steroids. Quite beyond words, really.
This is a catalogue of multiple war crimes, crimes against all humanity, undertaken in broad daylight, recorded and broadcast globally. We can and will hold these bastards to account.
Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Netanyahu, not so surprising when you think of the previous warmongers who have won. But their sheer audacity and narcissism, their sociopathy, is a statement of absolute Power that exposes their real weakness. Our protests, our boycott, our worldwide outcry can build such a movement as to mobilise billions and overturn their entire system.
Keep protesting. Build the Campaign. Free Free Palestine (and all of us)! We are all Palestinians!

The article (for what its worth):

It is OK to Protest for Palestine (Fly the Flag!)

Amidst all the confusion it is important to note that it is not illegal to offer support for the civilian population of Palestine, themselves subject to an illegal invasion and occupation. It’s OK to fly the flag!
Palestine is recognised as a sovereign State by 147 countries of the United Nations, including Spain, Ireland, Norway, and the huge nations of Venezuela, Brazil, China, Russia and India. Palestine is recognised and politically supported by most countries of the Global South, and UK trade unions. Palestine sits at the UN General Assembly.
Palestine is seemingly only not supported by the countries of the North West, especially the UK and USA. These two countries, more than the rest of the world put together, are arming Israel from their citizens tax-money, exporting munitions, military equipment and military advisers, training to facilitate the ongoing genocide (illegal under international law) in Gaza and settler colonialism in the West Bank.
Palestine’s two non-contiguous territories have been separated by illegal military invasion, land clearances and military occupation over the past 77 years. Israel has constantly waged military and political warfare against its Palestinian neighbours before and since its inauguration.
The current catastrophe of disproportionate death and destruction of Gaza by Israel – possibly 1500 Israelis killed and at least 60,000 Palestinians including 20,000 children (the bodies are there to be counted) since October 2023 means this is not a war of two sides, it is the drive towards the continuous extermination of just one people and an entire nation.
Supporters of such Israeli action justify the ethnic clearance (illegal under international law) on the grounds of Israel’s right to exist, whilst critics of this genocide are labelled as “Islamist sympathisers” and even “terrorists” by some, for demanding an immediate ceasefire, help and reparations for the people of Palestine and security for the Palestinians’ homeland.
Ironically, the fascist descendants of Hitler and Mussolini who systematically rounded-up and killed over 6-million Jews in the horrific Holocaust during the Second World War are now supporting Israel alongside far-right white supremacists and racists here and across the West. Why?
Because Israel is a racist colonial Apartheid State with a constitution which render Israeli citizens much higher rights and powers than any non-Israeli citizen.
The country’s laws are very similar to those of Apartheid South Africa which was supported by fascists everywhere as representing the separation of so-called human “races” and the domination of the superior “Whites”. In the Israeli context, the term “White” represents a political allegiance to Zionism rather than skin-colour.
White-supremacists in the UK, including the notorious Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, would like Britain to develop an Apartheid system, Whites over Blacks, from a belief in racial superiority and genetic ethnic purity. They whip-up anti-Muslim hatred and blame refugees and migrants for the crisis of housing and health services that, in truth, have been sucked dry by privatisation and corporate greed.
At this time, the overwhelming majority of the British people do not share such beliefs or sympathies, our friends and relations ethnically diverse and multicultural.
The active support for Palestine by ordinary people includes Jews not affiliated to the political creed of Zionism – a world view distinct from Judaism. It is not anti-semitic to oppose Zionism.
Across the West we have seen huge political protests for Palestinian rights. These must continue and grow. It is therefore of extreme concern that Starmer’s Government is clamping down on support for Palestine, targeting those of the progressive Left seeking Peace with Social Justice. It appears the government would prefer us proscribed rather than the far-Right. Democracy ensures the right to protest for Palestine. We are not illegal!