Lewis Nielsen is an anti-fascist officer at Stand Up To Racism. He spoke at a Your Party rally in Leeds on 8 October, stressing the importance of grassroots leadership in the movement. And referring to the growing confidence of the far right in mainstream politics and on the streets, he insisted:

the stakes are too high for us to mess this up

He added:

History will judge us if we throw away this opportunity… the rows that we’ve seen on social media and elsewhere – it has to stop.

And he stressed:

we have to say now, that the project of unity has to begin… If Jeremy and Zarah put out several videos on social media talking about what your party would do, the difference we could make, what we stand for, we could get this show back on the road.

 

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s joint appearance in Liverpool a day later showed progress on this front, as did a video Corbyn posted on 15 October featuring Sultana prominently. So it certainly seems the interim leadership understands supporters’ clamour for unity.

But at the same time, Nielsen argued, “the real point is there hasn’t been enough… democracy in Your Party”. And he asserted:

the truth is this, the leadership of Your Party is in this room. It’s in rooms like this… up and down the country.

What Your Party needs to meet this unprecedented moment in British history

“Private-school boy” Nigel Farage, Nielsen said, is “a stockbroker who became a millionaire”. And he gets “too much of an easy ride”. That’s in part because of the chaos in the Conservative and Labour parties, but also due to our useless mainstream media that’s enabled Farage’s rise to prominence. As Nielsen stressed:

This is unprecedented in British history – a far-right party on 30% of the polls

“This is the future we face”, he said, together with:

The biggest far-right demonstration in British history led by fascist Tommy Robinson [Stephen Yaxley-Lennon] who, by the way, was invited on a state visit to Israel this week.

To resist the increasingly confident far right, he insisted:

We don’t need a Labour Party mark 2. We need an insurgent party. We need a party that shakes up politics.

And he outlined what this would look like with a set of questions for Your Party:

Is it a party that lets landlords join? Or is it a party that fights for rent controls, supports tenants’ unions, and says we’re going to build council housing and reclaim the empty homes? Is it a party… that allows transphobes to join it? Or is it a party that sees the most scapegoated and most oppressed people in society and says ‘we stand with you 100%’? And is it a party… that, … faced with the pressure of Nigel Farage, of the Tories and Labour, will avoid the question of refugees and migrants? Or will it stand tall and say that migrants built this country and refugees are welcome here? …

Wouldn’t it be good if… Your Party councillors supported every strike for a pay rise in Britain? … Wouldn’t it be better if Your Party… seriously mobilised to the Palestine movement and said that we won’t let the genocide supporters in the Labour government get away with it? And wouldn’t it be better… the next time Tommy Robinson and his far-right thugs try and march through London… if Your Party said to everyone in the room tonight, the 800,000 supporters, it called them out on the streets and we outnumbered Robinson?

Nielsen’s spot on. Because not only are the stakes too high to let disunity derail the resistance to impending doom. The left also needs to be clear and bold with its diagnosis of the problem and proposal of the solution. And we need to remember that the real leaders are all the people who are willing to get active in the fightback.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.