Following months of sustained campaigning against the collection and processing of nationality and country-of-birth data by the Against Borders for Children campaign (Schools ABC), the Department for Education announced that it will end its collection of pupil nationality data. This immense, joyful outcome follows similar campaigning, action and subsequent victory by North East London Migrant Action (NELMA) when, at the tail end of 2017, the High Court found a Home Office policy for the detention and deportation of European Economic Area rough sleepers in the UK to be unlawful. Some of the victims of this policy are now beginning to received substantial damages. Both victories and other recent partial ones, which secure material changes of policy from fundamentally hostile state institutions, came as a result of countless hours of organising, campaigning and awareness-raising.
The British government’s ‘Hostile Environment’ approach to immigration has seen it extend border enforcement and surveillance into an ever-expanding dragnet across public services and civil society. The policies ask or compel teachers, healthcare professionals, banks, landlords and various employers to become border guards. Schools ABC and NELMA 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 challenge the state’s structural violence within healthcare, housing and welfare, bank and building society accounts, as well as detainee support and practical migrant solidarity.
Individual campaigns that have a clear and fixed objective as well as being rooted in material concerns and needs, have a solid benefit in that the message and method of campaigning can appear more focused, proximate and, at least potentially, solvable. These conditions are often not so easily reconciled among other forms of organising around a broader combination of oppressions. Peer-to-peer and mutual aid, often working through many months and years of casework and solidarity activity, can often be quite messy to unpick and silo into a particular action or policy. This method of organising, which moves within and without more formalised political spaces – encompassing support through legal processes, access to housing, social care, food and medication – can be difficult to quantify and make visible, but it has a strong multiplier effect. The development of collective means for engaging with and making demands on institutions hostile to providing these resources, builds a general literacy of the specificities of their oppressive functions, developing local knowledges and methods of resistance.
In a 1992 issue of Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF), anti-fascist organisations are urged to embed themselves in such local knowledges. In their own time, they refer back to earlier lessons in anti-fascist organising:
This was summed up in 1978 by a member of the Bengali Youth Association, an organisation set up to contest the most extreme and consistent racial violence and harassment in Britain at the time. Having just witnessed yet another left rally and march to remove the NF paper-sellers from Brick Lane’s Sunday market, he told the organisers as they left for home that night, ‘Now you’ve had your curries and cleared your consciences, fuck off back to where you came from.’ That does not mean, however, that we should cease to challenge the fascist groups through marches and demonstrations and pickets, but that we should destroy fascism at its racist roots and not merely react to it.
Today we should focus on similar considerations: how to balance opposition to far-right provocations and the racism going on in institutions and neighbourhoods; how to strengthen bonds between anti-racist networks and communities; the role of accountability and understanding the limitations of accountability processes. All these questions require historical documentation of successes and failures, so that social movements can learn from the rich institutional memory of struggles against popular and state racism that is so often obscured from view.
It seems to us that opposition to racism and fascism (1) must be able to perceive both far-right alliances with liberalism as well as nativist currents on the socialist left (2) critical of what CARF called the ‘macho flexing’ cultures of anti-fascism, and (3) consider positive alliances between extra-parliamentary groups and those parts of the socialist left that are anti-racist and anti-nationalist.
The strength in many successful extra-parliamentary activities is that they are not politically aligned to a party or invested in career-building. These processes are also necessitated by the experiences of those marginalised by a politics of “citizens” and “workers” that fails to respond to the demands of the most vulnerable amongst us, or centre a politics which responds to the concerns raised there. These activities are not drawn from forms of theoretical exceptionalism – that this or that position is the correct one – but the approaches they employ and the critical understandings they carry with them, as well as their ability to form networks with other groups and individuals whose campaigns and underlying aims are not substantially different from their own. These are long-term strategies, but they’ve been repeatedly demonstrated to offer sustainable forms of organising which are more than capable of racking up multiple, overlapping victories.
