FORTY YEARS AGO when I was at Oxford, the SWP, aka the Socialist Workers Party, were a thing. They sold The Socialist Worker on street corners, fly-posted about meetings and sought to infiltrate trade unions and social movements. They jumped on every topical left-wing bandwagon going. I read now that the British SWP during the 1980s was one of the largest revolutionary Trotskyist organisations in Western Europe. Yet at the time, even on the left, they were a bit of a joke.
It was a blast from the past when I discovered this week that the SWP is still going strong at the University of St Andrews. A group of students there is setting up a Reform UK student society and, so they can meet on university premises, they are seeking affiliation to the student union.
Lo and behold, an open letter was promptly published online expressing “our collective disgust” at the Reform students’ endeavour and a petition was launched to stop the union affiliating their society because
Reform councillors have publicly associated with known fascists from neo-Nazi groups, with anti-abortion groups from the U.S., and have been central to fearmongering around migrants and asylum seekers. Their narratives are underpinned by racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, sexism and transphobia.
The source turned out to be the St Andrews Socialist Society, a front for the SWP. The organisation is much smaller now than in its 1980s heyday. But the difference between then and now is that the SWP mindset is no longer an outlier: SWP attitudes have become culturally, and in much of our politics, fully mainstream. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the treatment of Reform UK – where in much of our media and political discourse it is axiomatic that Reform is racist, if not fascist.
So it was no surprise to find The Times columnist Kenny Farquharson yesterday labouring this theme in an entire column. After elaborating on the racist myth that Black men threatened white women after the abolition of slavery in the US, Farquharson accuses Reform’s Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, of promulgating the same trope. The reason? In a well-reported and live-streamed speech last week, Offord talked about joining a group of parents who have come together to see their daughters home safely at night amid the growing number of young immigrant men who loiter on Glasgow’s streets. The women and girls don’t feel safe.
Read the full article at The Reformer