The Together Alliance Summit meets in two sessions: Manchester last weekend and London. The London Summit takes place on Saturday, 24 October 2026, at 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AL, doors opening at 10:00 AM. I write more about the Allinace in an article posted by Anticapitalist Resistance on Tuesday 20th October.
It was Sunday morning before the Workers’ Liberty leaflet (photo below) got a proper reading, fished out of the bottom of the bag of ACR broadsheets where I’d stuffed it after swapping my leaflet for theirs in the tea room at the first-ever Together Alliance Summit. One sheet, printed both sides, headed ‘For a working-class and united front response to the far right!’ and written for the Together Alliance summits in Manchester and London. Most of what it says about the alliance is right, and its remedy, when it finally arrives, turns out to be the AWL.
What the AWL gets right
The diagnosis survived Saturday intact. The leaflet complains that the organisers promise the summits will be about “building power and planning action” and “have not, however, said these summits will have ‘decision making’ or ‘democracy’”. It says the unions have spent years “outsourcing their anti-far right work to Stand Up to Racism”, and that activists hand general secretaries platforms when they should be holding them to account. Then Kevin Courtney, the alliance’s interim chair, stood up in the afternoon workshop on local alliances and explained that Together is not a membership organisation, that “you cannot individually join”, and that the charities inside it mean he cannot say “don’t vote Reform” when he speaks as its chair. He can say “vote for love, hope, unity”. “That is a problem,” someone said from the floor. A retired trade unionist who had come, in his words, “to find how I can get support in dealing with the racism that I face on a daily basis” was handed a list of affiliates to join instead. The AWL could have taken the minutes.
On confrontation the leaflet goes further, and starts to slip. “Together Alliance/Stand Up To Racism mobilisations,” it says, “continue to avoid the necessary physical confrontations with the far right, and rely on the police to manage safety-distanced demonstrations.” That slash does a lot of work. In the activism workshop Nahella Ashraf of Greater Manchester Stand Up To Racism said that if Patriot Platform comes to Salford, as it has threatened to, “we will have to have a counter demo, even if we think it’s going to be a small number. I don’t think we can ignore them.” Courtney drew the line himself: Stand Up To Racism can organise the counter-demonstration, and a local Together alliance may feel its charitable objectives keep it away. The obvious reading is that the AWL has caught the alliance out. It has, but only the alliance. The division of labour runs between the charities and the campaigns inside it, and a leaflet that fuses them with a punctuation mark has spared itself the trouble of saying which affiliate it means, or why Stand Up To Racism, whose anti-fascism officer the leaflet itself names as the SWP’s national secretary, is the one still promising to turn up in Salford.
Must a united front fight for socialism?
“Our guiding framework here,” the leaflet says, “is the united front policy of the communist movement at the start of the 20th century,” and it reaches for Trotsky in the 1930s, “a distinctive emergency initiative”. So far, so orthodox. On the back page the definition arrives: the united front “is about mobilising the maximum number of people from the workers’ movement, to fight for class struggle socialism as an alternative to the far right.” Trotsky’s version, written for the German Communists on 8 December 1931, reads differently. “No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike!” The agreement is narrow because the parties to it disagree about nearly everything else. In Trotsky's version nobody has to agree about socialism. Each side keeps its own programme and argues for it under its own banner. The AWL writes socialism into the purpose of the front itself. It never says you must sign up to take part, and its local committees are to be "democratic and non-sectarian". But a front whose stated aim is "class struggle socialism" has settled in advance the argument Trotsky left each side to make for itself, and the programme box printed underneath ends up reading like the front's terms. That edges towards a recruitment pitch, or what the tradition would call ultimatism, though the AWL stops short of making it a condition.
Awkward for both sides
Which is where the Together Alliance becomes awkward for both sides. Formally it is the nearer thing to 1931: organisations that keep their own banners and their own disagreements, as Courtney told the summit, agreeing on a target. The temptation on the left is to call it a popular front, because Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International and the Ealing Women’s Rugby Club sit beside the unions. In October 1978 Socialist Challenge ran a strip, ‘The Bad Taste of Wally Warp’, whose sectarian anti-hero explains that the Anti-Nazi League is obviously a popular front, and the joke has kept. The label does not fit. A popular front binds the workers’ organisations to a bourgeois party’s programme for government, and Together has no programme and wants no government. Its defect sits in the clause Trotsky added at the end of that same passage. Such an agreement can be made “even with the devil himself, with his grandmother”, he wrote. “On one condition, not to bind one’s hands.” Charity law binds the alliance’s hands before it starts. It cannot name Reform. It may not be able to join a counter-demonstration, and those are the two things a united front against the far right exists to do, so the alliance’s answer, that its breadth will send people on to the affiliates that can, is a bet that 28 March repeats itself in Salford on a wet Saturday with a small crowd.
The programme box is where the leaflet stops being about the summit. Its bullet points run from abolishing the monarchy to open borders and a Workers’ Government, and one of them reads: “Oppose nationalism in all its guises: patriotism is nationalism by another name.” In a leaflet that sets out to defend Muslim communities and migrants, a blanket ban on nationalism throws away the distinction the Fourth International has always drawn between the nationalism of the oppressor and that of the oppressed. And yet the bullet had a target in the hall. Andrea Egan, Unison’s general secretary, closed her speech by telling the summit that if we are proud of Britain, the Britain we have grown up in, now is the time to defend it, and defend “a multicultural way of life”. A multicultural ‘Britain’, but a flag all the same. The FI’s distinction was built for Algeria and Ireland, not for a general secretary taking ‘Britain’ back from Tommy Robinson, and whether a socialist can refuse her version without refusing the people in the hall she was speaking to is a question the AWL answers too fast and this paper has not answered at all, though the answer probably starts somewhere near the difference between a country and the state that claims it, which is
Elsewhere the politics arrive unannounced. “Organising to get Labour to reverse the cuts is necessary,” the leaflet says, “not least because there is no single left-wing/socialist force that is a viable alternative to Labour.” Your Party goes unmentioned. So does the Green Party of England and Wales. A reader cannot tell what test they fail because none is set, and the sentence passes off the AWL’s whole orientation to Labour as a finding about the state of the left.
Even I have to defend the SWP on this
The history box has its own trouble. It dates the Anti-Nazi League carnival at Brockwell Park to October 1978; the carnival was on 24 September. Its Lewisham is won by “the radical movements”, and the SWP’s own part in the day goes missing. But on the point the box exists to make, the choice between Brockwell Park and Brick Lane, the AWL’s tradition has a better claim than ours. Socialist Challenge, the paper of the International Marxist Group, answered its own question on 28 September 1978 with a back-page headline, “Were we right to go to Brixton? YES! YES! YES!”, above a standfirst complaining that “every sectarian group in town jumped on the bandwagon to denounce the ANL for not diverting to the East End the forces they themselves could not mobilise in a month of Sundays”. The same issue’s report from Brick Lane recorded that the only speaker there to defend the decision to carry on with the carnival was Jonathan Silberman of the IMG. A fortnight later the letters page ran under ‘After Carnival 2’. Comrades in Leicester called the paper’s failure to call for a full mobilisation in the East End “a serious mistake”, and an Anti-Nazi League activist in Leeds objected to its description of those who went to Brick Lane as “sectarian groups”. The readers got it right before the editors did.
Time to get TUFF
Then, in a box beside the programme, the leaflet answers the question the summit could not. TUFF describes itself there as “a network of trade union activists committed to forcing union leaders to turn out their members on anti-far right mobilisations and get activists in workplaces and local branches active on defending migrants and winning over Reform and Restore voters to better, socialist political alternatives.” No programme box. No Workers’ Government. A target, a method and a constituency, and a door an individual can walk through, which is more than Together offered the man in the workshop. On its own site the network has grown a second T, Trade and Tenants Unions Fighting the Far Right, set up in January 2026, and it organises the tenants Courtney and Gawain Little kept invoking from 1930s Stepney as well as the branches. Its open letter to the TUC asks the unions to lead the counter-mobilisations themselves and to recruit defensive stewards from their own ranks. The site names no founders. ACR activists support it, and the AWL promotes it, which means the AWL is putting its name to something closer to Trotsky’s agreement of 1931 than its own leaflet’s theory allows, and the two sit on the same sheet of paper without either noticing the other.
London is next Saturday. Courtney’s advice to the man who could not join amounted to joining someone else, and for trade unionists there is a better version of it: get the branch affiliated, and the branch can send delegates, move motions in a local alliance and ask in public why it will not name Reform. Whether a Together alliance built out of affiliated branches would ever vote to do what its charities cannot, or would simply split along the line Courtney drew in Manchester, is not something anyone at the summit was asked to decide.
Trade unionist or tenants’ activist? Join the TUFF mailing list at tuff.network for its monthly meetings, sign its open letter to the TUC, and ask your branch or trades council to send a representative. Then take a motion to the same branch to affiliate to the Together Alliance and send delegates to its local alliance. ACR activists are involved; in Greater Manchester, contact @acrmanchester on Instagram or [email protected].
Sounds like a very irritating meeting to me, but I may have got something from it had I been able to go. Your article gave me a blast from the past, though. I was 17 in 1978, and Brockwell was one of the things I attended before I left for Dublin in 1980. I was mobbed by recruiters that day; one in cords and a big stripey jumper asked me which Uni I picked for when I left school. He was a little odd to me when I said RADA and went off mumbling about the bourgeoisie. He sounded like Oxbridge through and through.