First published 23 March 2026. Revised October 2026: tightened, and linked to the two-part series “Sectarian is not a direction”, which takes its argument further.
TL;DR: On 13 September 2025 a Tommy Robinson rally of up to 150,000 outnumbered the Stand Up To Racism counter-protest by about twenty-two to one. The SWP’s answer was the Together Alliance: a platform of celebrities and general secretaries, with no membership and no local branches. This post argues that Together is built the same way as the People’s Assembly, the Counterfire project the SWP rightly criticised in 2013–15. The SWP’s own journal named the mechanism in 2014: tying a movement to the trade-union bureaucracy leaves it “ill-positioned” to stand against that bureaucracy when it blocks action. The People’s Assembly is now an affiliate of Together. The Birmingham bin strike, in its second year without serious cross-union solidarity, is the same failure on the industrial side. The end of this road is the Communist Party of Britain: an organisation whose public existence runs entirely through fronts it cannot control.“We have not yet replicated at a local level the weight of support that exists at the top of the movement.” — SWP Pre-Conference Bulletin 3, December 2025
I. The march that wasn’t
On 28 March 2026 the Together Alliance will march through London. Sir Lenny Henry, Steve Coogan and Paloma Faith. Kevin Courtney on the platform, introducing Mark Serwotka, who will introduce someone from the TUC. The speeches will be good, the crowd will be several thousand, and the far right, watching on Telegram, will do the arithmetic.
In Birmingham, the bin workers will be entering their second year on strike. The injunctions are still in force and agency scabs are still collecting the waste. Unite has cut its Labour affiliation by 40 per cent. Yet the strikers have had meaningful solidarity from none of the unions whose general secretaries will share that London platform.
Put the two facts side by side. That is the strategic position of the British revolutionary left in 2026.
II. The verdict of 13 September
The “Unite the Kingdom” rally on 13 September 2025 was not a surprise. It was a reckoning. Between 110,000 and 150,000 people, organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, filled the streets from Westminster Bridge to Waterloo. The counter-protest, some five thousand people, was kettled in Russell Square and had no effect at all on the rally.
Twenty-two to one is not a ratio. It is a verdict.
For more than a decade Stand Up To Racism has worked on one theory of change. Put enough general secretaries and celebrities on a platform, stage enough national set-pieces, and the weight of “respectable society” will deter the fascists. On 13 September the far right did not read the statements signed by union leaders. They marched.
The SWP’s response was not an emergency conference of shop stewards, a call for trades councils to set up local defence committees, or a demand that union branches build the capacity to contest the streets. It was the Together Alliance, a “Love, Hope and Unity” platform with no membership and no local branches by design, its contact lists held in a central London office.
The form of the response shows the limits of the politics. A revolutionary organisation reads 13 September and concludes that it needs deeper roots. A bureaucratically dependent one concludes that it needs a bigger platform.
III. The Counterfire trap
Here is the irony that should stop every SWP member cold: the Together Alliance is, in structure and in politics, the People’s Assembly. (Our earlier analysis looked at Together’s tactics. This post is about the logic behind them.)
The People’s Assembly was built by John Rees and Lindsey German, who resigned from the SWP in 2010 with Chris Nineham and others over the relationship between revolutionary organisation and broad fronts. Chris Bambery followed. They were not expelled. It was a strategic rupture between people who had run the organisation together.
And the SWP said, in public, what was wrong with the PA.
Charlie Kimber, in Socialist Review in June 2013, welcomed the PA but named the mechanism of its failure: “there is a tendency for the anti-austerity front to be reduced to platitudes and generalities so as not to upset those union leaders who have shied away from a fight.” The SWP did more than criticise. It ran Unite the Resistance, a rank-and-file network for building industrial action and criticising union leaders where necessary. That is how a revolutionary organisation behaves: inside the broad front, with an independent structure aimed at rank-and-file power.
Paul Blackledge supplied the theory in International Socialism 141 (2014): “the People’s Assembly, launched by comrades around Counterfire, has effectively tried to tie the anti-austerity movement to the left bureaucracy of the trade union movement generally and to McCluskey more specifically in a way that has left them ill-positioned to stand against McCluskey when he acts as a barrier to action.”
The SWP was right. The People’s Assembly could fill a hall in Westminster. It could not stop a single cut.
Now compare the Together Alliance. Celebrities are listed before any union body in its founding statement. Its figureheads are Kevin Courtney, formerly joint general secretary of the NEU, and Mark Serwotka, formerly general secretary of PCS. It made a “conscious strategic decision” not to build a membership or local branches. Its contact lists are held centrally in London. And the SWP’s December 2025 bulletin concedes the result: no local weight to match “the weight of support that exists at the top”.
The most damning fact is not the resemblance. The People’s Assembly is itself an affiliate of the Together Alliance. It is on the signatory list with the Morning Star and the Stop the War Coalition, and near the bottom is the SWP. In 2013 the SWP criticised the PA for substituting a bureaucratic coalition for rank-and-file power. In 2026 it sits beside the PA as a fellow affiliate of a platform with even less local structure, since the PA at least tried to build local groups.
This is not history repeating as farce. It is something more instructive: an organisation that knows its own critique of opportunism was correct and carries out the policy anyway, because it no longer has the independent capacity to do anything else.
IV. The 2013 crisis and the logic of dependency
To see why, go back to 2013. The Delta affair, the resignations, the faction fights and the exodus (see “The Reckoning That Wasn’t“) cost the SWP members and credibility just as the British left was moving. The numbers are disputed; the trajectory is not.
What survived of its public profile was largely Stand Up To Racism. SUTR kept its union backing and parliamentary support and kept staging demonstrations. The diminished SWP came to depend on SUTR’s profile, and that quietly reversed the proper relationship between a revolutionary party and its united fronts.
A united front is a tactic: a temporary, limited alliance for specific aims, kept on the basis of the party’s political independence. The party uses the front. When the party’s own public existence depends on the front’s profile, the instrument has become the master. Nobody decides this. It accumulates.
It also reproduces itself. An organisation that moves its weight inside a coalition as one disciplined unit needs concentrated authority. Concentrated authority means members who act on the correct line rather than on their own political judgement. Members who have not been trained to judge strategy cannot resist strategic errors as they pile up, even through an internal democracy that formally exists. The front then becomes impossible to leave. It is not that the leadership has chosen to stay, but that nobody inside can clearly see the alternative. That is the path the Communist Party of Britain took over decades, and the SWP has been on it since 2013. Together is not a new decision. It is the latest expression of a logic set in motion when Respect needed a command structure.
V. Birmingham: the industrial mirror
The bin strike makes the same argument where the pressures of anti-fascist coalition-building cannot be blamed.
Unite members in Birmingham walked out on 11 March 2025 over pay and the downgrading of their roles. The government backed the council, the courts granted injunctions and agency labour kept collecting the waste. A year on, the strike has not been broken, and it has not been won.
The NEU, the BMA and the FBU, whose general secretaries share SUTR and Together platforms, have spoken at the pickets. They have not mobilised their members, and no serious cross-union solidarity has followed. Unite’s broad left, Unite Left, where SWP members work, has acted as a lobby for the leadership, not as an alternative centre of power able to build the solidarity that could win the dispute.
Sharon Graham’s decision to cut Unite’s Labour affiliation by 40 per cent was a real political signal, but it was not a breakthrough. It went from the top of the union to the top of the Labour Party, with the members’ consultation scheduled for later. That is managed dissent: a rupture performed at leadership level that hides the absence of any shift of power to the workers in the dispute.
The SWP’s own bulletins, and our account of its industrial decline, describe real work in Birmingham: support from the Central Committee, a striking bin worker brought to Marxism, paper sales on the high street. That is not nothing. But the SWP’s own verdict is that it is “simply too small to have a decisive influence on the tactics and outcome of what remains a dispute led by union officials from the top”. The question is whether a decade of working “with and against the bureaucracy” through the fronts has helped make it that small.
VI. Two errors, and the question behind them
There are two ways to fail a united front, and the history of anti-fascism shows both.
In 1921 Amadeo Bordiga led the Communist Party of Italy. The Arditi del Popolo had grown up as a mass anti-fascist movement of workers, socialists, anarchists and ex-servicemen, and had beaten back fascist squads in Parma and elsewhere. Bordiga forbade communists to join, because the movement had been “started on the initiative of officers connected with bourgeois-democratic groups”, and built separate communist squads instead. Lenin and Trotsky were scathing. Cutting the most disciplined part of the class off from a real mass movement because its first leaders were not revolutionaries helped ensure the defeat of both.
That is the ultra-left error: refusing the movement that actually exists. The Together Alliance makes the opposite, opportunist error: not refusing the movement, but dissolving into the platform. Trotsky insisted that in a united front revolutionaries keep “the right to lead the struggle to the end” and are never “dissolved” in it. Independence inside the alliance is what makes the alliance worth having. A front that will not name the Labour government’s part in state racism, for fear of embarrassing Stella Creasy, a Starmer loyalist who signed Together’s founding statement, has already given that up.
But setting Bordiga against Together as two ends of one line misses something, and this post’s first version missed it. Ultra-left and opportunist describe tactics: whether they run ahead of the movement or adapt to its existing leaders. Whether an organisation is sectarian is a different question: whose interest comes first, the movement’s or the organisation’s own. Bordiga’s squads and the SWP’s platforms answer the tactical question in opposite ways. They can give the same answer to the second one.
That is why the dependency described in section IV is not the opposite of sectarianism. Once a front is the party’s public existence, protecting the front’s platform becomes the party’s own interest. The criticism that should be aimed at the allies at the top is aimed at critics at the base instead. “Sectarian is not a direction” sets out that argument in general. Its second part applies it to the SWP.
VII. What the united front actually requires
The Bradford 12 were acquitted in 1982. Twelve young men, most of them Asian, had been charged with conspiracy after preparing to defend Manningham from the National Front. Their defence was that self-defence is no offence. The police had not protected them, and no celebrity platform had protected them. They knew who the NF organisers were, and they acted.
The anti-fascism of Cable Street and Lewisham rested on that understanding. The state will not protect working-class communities from fascist violence, and neither will statements signed by general secretaries. What protects them is organised, local, collective action: the steward who knows every workplace in the constituency, the trades council with real roots in its communities, the branch that was meeting for years before the fascists arrived.
About nineteen trades councils are on Together’s signatory list, among them Manchester, Leeds, Tower Hamlets, Leicester and Newcastle. That looks like local roots, but it is not. Affiliation to an organisation with no members, no branches and no obligations is a statement of sympathy. Nothing in Together’s structure turns an affiliation into a stewarding rota, a rapid-response network or a defence committee. The trades councils are listed; the shop stewards’ committees are not.
What the united front needs is the reverse of what Together has built:
local defence committees led by trades councils and accountable to the rank and file;
shop stewards’ conferences that build solidarity across unions among actual workers, not just general secretaries;
open criticism of Labour’s continuation of the hostile environment as a driver of the far right, whoever in the alliance it embarrasses;
organisation that exists before the crisis, not assembled in response to it.
None of this means abandoning the united front. It means remembering what one is: a tactic of the revolutionary party, not a substitute for it.
VIII. After the march
The far right did not need a celebrity platform in 2025. It needed Telegram, organisation and eighteen months of patience, and it is already building for the next mobilisation.
So the question for the SWP, and for everyone on the revolutionary left watching, is not whether to boycott or denounce the Together Alliance. It is sharper than that. When does taking part in a structure that consistently swaps visibility for power become an obstacle to building what could actually work? When does “with and against the bureaucracy” become, in practice, just “with”?
The usual reply to this argument is that the alternative is sectarian isolation: a smaller, purer SWP denouncing the fronts from outside while the fascists march. Section VI is why that is a false choice. The answer to Together is not Bordiga. It is an organisation whose members are trained well enough to work inside the united front, win influence there, name the bureaucratic obstacles without wrecking the coalition, and keep the capacity to act independently when the front reaches its limits. That is what the SWP did in 2013, when it ran Unite the Resistance alongside the People’s Assembly. It cannot do it in 2026. That is not because its comrades are less capable. A decade of the logic it is now completing has worn away the form that made it possible.
This is not a polemic about bad intentions. SWP comrades in Birmingham, on picket lines and building SUTR groups in Scotland are doing real work in hard conditions. The critique is of structure, not of people. An organisation can have good comrades and a bad strategy, and can diagnose its opponents’ errors precisely and still repeat them, while the conditions that produced the opportunism go unaddressed.
The Communist Party of Britain did not decide one morning to trade its independence for access to the Morning Star‘s platforms, and the SWP did not decide one morning that fronts mattered more than building a party. These things happen through a thousand reasonable-looking decisions, each justified by the pressure of the moment. By the time the pattern is visible, it is embedded.
The 13th of September made the pattern visible. The response to it made it structural. Whether the 28 March march produces anything beyond a photograph will decide whether it becomes permanent.
The bin workers will still be on the picket line on 29 March. The question is whether anyone who was on the platform the day before will have done anything to help them win.
Notes
SWP Pre-Conference Bulletin 3 (PCB3), December 2025. Internal.
Figures from CBS News, PBS NewsHour and the Guardian live blog, 13 September 2025. The Wikipedia entry on the 2025 British anti-immigration protests gathers the main sources.
Together Alliance founding statement and signatory list at togetheralliance.org.uk, accessed March 2026. The decision against a membership or local branches is confirmed in the Socialist Party’s “Together – or a union-led fight against racism and the far right?”, socialistparty.org.uk, 10 December 2025.
Charlie Kimber, “People’s Assembly: what can it deliver?”, Socialist Review 381, June 2013. Mark L Thomas, “Campaigners join Nottingham People’s Assembly”, Socialist Worker 2354, 21 May 2013: “no discussion in the closing session about how we can campaign for union leaders to turn opposition to austerity into effective action, including strikes.” Paul Blackledge, “Once more on left reformism: a reply to Ed Rooksby”, International Socialism 141, Winter 2014; the quotation in the text is from its footnote 23.
Birmingham City Council, “Industrial action in the waste service – one year on from start of all-out strike”, March 2026. Unite’s announcement on its Labour affiliation, unitetheunion.org, March 2026.
On the Arditi del Popolo: Tom Behan, The Resistible Rise of Benito Mussolini (Bookmarks, 2003), and Héctor Sierra, “Revolutionaries, hegemony and the united front”, International Socialism 187, July 2025, an SWP article that supplies the Trotsky citations used here and makes the Bordiga comparison from a rather different position.
Trotsky, “On the United Front” (1922), in The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2 (New Park, 1974); “What Next?” (1932), in Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front (Bookmarks, 1989).
Related Reading:
Dante’s Nine Circles of Socialist Failure: How Revolutionary Movements Descend Into Crisis
After Holyrood: Reform’s Seventeen and the Limits of Electoral Refuge: 2029 prognosis: Reform will rule Britain, even if outside government
The Friends Who Run Things: Structurelessness, the post-Corbyn dispersal, and the question the Green Party is now being asked to...
Unite, the Union Bureaucracy & the Ballot: Reading Ernest Mandel through Unite, the Teamsters and Comisiones Obreras
Spotlight on Ukraine: Fourteen Claims That Circulate, and What the Evidence Shows: Part 9 of “With Washington and Moscow”
Thank you for this careful explanation.
Makes some good points Duncan but is quite repetitive. Needs some firm editing