Together Alliance & the London March: Why Anti-Racism Needs Roots, Not Just Routes

What Your Party should do (and what it shouldn’t)

Postscripts have been added here.

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TL;DR: The Together Alliance's 28 March London march will generate a number, a photograph, and a mailing list held by the SWP. It will not build the community-rooted anti-racist infrastructure Britain actually needs. The union bureaucracies backing Together stayed silent through fifteen years of hostile environment policy; they are moving now because Reform UK threatens their institutional base, not because they want grassroots anti-racist organisation. SUTR functions as a pressure valve for that passivity, and the SWP has its own organisational reasons to keep it that way. Manchester's Resist Britain First coalition showed what the alternative looks like. So did Argentina's piqueteros and the Asian Youth Movements before them. Go to the march. But the real question is what gets built on 29 March, and every day after. Your Party should sponsor the demonstration on conditions: democratic representation, regional mobilisations, and political content Together currently refuses to articulate.

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For some socialists, the debate about 28 March is whether or not to affiliate to the Together Alliance. This is the wrong question. It is not even an interesting question. The interesting question is what kind of anti-racist movement can actually defeat the far right in Britain, and the answer is not another march down the Embankment towards a stage full of celebrities and a gauntlet of newspaper sellers.

Nobody can object to a large anti-racist demonstration in London. Objecting to demonstrations is the preserve of curmudgeons and sectarians, and we are neither. But a demonstration is a spectacle. It counts heads, generates photographs, provides a temporary emotional catharsis, and then disperses. The coaches go home. The banners get rolled up. The SWP sells its papers, the various fragments of the far left hand out their leaflets, and everyone retreats to the organisational infrastructure that already exists. The question nobody seems willing to ask is: what if that infrastructure is precisely the problem?

The Together Alliance assumes that the participating organisations, the existing far-left groups, the NGO apparatus, the trade union officialdom, are the infrastructure we need. They are not. They are the infrastructure we have, which is a very different proposition. And the gap between what we have and what we need is the gap between a march that makes us feel better and a movement that makes the far right afraid.

The spectacle and its discontents

Start with the most basic question, one that nobody in the Together Alliance leadership seems to have asked: who is the audience for this march, and what is its goal?

If the audience is the media, then a single London march makes sense. It produces the aerial photograph, the celebrity endorsements, the stage with Paloma Faith and Leigh-Anne Pinnock. It generates a number: 100,000, 200,000, however many. That number enters the news cycle for approximately 36 hours and is then forgotten.

If the audience is the far right itself, then a single London march is almost irrelevant. Tommy Robinson’s movement is not based in central London. Reform UK is not winning council by-elections in Westminster. The far right is growing in Rotherham, in Hartlepool, in the de-industrialised towns of South Wales, in communities where the hostile environment is lived daily and where “Raising the Flags” campaigns paint lamp posts red, white, and blue. A march in London does not contest that territory. It concedes it.

If the audience is the communities under attack, Black, Asian, and migrant communities facing actual racist violence, then one march in London is actively insulting. Why should a family in Plymouth who face racist abuse walk past their own shuttered high street to board a coach to London? Why should activists in Glasgow or Cardiff or Belfast travel to another country’s capital to protest racism in their own communities? Why not ten simultaneous marches in ten regional centres, each one rooted in the local reality of racism, each one building local organisation that persists beyond the day?

The London-centrism is not merely strategic miscalculation. It is political arrogance, and in the Scottish case it shades into something worse. Believe in Scotland announced a major independence march and rally in Edinburgh for 28 March 2026 back in August 2025, months before the Together Alliance even existed as a public entity. Together launched in late November 2025 and set its London demonstration for the same day. There is no evidence of any coordination, any consultation, any awareness that a significant progressive mobilisation was already planned north of the border. The “Let’s End London Rule” theme of the Edinburgh march could hardly be more pointed.

The practical consequence is straightforward: more anti-racists in Scotland will march for independence in Edinburgh on 28 March than will travel to London for the Together demonstration. That is not a prediction; it is a certainty. Believe in Scotland’s previous mobilisations have drawn tens of thousands. The Scottish left, the Scottish trade union movement, the anti-racist networks that built the counter-demonstrations against the far right in Glasgow in 2024, will overwhelmingly be in Edinburgh. The Together Alliance has not lost Scottish participation through bad luck. It has forfeited it.

Whether this reflects mere carelessness or something more deliberate is worth asking. The London-based organisations sponsoring Together, the SWP, the major trade union leaderships, the NGO apparatus, are not, on the whole, sympathetic to Scottish independence. Some are actively hostile. The SWP has long treated Scottish self-determination as a distraction from class politics, a petty-bourgeois nationalism to be tolerated at best. The trade union bureaucracy, wedded to British-state structures through which it exercises what little influence it retains, has no institutional interest in the break-up of the UK. Scheduling a “national” anti-racist mobilisation on the same day as a major Scottish independence march, without consultation, is at minimum an expression of profound indifference to Scotland. At worst it is a statement: our movement is a British movement, our capital is London, and if Scotland has other priorities, that is Scotland’s problem.

This is what London-centrism looks like in practice: not always malice, but the reflexive assumption that nothing that matters happens outside the M25, combined with a political hostility to the national movements that challenge the British state the Together Alliance is apparently too polite to confront.

The answer to “why one march in London,” though nobody will say it plainly, is infrastructure. Ten regional marches would require ten independent organising committees, ten sets of local relationships, ten democratic structures answerable to ten different communities. One London march requires a single central committee coordinating a single national event. One London march can be controlled.

Now consider what actually happens on that march. Tens of thousands of people travel to London. They march along a pre-agreed route. They are funnelled, literally funnelled, through barriers towards a rally point where platform speakers address them. And alongside the route, the organised left sets up its bookstalls and paper sales. The PSC has its stall, the SWP has its stall, the CPB has its stall. Every organisation treats the demonstration as a recruiting opportunity for itself.

This is the critical point about the SWP’s central role through Stand Up To Racism. SUTR is the “engine” of Together; the SWP’s own pre-conference documents say so explicitly. They describe SUTR as the force that should “drive the mobilisation and shape the politics of it.” They are equally explicit that “TOGETHER is not a membership organisation and is not setting up local branches.” The largest anti-racist mobilisation in a generation, and the conscious strategic decision is not to build anything permanent at the base.

So what does the mobilisation actually produce? It produces contacts. It fills coaches, and the people who fill those coaches sign clipboards and give email addresses and phone numbers. Those contact lists do not belong to the “movement.” They belong to SUTR, which is to say they belong to the SWP. The demonstration functions as a harvesting operation: the energy, the anger, the willingness to act of tens of thousands of people is channelled through a funnel that deposits them into an organisational apparatus controlled by a single far-left party with approximately 5,000 members and a long history of bureaucratic manipulation of broader movements.

This is what the SWP calls the united front tactic. It is nothing of the sort. A united front is an agreement between organisations of the working class to fight together on specific demands while maintaining their independence and their right to criticise each other. What the SWP operates through SUTR is a franchise: the brand is broad and inclusive, the intellectual property is privately held. Everyone marches, the SWP builds.

The structural problems are compounded by a personnel problem that the Alliance’s leadership seems determined to ignore. Kevin Courtney, the former NEU joint general secretary who now serves as SUTR’s trade union liaison officer, is a central organising figure in the Together mobilisation. Mark Serwotka, the former PCS general secretary, has been a prominent public face of the broader anti-racist apparatus for years. Both are associated, through attendance at Woman’s Place UK events, through public endorsements of gender-critical organisations like FiLiA, through Serwotka’s marriage to Ruth Serwotka who co-founded WPUK, with a current of opinion that significant sections of the left regard as hostile to trans rights. This is not gossip. It is a strategic problem. Trans people are themselves targets of far-right violence. LGBTQ+ communities were explicitly named in Milei’s Davos tirade; they are explicitly targeted by Reform UK. An anti-racist alliance whose most prominent organisers are perceived as toxic by the very communities who face intersecting oppressions from the far right is an alliance that has crippled itself before the first banner is unfurled. Younger activists, queer organisers, the people who should form the backbone of any serious anti-fascist mobilisation, look at the leadership of Together and see people they do not trust. The Alliance has done nothing to address this. It cannot, because addressing it would require a democratic process that Together, by design, does not possess.

And then everyone goes home. In Stoke, in Bradford, in Newham, in Tottenham, the people who actually face racist violence on their streets every day are exactly where they were before the march happened. No new local organisation has been created. No new network of self-defence has been established. No new confidence has been built among the communities most directly under attack.

What Argentina teaches

The most instructive counter-example to the British model of anti-racist mobilisation is not France, though the comparison with the Nouveau Front Populaire is tempting and has been endlessly rehearsed. It is Argentina. Twice over, in fact: once in the piquetero movement that erupted from the late 1990s, and again in the extraordinary anti-fascist mobilisations against Milei in early 2025.

The piqueteros emerged from the wreckage of neoliberal devastation in conditions far worse than anything Britain currently faces. Unemployment above fifty per cent in parts of Greater Buenos Aires. The complete collapse of the formal labour movement’s capacity to represent the unemployed. The Peronist party machine operating as a system of patronage rather than resistance. And out of this catastrophe, the most excluded and impoverished sectors of the Argentine working class, overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly from the poorest barrios, built something from below.

What did they build? Not a march. Not a single national demonstration and then home. They built territorial organisations rooted in neighbourhoods. The Movimientos de Trabajadores Desocupados, the unemployed workers’ movements, ran bakeries. They ran construction cooperatives. They ran clinics and water purification projects. In General Mosconi, a devastated former oil town with forty per cent unemployment, the movement was running over three hundred community projects. Every Thursday there was a neighbourhood assembly. Every decision was collective. When the government wanted to negotiate, the piqueteros did not send delegates to meet officials in offices; they demanded the officials come to the blockades, where everyone could discuss demands together.

This was not anti-racism specifically. But it was something far more important than what the Together Alliance is offering. It was self-organisation. Self-confidence. The construction of autonomous power in the communities most directly affected by the crisis. The piqueteros’ slogan was “trabajo, dignidad, y cambio social”: work, dignity, and social change. Not a request that the existing institutions represent them better. A declaration that they would represent themselves.

The sectarian left parties in Argentina tried to co-opt the piquetero movement, of course. The Peronists tried to absorb it through clientelist distribution of welfare payments. Some organisations were captured. But the movement’s territorial rootedness, its insistence on assembly democracy, its refusal to delegate authority upward, made it structurally resistant to bureaucratic takeover in a way that a national demonstration coordinated by a Leninist party through a front organisation simply cannot be.

Then came February 2025. Milei gave his deranged speech at Davos, attacking LGBTQ+ people, feminists, the left, anyone he considers “woke.” Within 48 hours, university assemblies in Buenos Aires were organising. Not the trade union bureaucracy. Not the established parties. University assemblies. LGBTQ+ collectives. Neighbourhood groups. The Antifascist and Antiracist Pride March on 1 February brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets across more than a hundred cities simultaneously. Not one march in Buenos Aires with coaches from the provinces. More than a hundred marches, in a hundred places, each one rooted in local organisation, each one answerable to the community that built it. International Viewpoint reported that it was the first time Milei was forced to retreat.

What made this different from the Together model? Three things. First, it was initiated from below, by the communities most directly under attack, not by a pre-existing political apparatus seeking to manage their anger. The LGBTQ+ community, Afro-Argentine collectives, sex workers’ unions, university assemblies: these were the protagonists, not the stage-managed beneficiaries of someone else’s strategy. Second, it was federal. It happened simultaneously across the entire country because each locality had its own organising capacity, its own assembly, its own reasons to march. Nobody in Tucumán needed to travel to Buenos Aires to make their anger count. Third, it was explicitly intersectional in a way that was organic rather than performative: the co-founder of Afrocolectiva marching alongside the Madres de Plaza de Mayo alongside sex workers from AMMAR alongside university professors and their unions. The movement’s power came from its roots in actually existing community networks, not from celebrity endorsements or AI-generated promotional images.

The traditions we have forgotten

Here is the bitter irony. Britain has its own tradition of exactly this kind of community-rooted anti-racist self-organisation, and the contemporary anti-racist movement has almost entirely abandoned it.

The Asian Youth Movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s were not initiated by the SWP. They were not front organisations for any party. They emerged from the direct experience of racist violence in specific communities: Southall after the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar in 1976, Tower Hamlets after the murder of Altab Ali in 1978, Bradford, Sheffield, Luton. They were rooted in neighbourhoods. They were led by the people who lived there. Their slogan, borrowed from the children of Soweto, was “don’t mourn, organise.”

The AYMs practised community self-defence. They organised patrols. They had telephone trees. They put families at the centre of campaigns rather than party organisations. When the Bradford 12 made petrol bombs in 1981 to defend Manningham against a rumoured fascist march, and were arrested and tried for conspiracy, their acquittal on grounds of self-defence was secured not through the intervention of a national party but through a mass community defence campaign that built solidarity across the country. “Self-defence is no offence” was coined in that campaign. It was a principle rooted in the direct experience of communities that knew the police would not protect them.

The AYMs explicitly resisted absorption by established left parties. The Bradford AYM barred dual membership precisely to prevent left groups from infiltrating and taking it over. When their chair secretly joined the Labour Party and tried to recruit, the organisation split rather than be co-opted. The United Black Youth League that formed from this split was governmentally independent, funded by its own community, answerable to its own assemblies.

Contrast this with the Together Alliance. An organisation convened by SUTR, which is to say convened by the SWP. “Not setting up local branches.” Focused on a single national demonstration in London. With decision-making processes that the Weekly Worker, for all its many faults, is not wrong to describe as opaque. With a political programme that deliberately avoids confronting the state racism of the Starmer government because to do so would alienate the trade union bureaucrats and centrist Labour MPs who give the platform its breadth. The AYMs would not recognise this as anti-racism. They would recognise it as the kind of paternalism they organised against.

What would it take?

There are real dangers in the current moment. Reform UK is polling above thirty per cent. Tommy Robinson led the largest far-right demonstration in British history on 13 September 2025. The Starmer government’s response to the far right is to echo its rhetoric on migration. The hostile environment is not a far-right policy; it is state policy that Labour has chosen to refine rather than abolish. The threat is genuine. No serious person denies it.

But the response to a genuine threat cannot be a spectacle that leaves no organisational trace. It certainly cannot be a spectacle designed, whether consciously or not, to channel the energy of thousands of anti-racists into the contact lists and organisational structures of one far-left party. It has to be something that builds durable, community-rooted power.

The skeleton of an alternative already exists in the traditions the British left has forgotten and the international examples it refuses to learn from. What follows is not a utopian sketch. It is a concrete proposal for regional anti-racist committees that could begin to be built tomorrow, drawing on the AYMs, the piqueteros, and the principle that the communities under attack must lead their own defence.

• Structural autonomy, not franchise branches. Each committee must be a genuinely democratic body rooted in and answerable to its specific town or city. Not a local branch of SUTR. Not a franchise of any national organisation whose contact lists flow upward to a central office in London. The AYMs understood this: they barred dual membership precisely to prevent left parties from colonising them. The piqueteros practised it through neighbourhood assemblies where every decision, every demand, every tactical choice was made collectively and locally. Leadership must be vested in members of the Black, Asian, and migrant communities most directly under attack. This is not a liberal concession to “representation.” It is a strategic necessity. White socialists organising “for” racialised communities reproduce exactly the paternalism that makes the existing anti-racist infrastructure so brittle. The people who face racist violence on their streets know things about that violence, about its patterns, its perpetrators, its relationship to policing and housing and employment, that no amount of theoretical sophistication can substitute for.

• The united front, properly understood. The committees should work with everyone willing to fight: trade unions, religious organisations, leftist parties, tenants’ groups, football supporter networks, whoever will march. March separately, strike together. But the united front is not the popular front. It preserves full political independence and the right to criticise allies. A regional anti-racist committee that cannot name the Labour government’s complicity in state racism, that cannot connect the hostile environment to the conditions fuelling the far right, that cannot raise Gaza because it might embarrass the trade union general secretaries on the platform, is not practising the united front. It is practising surrender dressed up as diplomacy.

• Community self-defence and intelligence. “Self-defence is no offence” was not an abstract slogan. The Bradford 12 made petrol bombs because the police would not protect Manningham from fascist attack, and the jury agreed they had the right to do so. Regional committees need to organise what the AYMs organised: local defence patrols, telephone trees, rapid-response networks capable of mobilising in minutes when a racist attack occurs or a far-right march is announced. In 2026 this also means a serious digital intelligence capacity: tracking far-right Telegram channels, mapping their organisational hierarchies, monitoring their financial networks, disrupting their online recruitment before it translates into street violence. The far right is organised. We must be more organised.

• A programme that addresses material grievances. Here is where the Together Alliance’s moralism is most catastrophically inadequate. “Love over ignorance” does not answer the question being asked in every de-industrialised town where Reform UK is growing: why is my life getting worse, and who is to blame? The far right has an answer to that question. It is a lie, but it is an answer. The anti-racist movement needs a better one. Jobs, homes, and services, not racism. Expropriation of the banks. A massive programme of council house construction. Public ownership of energy and water. The far right grows in the soil of neoliberal devastation; you cannot defeat it without addressing the devastation. A committee that combines anti-racist self-defence with mutual aid, with legal support for those facing immigration enforcement, with community cooperatives and food projects, as the piqueteros built in General Mosconi and La Matanza, is a committee that offers something the far right cannot: material solidarity that actually improves people’s lives.

• No platform, enforced locally. The far right must be denied any public platform in our communities. Not through abstract policy statements from national headquarters, but through local organisation that prevents fascists from marching through racialised neighbourhoods, from holding meetings in public halls, from selling their literature on high streets. This is trade union work as much as community work: pressuring unions to refuse to service fascist events, to blacklist fascist propaganda, to organise industrial action against racist government measures. Three hundred trade union banners on a London march is decorative. Trade union branches refusing to handle deportation logistics is power.

• Regional mobilisation, not London pilgrimage. Instead of funnelling all energy into one march in one city, the committees should organise simultaneous regional mobilisations that contest the far right where it actually operates. In Scotland, where a major progressive mobilisation is already planned for 28 March and where the anti-racist movement has its own distinct character rooted in the independence struggle, the sensible thing would have been to work with it, not against it; to build anti-racist contingents within the Edinburgh march rather than demanding Scottish activists abandon their own movement to swell the numbers in London. But that would require acknowledging Scottish self-determination as a legitimate anti-racist demand, and the organisations behind Together are not prepared to do that. And each of those regional mobilisations would require, and therefore would create, local organising capacity. You cannot bus people to ten cities from a single central committee. You have to build locally. That is precisely the point.

What Your Party should do (and what it shouldn’t)

There is a harder question the left needs to face directly: should Your Party sponsor the 28 March demonstration?

Yes. But how it sponsors matters more than whether it sponsors.

Your Party has 800,000 sign-ups. It has parliamentary voices with genuine moral authority on anti-racism: Zarah Sultana, who resigned from Labour over Gaza; Jeremy Corbyn, who has been on more anti-racist demonstrations than most of the Together Alliance’s steering committee combined. The SWP’s own pre-conference documents identify Your Party’s membership base as one of two “crucial factors” for the mobilisation, alongside the Palestine movement. They want those 800,000 names on the march. Of course they do. But what the SWP wants is for Your Party members to fill the coaches and swell the numbers within a mobilisation driven and shaped by SUTR. They want the bodies. They do not want the co-leadership.

If Your Party simply adds its logo to the Together poster and encourages members to attend, it has accomplished nothing except lending its mass base to someone else’s strategy. Your Party members march, SUTR harvests the contacts, the SWP builds. Your Party gets a day out; the SWP gets a movement. This is not sponsorship. It is subsidy.

Your Party’s opportunity is far larger than adding numbers. It is the opportunity to transform the character of the mobilisation itself, to make the case within the Alliance for the grassroots anti-racist organisation that Together has explicitly decided not to build. Your Party has local groups forming across Britain. Many are embryonic, some barely functional, all searching for a purpose beyond the next electoral cycle. Anti-racist organising could give them one. Not as auxiliaries of SUTR, running errands for a mobilisation designed in London, but as the nuclei of the kind of regional anti-racist committees described above.

The concrete demand is simple. Your Party should sponsor 28 March and insist on three conditions.

• First, democratic representation in the Alliance’s organising structures. Not a logo on the letterhead; a seat at the table where decisions are made.

• Second, regional mobilisations alongside the London march, with Your Party branches convening local anti-racist committees that persist beyond the day.

• Third, political content that Together’s platform currently refuses to articulate: the connection between Starmer’s hostile environment and the conditions fuelling the far right, the complicity of the British state in racism, the class programme that “love over ignorance” cannot substitute for.

If the Alliance accepts these conditions, Your Party has used its mass base to shift the anti-racist movement toward grassroots organisation. If it refuses, Your Party has demonstrated in practice that Together is not a genuine alliance but a franchise that demands bodies without offering democracy, and Your Party members will know exactly what they are marching for and what they are marching into.

This is also a test for Your Party itself. The SWP’s pre-conference bulletin notes, correctly, that “the logic from the leading figures” of Your Party “is to prioritise electoral politics and the MPs as the key players.” The Grassroots Left current within Your Party, in which ACR participates, has been arguing the opposite: that Your Party must be a party of the streets and workplaces, not just a parliamentary vehicle. The 28 March question is a lever. Pressing for sponsorship on conditions that build grassroots anti-racist capacity is simultaneously an intervention in the anti-racist movement and an argument within Your Party about what kind of party it will be. A party that passively endorses Together and fills the coaches is a party that has already conceded its strategic direction to others. A party that insists on local organisation, democratic participation, and political independence is a party worth building.

Neither sectarianism nor passivity

The point is not to boycott the 28 March demonstration. Go to the march. Take your banner. Chant the chants. The point is that if 28 March is the end of the strategy rather than a single moment within a much larger process of community self-organisation, then it will have failed before the first placard is raised.

The sectarian response is to refuse to engage with anything one does not control. The passive response is to attend whatever the existing organisations have arranged and hope it will be enough. Both are forms of political cowardice. The revolutionary response is to participate in the broadest possible mobilisations while simultaneously, and primarily, building the autonomous, community-rooted organisations that can sustain the struggle long after the march is over.

Argentina’s movements did not choose between mobilisation and self-organisation. They did both. The piqueteros blocked roads and ran bakeries. The anti-Milei marchers filled the streets and then returned to their university assemblies and neighbourhood collectives to plan what came next. The Asian Youth Movements marched alongside the wider labour movement and maintained their own autonomous organisations rooted in specific communities.

This is what it means to avoid both sectarianism and passivity. Not splitting the difference between them, not finding some comfortable middle ground, but transcending the false choice entirely. Build the movement from where people live and work and face racist violence. Build it with and under the leadership of the communities most directly affected. Build organisations that are democratic, that are accountable to their base, that do not exist to funnel people towards someone else’s bookstall.

28 March will be what it will be. The question is what exists on 29 March, and the week after, and the month after that. If the answer is “the same organisations that existed before, with slightly updated mailing lists held by the SWP,” then the far right has nothing to fear. If the answer is “new, rooted, community-controlled anti-racist organisations in fifty towns and cities across Britain, led by the people who actually face racist violence,” then we might actually be getting somewhere.

The infrastructure we need does not exist yet. No march will build it. Only organising will. And that organising cannot begin and end at a clipboard on the Embankment.

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Postscripts

1] On Sparks and Pressure Valves

A reader raises a serious objection: the demonstration’s purpose is solidarity and confidence, not organisation-building in itself. People march, feel less alone, and go home ready to do the real work. Cable Street. Lewisham. The logic is sound as far as it goes.

But sparks have causes. What actually ignited this mobilisation is not a principled decision by the trade union bureaucracies to build grassroots anti-racist infrastructure. If that were their goal, they would have started building it. They haven’t. What moved the union tops is narrower and more defensive: the electoral rise of Reform UK threatens public sector budgets, and therefore the institutional base of the unions themselves. Self-preservation, not solidarity, is the motor here.

Consider the record. The unions did not organise national demonstrations when Liam Byrne, Labour's Immigration Minister, invoked a "hostile environment" for illegal immigrants in 2007. They did not take to the streets when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition systematically expanded it through the Immigration Act of 2014, introducing right-to-rent checks, NHS charging, and employer verifications. When the Windrush scandal exposed that logic applied to legal residents of decades' standing, the response was UNISON letters, TUC motions, and a judicial review. Worthy, careful, institutional. Not a march. And they have not challenged Starmer's Labour, which has not dismantled the hostile environment but intensified it: increased raids, tens of thousands of removals in its first year alone, settlement waits extended toward a thirty-year horizon. A hostile environment on steroids. Fifteen years of briefings, motions, and carefully worded letters. That is the record.

SUTR’s function, in this context, is to provide political cover for precisely that passivity. When members raise demands for genuine anti-racist organising, the bureaucracies can point to Together and call it done. The pressure is released without the structure changing. Together is explicitly not a membership organisation. It is not establishing local branches. That is not an oversight; it is the design. The SWP’s own pre-conference documents confirm that SUTR is intended to be “the engine that drives the mobilisation.” The unions provide the logos and the numbers. The SWP manages the politics. And the politics are carefully calibrated to keep everyone comfortable: “Hope over Fear,” “Unity not Division,” nothing that might embarrass a union leader sharing a platform with a Labour MP whose party built the system being marched against.

But the SWP’s interest in this arrangement is not purely ideological. It is also organisational, and worth naming plainly. SWP members in many unions organise in minority left currents proposing genuine alternatives to the incumbent leaderships. The Central Committee, however, also wants to develop relationships with those same union leaders. These two goals are in permanent tension; bureaucratic triangulation is the SWP’s way of managing it. The more useful SUTR and Together are to the union tops, the more slack those tops will cut SWP members organising on their executives. The SWP has watched this logic pay off handsomely for the Communist Party of Britain over twenty years of patient cultivation of the union bureaucracies. The CPB has influence without a mass base; access without accountability. The SWP is learning the same lesson. Which means SUTR must remain the anointed channel for anti-racist discontent, never the foundation for independent organisation that might embarrass the wrong people.

What does a marcher take back to their workplace from Together’s framework? Energy, hopefully. But also confusion: about who built the hostile environment, who maintains it, and why the unions that could have fought it for fifteen years are only now finding their feet. Solidarity without analysis. Confidence without direction. The spark that illuminates nothing.

Manchester on 21 February made this concrete. SUTR mobilised trade unionists and councillors in Piccadilly Gardens for speeches; the numbers were solid. Meanwhile a separate coalition, Resist Britain First, built from revolutionary anti-racist, feminist and community defence organisations working alongside rank-and-file trade unionists and tenants' union organisers, took a different approach: disciplined direct action that blocked Britain First's route, split their march at multiple intersections, and confined Paul Golding's rally to around a hundred soaking wet supporters in the Castlefield bowl. Two demonstrations, one day, one city. The SUTR model mobilised the usual suspects through the usual channels. The other model had built something different: rooted in Black and Asian communities with their own leadership, their own tactics, their own accountability to the people most at risk. That is the grassroots anti-racist infrastructure the union bureaucracies have never tried to build. It exists in Manchester not because of Together but despite the framework Together represents.

Local anti-racist organisation will not fall, like an apple from a tree, from this demonstration. And the union bureaucracies, with the SWP running their logistics, have made certain of it.

2] Harder conditions are a reason for change, not for acceptance

One comradely challenge is worth meeting directly. The absence of anything like the Asian Youth Movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s is not primarily the SWP's fault. Forty years of deindustrialisation, the deliberate fragmentation of working-class community infrastructure, and the atomisation that neoliberalism produced as policy have gutted the organic connections from which those movements grew. Resist Britain First in Manchester is being built in that harder terrain, not the dense industrial communities and mutual aid networks of the Southall or Bradford of 1981. That is a real difference, and the article could have acknowledged it. But it cuts both ways. If the terrain is harder, the case for building genuinely rooted infrastructure rather than a franchise mobilisation model becomes stronger, not weaker. The union bureaucracies did not create neoliberalism; they accommodated it, step by step, year by year, precisely through the institutional rather than street-level model of opposition that Together now reproduces. The conditions are harder. That is an argument for doing things differently, not for accepting the current arrangement as the best available.