Defying The Racists

And their little-dick energy

There was an anti-racism demo in town on Saturday. Almost two hundred of us turned up to celebrate humanity.

A racist was there with a big Union Jack. One of the speakers correctly referred to it as the Butcher’s Apron. The Reform racist was backed by his sheepish teenage bam supporters. The local racist groups are the same idiots who waved an Israeli flag at one of their little rallies, because they support genocide and violent Apartheid states. And they held a demo outside a hotel that contained refugees “to protect our women and children!” whilst listening to the racist words of thugs connected to paedophile sex offenders.

You couldn’t make it up.

One of the racists half-kicked at a little dog, the wanker.

Anyway, as the main racist paraded around with his flag, trying to get in the way of speakers and provoke people (he failed repeatedly), a woman drew “Racism is little-dick energy” on a huge placard and followed him around holding it up. It took him a while to realise why everyone was laughing, because he wasn’t the brightest spark. Then the crowd started chanting “Little dick! Little dick!” Well, he did seem to be an attention-seeker, but I don’t think that’s what he wanted.

Later I told the main racist with his thin moustache that it was lovely to see him, thank you for turning up to oppose racism and add to our numbers. “You’re a good little boy at heart.”

And here’s part of one of the speeches given by a Trade Union Council representative:

The man responsible for stirring up the local racists was Danny Thomas the infamous far-right agitator and sidekick of the man who calls himself Tommy Robinson.

It’s well known that Tommy Robinson gets substantial funding from three American racist billionaires: Elon Musk, Robert Shillman and Alex Jones, as well as contributions from some far right people in Israel.

From an early stage in the 1920s Hitler’s Nazi party got substantial funding from rich Germans at home and abroad as well as Henry Ford, exiled Russian aristocrats and various anti-semites from many different countries including Britain.

Reform UK, helped by large parts of the media and social media platforms, has been deliberately stirring up resentment against refugees and immigrants generally.

Why? Because their millionaire leaders and their super rich backers want to divert anger against the huge inequalities in our society and our crumbling welfare state away from the real causes.

Nigel Farage was reckoned to be worth £3.2 million in 2025, Zia Yusuf was worth £5.2 million and Richard Tice was worth £40 million.

Recently they were joined in the anti-immigrant rhetoric by Sir Jim Ratcliffe in his “Britain is colonised by migrants” speech.

The Rat Ratcliffe (knighted presumably for building a huge personal fortune) is worth £29.6 billion. He’s been a tax exile in Monaco since 2020, a move which is reckoned to have saved him £4 billion.

This country’s politicians tolerate massive (legal) tax avoidance by the rich every year. The latest HMRC figures for 2022-23 show £39.8 billion of uncollected tax. (Add that to the previous year’s figure of £36 billion and all the years before that to see the scale of losses that they never do anything about.)

(That’s without a wealth tax that both Labour and the Tories don’t want us to talk about.)

Shabana Mahood the UK Home Secretary is a member of so-called Blue Labour.

Despite the great result in the Manchester by-election, her focus remains on trying to win over Reform UK voters.

She doesn’t seem to get it. If you feed Farage and his followers with more and more anti-immigrant policies he’ll just keep coming back for more.

I know others will talk about refugees and the political situation.

I want to talk about the difficulties this government and the Tories have deliberately caused two vital groups of workers who’ve come here from abroad to fill important vacancies in the care system and the NHS.

Workers from African and Asian countries are in the UK on work visas with “no recourse to public funds”. Because they have no access to benefits and are liable to be deported after 60 days if they lose their job, the Home Office visa system leaves them, as workers with inferior rights, open to exploitation by unscrupulous employers.

Successive UK governments have responded to anti-immigrant pressure from racists and in doing so have made the shortage of workers in the care sector much worse by (a) preventing care workers from bringing their families to join them with effect from March 2024 and (b) setting the minimum annual wage for work visas with effect from July 2025 at £31,300 - a long way above current wages for carers.

Because of their work visa restrictions, most of the low-paid care workers from abroad are forced to live in overpriced, overcrowded and often sub-standard private rentals.

It is due to the failings of successive UK governments (and nothing to do with refugees or migrant workers) that there is a huge shortage of affordable social housing, that hospitals, the care system and education are underfunded and that state benefits have been cut in real terms and are now lower than elsewhere in Western Europe.

Many of these workers in the care system have contracts that are worded differently from the ones given to local workers (even though that’s supposed to be against Home Office rules - which they never enforce).

Some of the contracts for African workers that I’ve seen in my role as employment rights adviser, specifically threaten to report to the Home Office any disciplinary warnings and any grievances that they raise.

Small wonder that they are reluctant to report the growing number of racist abuses they get from a small minority of clients and fellow workers emboldened by the utterances of Farage and his crew.

Gradually they are being persuaded to join trade unions like UNITE and UNISON but there’s a big job in getting that across to them particularly when they know that managements are hostile.

Talking of managements. Many of them would rather run a mile than confront racists in workplaces despite anti-discrimination policies in their organisation.

I’ll finish on a bit of good news on that front though. Richard Akintayo who was a Nigerian consultant on rheumatology took NHS Dumfries and Galloway Health Board to an Employment Tribunal over 14 days in July and August last year.

Despite being up against a barrister, he won his case for constructive dismissal, direct discrimination and racial harassment over their management’s failure to take any effective action to address his complaints of racial discrimination by certain workers in DGRI.

The hearing to determine the level of damages has still not taken place but this is a significant win in a landmark case which hopefully will encourage managements generally to take serious steps to drive out racist behaviour in workplaces.”

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