How should we counter the rise of the far-right? As KEN TOWL found out when he arrived on time at the Croydon School of Philosophy, by offering some truth and understanding
In the School of Philosophy on Addiscombe Grove, not far from East Croydon Station, Yunis Smith, ex-Royal Marine and currently “immigrants’ champion” on Hastings Council, wears a green hat and drinks from a green water bottle. He sits in front of the opening slide of his PowerPoint slideshow, which features a union flag next to a depiction of Tower Bridge, coloured green.
Mussolini got the trains to run on time: Croydon Greens’ meeting in the Croydon School of Philosophy eventually began at 3.30pm…
When you are a member of a party with a colour for its name, branding is pretty straightforward.
Smith is councillor for Baird ward (named for John Logie Baird, who invented the television in Hastings), and part of the minority Green administration on Hastings Borough Council, and was the Croydon Green Party’s “special guest speaker” at the weekend.
Traditionally, Hastings has had a Labour council. Perhaps reflecting this, Smith’s neighbouring ward is Tressel, named for the author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, the classic semi-autobiographical novel beloved by many in the Labour movement.
But at the end of 2023, Hastings’ ruling Labour group fell apart when several of its councillors, including the council leader, resigned from the party to form Hastings Independent Group, primarily over Labour’s failure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. So I was curious to hear Smith speak about how to deal with the growing threat of the far-right, given that the Green Party had almost certainly taken votes that had previously gone to Labour.
The meeting started late, of course. I got there just in time for the advertised 3pm start. I was ushered into a kitchen area where I was offered tea or coffee with the half-apologetic aside, “We only have oat milk”, after I opted for tea.
I took my seat and waited. I struck up a conversation with the woman to my right. “I am not a Green Party member,” she said. “Neither am I,” I said. It turned out she was a Labour Party member but was Green-curious. Well, these days, a lot of us are, I suppose.
At about ten past three, a Green Party representative told us that the meeting would start “on time” at 3.30pm “to allow everyone to get in”.
My neighbour asked me to guard her bag while she went off to get a sandwich, as she had rushed to get there on time and so had to miss lunch. She came back at 3.30, just as the show started.
I couldn’t help but think that if Benito Mussolini was able to make fascism more acceptable to the Italians by getting the trains to run on time, the Greens could make their much more attractive politics more convincing by starting their meetings on time. And by providing milk that has seen the inside of a cow.
I am not a fan of PowerPoint, particularly when it is used as a platform to support bullet point after bullet point in tiny writing that is supposed to back up what the speaker is saying, but actually only competes with it. You don’t know whether to read or to listen. Smith would have done better without it.
Moving to the (far) right: recent polling by YouGov has consistently shown a three-way split, with Reform UK gathering support
He is an engaging and entertaining speaker. He is, in many important ways, very different to Donald Trump, and I am sure any comparison with the all-but-fascist leader of the free world would horrify him. But Yunis Smith is similar in one regard. Driven by passion for what he is saying, he cannot avoid departing from his carefully honed script, and when he does, he carries the room with him.
His premise was this: that the far-right is on the rise, that they will appeal to voters who are looking for change, to voters beyond their core support, voters who are not intrinsically racist or ultra-nationalist, but voters who feel that they are being failed, whether by rising prices, lack of investment, poor opportunities in the area and any of the other factors that influence the quality of our lives.
On the right, the Reform UK Party is trying to capture these votes, but it is the Green Party who are the real reformers (see what he did there?) and so engagement with voters who might be prepared to lean that way was a good way to check the rise of the right.
Yunis’ off-script anecdotes best illustrated this.
He described meeting one disaffected voter while door-knocking in Baird ward and asking him what the key issues were for him. The man gave a long and winding description about a problem with brambles and the local parks that arose from the council’s failure to cut them back around the entrances to the parks, and the blacks. “Run that past me again,” said Smith. He had already explained how a favourite tactic of his was to get people to repeat their allegations because he found that they tended to modify their language the second time around.
The man repeated his painstaking explanation of the minutiae of the municipal bramble issue (“Not in the parks themselves, but at the entrances, where you go in and out”) and then, having established this, added, again “and the blacks”.
Smith’s point here, that while the first issue, a hyperlocal one in the complainant’s mind, needed careful explanation, the second, being universally acknowledged, did not.
So Smith asked for more information and managed to draw out the real issue, which, in this case, was anti-social behaviour by youths in the centre of town, and not an issue of ethnicity at all but rather one that had been lazily categorised that way.
Another conversation was sparked up as a result of Smith taking a photo of dog mess.
A resident asked him what he was doing, and he explained that he wanted to get the council to tackle the issue. The resident said, “If you want to be effective, you should do something about illegal migrants.”
Here, Smith was able to challenge the narrative around refugees and immigration by raising the idea of creating more safe routes, so that those escaping oppression around the world could claim asylum safely, while the people-traffickers would lose their business. I didn’t think that such an argument would appeal to hard-core Reform voters, but that wasn’t the point, as Smith explained to me afterwards.
I liked Smith. He was a decent man, in politics for all the right reasons. And, crucially, he exuded competence to match his conscientiousness. I asked him about his focus on the far right. Surely, in Hastings, the far right had no foothold at all? They had no candidates, never mind councillors.
He pointed to the General Election results. Hastings and Rye is a Parliamentary constituency of two parts, strongly Labour Hastings and strongly Conservative Rye. Last July, the Tories lost the seat to Labour’s Helena Dollimore (a former councillor in Merton, much like Croydon East’s Natasha Irons) but the Greens, despite their local successes and a rise in their vote from 0.1% to 12.4%, had been pushed back into fourth place by Reform, who secured 16.1% of the vote.
Challenging the narrative: Hastings councillor Yunis Smith, who might be better leaving the PowerPoint at home
Here was the danger, Smith said, but at the same time, many of these voters were winnable. They were not hard-core right-wing. They were looking for change and, as long as Labour did not provide it, then more voters would add to their number. Only the Greens could appeal to these voters, and offer them real reform.
In Croydon East, as happened in Hastings and Rye, the winning Labour Party saw its support drop but benefited from the collapse of the Conservative vote.
In Croydon East, as in Hastings and Rye, the Reform Party pushed the Greens into fourth place, despite stalwart Peter Underwood being able to take his party from a notional 2.3% to 7.1% of the votes in a seat that most would have understood to be very much a two-horse race.
Interestingly, and gallingly for Underwood, Reform’s flimsiest of paper candidates, Scott Holman, who does not appear to have stepped on one doorstep in the borough, managed to take his party to 13.4% entirely, one supposes, due to the “charisma” of party leader Nigel Farage.
Yes, I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t see it either, but the Dulwich College-educated millionaire bond-trader has successfully marketed himself as a down-to-earth, commonsense man-of-the-people sort of chap, whether we like it or not.
If Peter Underwood stands again, will he try to target Reform’s 5,862 votes? Or Natasha Irons’ 18,541? Knowing Peter, he will go for votes wherever he can get them.
A General Election is likely a long time away though. It will be interesting to see where Reform sits in the national opinion polls on the eve of a vote. A recent YouGov poll, putting Reform on 27% to Labour’s 25% and the Tories’ 21%, is a sobering reminder that we live in changing times and the British political duopoly cannot rely on the voter loyalty that has served them so well in the past.
That same YouGov poll has the Greens languishing on 9%, so there is work to do yet for Underwood and his colleagues.
Perhaps, in the meantime, Underwood has his eyes on the Fairfield council ward where he narrowly lost out in 2022 in what became a Labour v Green scramble for votes that saw Ria Patel and Esther Sutton as the Green Party’s first councillors elected in Croydon.
Safe, but for how long?: Tory MP Chris Philp survived in Croydon South, where Reform’s surge hardly materialised
At yesterday’s meeting, Ria Patel herself invited members to consider standing as candidates and made an allusion to “target seats”. Given that the Greens have tended to do better in the north of the borough, Labour might be well-advised to look out for increased Green activity in some of its heartlands. There should be no doubt, of course, that the Greens will want to consolidate their success in Fairfield ward and try to win all three of its council seats come May 2026.
If Hastings is anything to go by, it is in the local elections where the Greens are likely to make the most progress, while it is in national, General Elections that Farage’s Reform are likely to score. On a local level, with his tales of brambles and dog mess, Smith was really arguing for competent local councillors who meet the needs of their residents.
He expressed a need for councillors who are empowered to put residents, rather than party first, in an age where voters were less ideological and more transactional than ever.
Labour MPs Sarah Jones and Steve Reed, with their 54% and 52% vote shares, can probably sleep soundly for the time being, and in Croydon South, Tory Chris Philp appears able to get elected despite his association with the government of Liz Truss and the council of Jason Perry.
But Labour and Conservative councillors and wannabe councillors in Croydon should be thinking very carefully about their positions. Their wards are, right now, being eyed up by Greens, Reformers and Liberal Democrats who, in these febrile times, smell blood, be it Labour red or Tory blue.
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Perhaps YouGuv are mathematically challenged? The figures in that slide of votes (above) adds up to 101% ?! Perhaps Plaid Cymru and others only got 0.5% each, but got rounded up to 1% each?
Thanks for this well-argued and intelligent piece Ken. I wonder, though, who you think the ‘far right’ is who must be challenged? Along with narratives, of course. Are they ‘Sir’ Keir’s? Or are they the genuine working class, left behind by all our parties who seem to be run by the well-heeled liberal intelligencia who sip oatmilk lattes, rather than pints of brown and mild?
One way to cut through the political bramble is to use some sharp political shears. Let’s have a go…first apply some reality oil on the shears, which is that every human being born outside Africa is of African descent and that climate changed our complexion from black to the very pale black it is today. Thus today, the nearer to the Equator humans live thus darker the complexion. Indeed, DNA extracted from Cheddar Gorge Man revealed that he had black curly hair, brown skin and blue eyes. From these facts, Racism is a Capitalist construct to divide and rule.
A couple of snips and already we have made some headway.
Since evolution is a fact and factually we are all African and the first human diaspora from Africa happened some 100,000 years ago and dinosaurs roamed the Earth millions of years ago before that, divine intervention never happened and the intervention was an invention and as such all religions are just superstition pure and simple. However superstitious fears were and still are used to empower shamans, divine right of Kings etc to divide and rule, subjugate women and other members of society and thus is another Capitalist construct as is their imposition. However no-one would deny anybody a belief that brings succour in times of distress. Nor would anyone deny someone who dressed and ate according to their own superstition. Another couple of snips and already we can see our way through.
So what really divides society given the above facts? The answer is of course class, where the ruling class lords over the working class and uses every trick in the book from dictatorship, media ownership, superstition, racism, land ownership to the courts of law and dubious claims of democracy to achieve this. The ruling class use these tricks and constructs because they know that they need the working class to survive but the working class does not need them to survive. We have cut through the political bramble and now can face the future.
Society has to educate the future generations via secular establishments on these facts of life and any political party worth its salt should promulgate these as well.
Bob Hewlett? Dave Spart, more like it
You’re showing your age old man. Didn’t Spart die in a smokey bar in Hampstead back in the ‘sixties?
Completely off topic, but a Croydon connection… Logie Baird achieved the first transatlantic TV broadcast from a garden in Coulsdon.
https://insidecroydon.com/2023/04/08/coulsdon-art-trail-marks-clapps-big-hand-for-logie-baird-tv/
Thanks for this – something to be proud of. Of course, the broadcast wouldn’t have been from Croydon then – we didn’t control that part of Surrey until 1965