Anti-racism campaigners are planning to organise unity gigs in the towns and cities blighted by anti-immigrant riots to combat the growing influence of the far right in some parts of Britain.
Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) – the successor organisation to the Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement which helped turn the tide against the National Front in the 1970s – is planning to follow a concert in London in September, featuring singer-songwriter Paloma Faith, with a series of local gigs across the country over the next 12 months.
“We are doing the launch in London, which is home ground for us,” says Samira Ali, an organiser for LMHR and its sister organisation Stand up to Racism. “But we want to organise these gigs in the places the far right see as their territory because we want to show they are in a tiny, hateful minority.”
Anti-immigration violence erupted in more than 25 British towns and cities this month after false stories circulated online about the background of a teenager charged with murdering three children in Southport.
Mosques, hotels accommodating asylum seekers and areas with large immigrant populations were attacked during the unrest, which was instigated or encouraged by the far right.
More than 1,000 people have been arrested, with almost 600 charged so far. Some of those charged have been children, including two 12-year-old boys, a 13-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy.
Thousands of people across the country also took part in a series of protests against the far right after threats were made against more than two dozen immigration advice centres.
LMHR, which put on gigs to undermine the influence of the British National party in the early 2000s, is relaunching itself to counter what it sees as the renewed threat posed by organised fascists on the streets as well as the anti-migration populist right in parliament, led by the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, who has been accused of stoking the unrest.
“The far-right mobilisations have been huge … the biggest we’ve seen for decades,” said Ali.
“But the context is even more dangerous than when Rock Against Racism was launched in the 1970s. Then, we faced the National Front but didn’t have Reform in parliament. We didn’t have fascism on the rise through Europe in the same way and Donald Trump running for the presidency in the US.”
Artists including Idles, Nadine Shah and Fontaines DC have backed an LMHR open letter calling for a “united cultural movement which will ward off the threat of the far right and strengthen communities damaged by the corrosive effects of racism”.
LMHR is hoping to replicate the DIY ethos of Rock Against Racism, which inspired local activists to put on gigs featuring black and white musicians. RAR organised 300 local concerts and five anti-Nazi carnivals in the 1970s, with more than 80,000 gathering to hear the Clash and Steel Pulse in Victoria Park, east London, in 1978.
“We’re going to be supporting people throwing gigs in their home towns,” said Alex LoSardo, another LMHR organiser. “We can help them with resources such as T-shirts, posters and stickers, and co-promoting their shows and linking them up with artists.
“The aim is to turn LMHR into a mass grassroots movement like it was in the Rock Against Racism days.”
Roger Huddle, one of the signatories to a letter to the NME that led to the founding of RAR in 1976, said he backed the latest initiative by LMHR. “The most important part of RAR was the DIY culture. Our fanzine, Temporary Hoarding, always had a guide on how to put on a gig in your area,” he said.
“I went to all kinds of weird and wonderful places where young people wanted to put on gigs.”
He added that the extreme right celebrated the worst, most backward-looking music whereas anti-racists could call on the incredible diversity of the popular music scene. “When Tommy Robinson’s supporters marched to Trafalgar Square [before the riots in July] they were singing Rule! Britannia,” he said. “That is the most boring song ever written, full of awful Edwardian golden-age nationalism … This is a great help to our side.”
Huddle said music had a unique power to unite people, especially the young. “Music is everything to angst-ridden teenagers, who are the very people we want to reach to build a new movement against racism.”
