Masked far-right thugs violently assaulted a public meeting held by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Glasgow last Thursday night. Police Scotland have refused to confirm whether they have charged anyone over the assault.
Around 20 men dressed in black and wearing balaclavas descended on the meeting advertised by the SWP’s Glasgow branch on Mungo Avenue, in the city centre. Social media footage shows the fascists breaching the venue’s external doors and violently kicking two internal glass doors manned by stewards.
The far-right thugs can be heard violently shouting to “open the f* doors”, which they kicked repeatedly, before retreating. Among those present at the meeting were striking Scottish university workers and a speaker from Paris, invited to report on the mass protests in France.
The Glasgow branch of the SWP issued a statement the following day, “The twenty fascists charged against the venue where the event was taking place with the intention to storm and disrupt the meeting and attack participants, but they were repelled at the door. After failing to gain access, they retreated.”
The Socialist Equality Party denounces this attack on the SWP’s meeting and demands that Police Scotland seek out, arrest and charge those involved. The violent assault by fascists underscores the need for heightened vigilance and attention to security for all left-wing, anti-war, anti-fascist and working-class organisations.
According to eyewitnesses, some of the attackers were the same as those involved in far-right marches and pogromist violence in Glasgow over the summer. On July 25, around 200 members of Unite the Clans held a Nazi-style drill at Glasgow Green, addressed by the fascist Patriotic Alliance and Reform UK. Rally participants later rampaged through the city, with an immigrant delivery driver attacked. Unite the Clans held a second protest in September, with around 100 people.
On June 13, members of the neo-Nazi Scots Active group held an anti-immigrant mobilisation in Glasgow to counter a rally of 1,000 people in support of immigrants. According to the Daily Record, the rabble “clashed with cops, targeted ethnic minorities, and made Nazi salutes”.
On July 24, a group of around 50 neo-Nazis assembled outside the offices of the Daily Record, one of Scotland’s major tabloids, standing silently in drill formation, to intimidate the newspaper’s journalists over their investigations of far-right protests in Glasgow.
Nick McGowan-Lowe, the National Union of Journalists’ national organiser for Scotland, told the Press Gazette: “The NUJ is concerned about the increasing amount of abuse and threats of violence aimed at journalists in recent weeks in Scotland, especially those connected with groups taking part in organised protests.”
Increased far-right activity in Scotland is closely linked to that of loyalist groups in Northern Ireland, with a recent investigation by The Ferret exposing a network of convicted loyalists and former paramilitaries travelling between Belfast and Scottish cities including Glasgow. Fascist anti-migrant riots in Belfast in June led to the displacement of over 88 households, with homes, businesses and vehicles set on fire.
In their statement issued Friday, the SWP condemned Restore Britain and Reform UK’s role in giving “street fascists oxygen with their Islamophobic and racist arguments,” urging their supporters to “be part of building Stand Up to Racism and its activities” and calling for “an enormous mobilisation for the Scottish Trades Union Congress St Andrew’s Day annual march against racism and fascism” on November 28.
The SWP’s response is a political diversion. The growth of Restore Britain and Reform UK has been encouraged by the right-wing nationalist, anti-immigrant and militarist programme of the Labour governments under both Starmer and Burnham, and by a union bureaucracy that has suppressed any serious fightback by millions of workers against the assault on their living standards and social and democratic rights.
The mass youth protests in France and across Europe show that powerful objective conditions exist for an all-European offensive by the working class to take on and defeat the ruling class agenda of war, austerity and fascism. But this means fighting in the working class to break the grip of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy and advancing the fight for socialism.