“The speech” may have been in the making a long while, maybe for a lifetime, but Andy Burnham has only a week left for revision before his first conference as Labour leader. Expect hope, of course, that the future will be better, though the way is hard. Already his optimism means that fewer people think they will be worse off next year. But his most urgent task is the cultural wildfire that needs extinguishing before it takes hold.
The rise of anti-migration neofascism is more threatening than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Shock tactics by a few hundred people in black shirts and balaclavas are designed to invade the national consciousness, their noxious hate bleeding into the mainstream – and they do.
Keir Starmer began well, hosing down the summer 2024 rioters with rapid arrests. But since then, the truth is that Labour has looked ambivalent in challenging aggressive St George’s flag-raisers, and the asylum hotel protesters who claim to be “protecting” the country whose values they are trashing. At the same time, the self-proclaimed patriots of GB News, the Mail, the Telegraph and Elon Musk’s X pump out daily hate of the country. Burnham’s task is to face them down with top-level leadership, and the sheer force of his positivity.
It won’t be easy. Nick Lowles, the founder of the advocacy group Hope Not Hate, says the cordon sanitaire that once defended democratic politics from the far right and ethno-nationalist thuggery is gone. He has patrolled that line all his working life, and now he’s alarmed about the feeble responses from mainstream politicians to the swelling ranks of racist demagogues intent on wrecking what is, still, a remarkably cohesive multicultural society.
But Lowles is encouraged by his latest talks with Downing Street. “They are ready to push back,” he says. “Good people need to stand up.” Keep immigration policy separate, is his advice. “It’s not binary, people want the small boats stopped – but they value the cohesive communities they live in.”
Burnham of the north, immune to the rightwing branding of southerners as “woke”, is the right man to speak plainly against racism to the “red wall” tendency. There is a decency argument to be made. Look how the best-of-British RNLI had to close a station as volunteers were threatened for risking their lives for anyone in peril on the sea. Consider the truth that only 1.2% of RNLI’s emergency launches involve refugees.
Consider that when Sagal Abdi-Wali, once a Somali child refugee and now a local council leader, the Labour candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, a respected public servant, faces ferocious abuse for seeking to serve the public, it’s a direct threat to democracy.
When a poll indicates that 37% of men between 25 and 34 like Tommy Robinson, there can be no doubt that the sewer of hate and misogyny, operating via dark algorithms, needs to be checked, not protected as “free speech”. When tax-exile billionaire Jim Ratcliffe opines from Monaco that immigration and taxes are destroying the country, it’s for Labour to be the patriots who rebut him.
Things are bad when the former prime minister Rishi Sunak, born and bred in the UK, feels obliged, as he did in the Sunday Times at the weekend, to defend his right to be brown and British. Calling himself a beneficiary of “the world’s most successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy”, he was shocked by footage of “someone referring to me as a ‘Paki’ and others questioning the Englishness of a ‘brown Hindu’”. He insisted: “We cannot allow race to be reintroduced into our politics … they are trying to turn Britishness into a DNA test.”
Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats sees it as his “moral responsibility to stop Reform”, as it is for Labour, and should be for traditional Tories. But Westminster has been muted. When Nigel Farage first announced he would deport 600,000 people, including children, Labour – like the Tories – only opposed his scheme’s cost and impracticality.
Deporting whichever migrants Farage targets next may appeal to some, but it’s for Labour to spell out what that midnight knock would come to mean – not just for millions as British as Sunak, but for us all, with our liberties diluted, and division and hate concentrated.
The tempting counterattack is more hate: knuckle-dusters against knuckle-draggers. But that’s not the right way, says Lowles, who has himself been the target of violence and death threats. His organisation seems to be carrying a lot of the burden here. It’s scrutiny of that dark world – infiltrating and exposing the extremism, gathering names and evidence when violence has been planned – that has prevented outrages and saved lives. The police appear to know far less.
Hope Not Hate, which relies on donations, runs community groups in places at risk of tensions. In mainly white areas of Bradford, Gateshead, Sunderland and elsewhere, it offers free meals in school holidays and provides food banks to bring people together to talk community politics. When racist trouble breaks out anywhere, “we try to get there within 24 hours, to bring together local faith groups and local mothers who don’t want violence,” Lowles says. “Calming down, not countering hate with hate.”
In a world where Trumpites and our own extremists own the loudhailers, his remedy lies with community groups, knowing your neighbours, joining up, being active. He offers reassuring polling: 53% of British adults like “living in a community with people who come from different backgrounds”.
A reflection of that better Britain is what he expects from Labour next week, and so do I. Go on chasing down small boats (arrivals are 41% down this year), but also celebrate the country we live in, protect its social success against opportunistic pedlars of hate.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen what I thought was overt racism made untenable: just watch the toe-curling TV sitcoms of yesteryear. In 2005 Michael Howard, the then Tory party leader, bombed with his shameless dog-whistle campaign slogan, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”. No, good people were not.
Those people are still there; the challenge is having the credibility and the will to speak for and to them. Burnham can do that. Next week he should.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 22 September 2026. In an earlier version, an image showing counter-protesters from Stand Up to Racism was incorrectly captioned as showing the “South Coast Patriots” group.
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