Agenda Alliance responds to this weekend's mobilisation of the far-right

We are heartbroken to be sharing another statement today, just over a year from the far-right riots of 2024, to offer our love to and solidarity with everyone affected by the far-right's mobilisation in London this weekend. To our Muslim, migrant, Black, Brown and minoritised colleagues and friends, we know the impact this has, and want you to know we are with you.

To our members, especially our by-and-for members, we know the added pressure these events cause you and the women and girls you support, whilst your staff are also feeling affected and scared. Thank you for all you do to try and support a sense of safety for women and girls in times like these.

What we witnessed this weekend was a reflection of a terrifying rise in far-right activity in our communities and on our streets, across the entire past year but particularly over recent weeks. Renewed far-right presence outside asylum hotels, flags raised and painted across our towns with clear intent to intimidate and threaten, and increased racist and anti-migrant harassment are making our communities deeply unsafe. Muslim, migratised, Black and Brown people are even less able to move safely through the streets, feeling heightened anxiety and fear, impacting their mental and physical safety, and triggering the pre-existing trauma already caused by daily and structural racism experienced across generations. For older family members and friends, these events bring back frightening memories of the rise of the National Front throughout the 1970s and 80s, or the BNP in the early 2000s, and the threats, harassment and violence they faced.

This is unacceptable, and anyone with the privilege to remain unaffected by racist or anti-migrant abuse must be thinking deeply about what part you can play in supporting those around you and acting to turn the tide. We know for Muslim, migratised, Black and Brown communities, the police in many cases do not feel like a protective force. White allies taking action to contribute to and strengthen trusted, inter-faith, anti-racist local networks, that can be called on for support and effective bystander intervention by people of colour, should they wish to, is critically important. Our affected neighbours cannot be left to feel they are in this alone.

To our government, we wish to say – change course now. In 2024, we signed a collective letter calling on Keir Starmer to act urgently to safeguard Muslim, migrant, Black, Brown and minoritised women and girls in the wake of the far-right riots. A year later, over 100 organisations had to write to him again, calling for urgent action against the weaponisation of VAWG in support of the far-right's agenda. Instead of direct and robust challenge, and efforts to diffuse community tension, we have seen consistent pandering to far-right narratives from the very top of government, and the pursuit of some of the harshest migration policy the UK has ever seen. Racist and divisive rhetoric has been repeated across government and public services. Instead of a change of pace in the violent language of the previous government, these narratives are being compounded, extended, and shored up in harmful policies.

The result is a vastly emboldened far-right, with predictably violent consequences; we are thinking, in particular, of the young British Sikh woman horrifically targeted by racially-motivated sexual violence in the West Midlands. We are holding her, and all Black and Brown women made especially fearful by this news, in our hearts. A serious commitment to tackling violence against women and girls means addressing the ways this rhetoric actively encourages racially motivated gendered violence. Condemning the violence of this weekend must also involve taking responsibility for the part played in fuelling it.

In these frightening and difficult times, this message comes from all of us at the Agenda Alliance team, with love and care.