Hundreds of thousands (organisers claimed half a million, the police, absurdly, 50,000) marched in London Saturday against the far right.

Socialist Equality Party members distributed thousands of copies of the leaflet “Fighting the right means stopping the Iran war!”, and sold literature including Leon Trotsky’s Fascism: What it is and how to fight it, David North’s The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide, the SEP pamphlet Corbyn’s new left party: What it is and what it isn’t, and the Historical and International Foundations of the SEP (UK).

The size of the march, with large numbers coming from throughout the UK, showed the strength of opposition to the far right, part of a groundswell demonstrated on the other side of the Atlantic by the US “No Kings” protests the same day.

Millions of workers and students are fiercely opposed to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, still leading the polls at 25 percent, its usurped Conservative Party, making up another 15 percent, and the fascist Tommy Robinson who has organised violent demonstrations in London.

They are also disgusted by the governing Labour Party, which they understand is fuelling the rise of the far right with its anti-migrant policies at home, scapegoating them for Labour’s continued impoverishing of the working class, and its alliance with Donald Trump in the wars against Iran, Ukraine and backing the genocide in Gaza.

None of this anti-Labour opposition found expression on the platform, however. The opposite was the case. The growth of Reform UK was used by organisers, the Together Alliance, to mount a “get the vote out” drive for the Labour Party, backed as necessary by the Green Party.

After rally organisers directed the demonstration to a website where they could register to vote, Chair of the Together Alliance Kevin Courtney, former general secretary of the National Education Union, concluded his opening speech:

“We want you to help us register voters. Now the Together Alliance is not party political, that’s part of its breadth, so we aren’t going to tell you who to vote for. We’re not even going to tell you who to vote against.

“But we are going to say this, we want you to register to vote. We want you to get your friends to register to vote. We want you to use your vote as you see fit, but we want you to vote for love and hope and unity and against hatred and division.”

That this meant voting for the Labour Party was made clear by the four Labour representatives invited to speak. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, an ally of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, took the opportunity to burnish his credentials but didn’t bother to attend himself, instead sending someone else’s poem.

Diane Abbott, shadow home secretary under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, took the opportunity to plead, “We are here to say to politicians in all parties that you shouldn’t be trying to copy Reform, you should be trying to challenge them.”

Apsana Begum and Dawn Butler, two other Labour backbenchers, did not even rise to these heights, with Butler asking the crowd to “repeat after me,” twice, “Love! Unity! Hope!” This was nauseating, coming from a member of a party which has supported a genocide, arrested thousands for protesting it, slashed migrant rights and backed yet another illegal war in the Middle East.

By championing Labour, Together is telling workers to “beat the right” by voting for the main source of the problem today.

There were two methods for covering up the implications. One was to bury the political issues in an avalanche of protestations of “love”, “unity” and “hope”. At one point the sermon was delivered by an actual vicar citing from the Bible. The other was to hold out the prospect, again, of pushing Labour to deliver on its supposed promises.

Head of the Trades Union Congress Paul Nowak told the crowd, “We’re here because we reject the politics of hate, but we’ve also got to reject the politics of the status quo… We need to make sure the government and politicians of every single stripe start to deliver the change the British public voted for in July 2024.”

Nowak was one of half a dozen trade union leaders to speak at the event. Their function was to allude to the class issues, nodding towards the social crisis in the UK and invoking “struggles” against it, while proposing nothing to remedy this.

The actual record of the trade union bureaucracy has been to sabotage the class struggle so relentlessly that, in Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union General Secretary Eddie Dempsey’s words, “For 40 years in this country, we’ve seen people’s living standards driven backwards, we’ve seen our industries offshored, we’ve seen our public services privatized.”

Together is the latest means of concealing the trade union bureaucracy’s class collaborationist policy. There was the People’s Assembly which served the same function in the first years of austerity, and the Enough is Enough campaign which dissolved the recent strike wave into a campaign to get Labour in government. Now there is Together to “keep Reform out”.

Andrea Egan, UNISON general secretary, the latest to be touted as a “left” trade union leader, advised simply, “If this Labour government wants to defeat Reform and Farage, the answer isn’t to copy them.”

Significantly, Your Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and member of its leadership committee Zarah Sultana were at the march, but were apparently not invited to speak from the platform.

This can only be interpreted as a slight by the trade union bureaucracy which ran the show and which has neither forgiven their break with the Labour Party—as bitterly reluctant as it was on Corbyn’s part, and sees no need for the apologetics for Labour he would have proffered, given the continued decline of Your Party. The Greens are considered a necessary ally for Labour, because the high level of support they now enjoy may require agreements on tactical voting and even a possible coalition in future.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski was only too happy to appear on these terms, turning up for a 4-minute victory lap. Underscoring the otherwise blanket exclusion of political questions, he was the only person to mention, briefly, the illegal war on Iran. But he did so essentially to exonerate Labour.

People in the UK, he said, “have seen Reform for who they really are. They would have dragged us into this illegal and unpopular war.” As if Starmer’s government has not done so!

The Socialist Equality Party placed the war in Iran, and Labour’s complicity, at the centre of the fight against the far right. Our statement argued that it “cannot be combatted outside of a struggle against imperialist war and for the defence of the democratic and social rights of the working class.”

We insisted, “A movement must be built in the working class, in total opposition to the Labour Party, based not on abstract statements of anti-racism and opposition to the far right, but concrete struggles against their sources: war, inequality, authoritarianism and the capitalist system underlying them all.”

The Together Alliance is above all a framework for branding this urgently necessary fight “divisive”.