People take part in a Stand Up to Racism protest in Epping, Essex, July 27, 2025
LEFT MPs Zarah Sultana and Diane Abbott and senior trade unionists will lead thousands of counterprotesters’s “far-right festival of hate” in London on Saturday.
A thousand people attended an online event to launch the Women Against the Far Right campaign on Thursday night, in the run-up to the march organised by Stand Up To Racism, with hundreds from the campaign set to join the march.
Ms Abbott, who is currently suspended from the Labour Party, said: “The far right are a menace to the whole of society.
“Their first targets, asylum-seekers and Muslims, are broadening to all migrants, black people and on to trade unionists, all religious minorities and anti-racists. They must be stopped.”
Ms Sultana said: “The far right are not welcome on our streets. We see through their lies.
“Their politics of hate and division make our communities weaker and women less safe.
“That’s why thousands of us are marching on Saturday — to show that fascists will be met with resistance wherever they spread their poison.”
Climate science denier Nigel Farage explains that it’s simple to blame asylum-seekers or Muslims for everything.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Diane Abbott is the the longest-serving female MP but lost the Labour whip in 2023 and again in July this year for her comments on racism. Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA Archive
Exclusive: Contenders teed up for future contest, which MP says seems ‘to pre-empt results of investigation’
Moves to find a successor to Diane Abbott in the parliamentary seat she has represented since 1987 are under way, prompting concern that her fate has been decided before an investigation into her latest suspension has concluded.
Figures on Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) have spoken to potential contenders, teeing them up for a future contest in her constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington, and giving them informal advice on how to prepare, according to a party source.
Abbott was suspended from the party in July for repeating that Jewish people do not experience racism in the same way as Black people[*1], a statement that had earned her a previous suspension in April 2023.
Labour said there would be no discussion of potential successor as an investigation was ongoing. The party said there had been no discussions about alternative candidates at any NEC meetings and no proposals put to NEC members about a selection process.
Abbott said: “It does seem to be rather pre-empting the results of the investigation.”
*1 I suggest that it shouldn’t be reduced to “Jewish people do not experience racism in the same way as Black people.” While that is how it’s perceived and dealt with by the Zionist Labour party, it’s more about there being different forms and consequent experiences of racism and not addressing Jewish people specifically.
“Clearly, there must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know.
“I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism. I don’t know why people would say that.”
A photograph from the battle of Kohima, in north-east India, during World War II
We have long struggled for black and Asian Allied soldiers to be properly acknowledged in Europe’s commemorations — but now a worse travesty is upon us, as Russia’s crucial role is purged from the record, writes ROGER McKENZIE
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President Putin took part in the commemoration of the 60th D-Day anniversary in 2004 and again, 10 years later, for the 70th anniversary — but he was not invited to this one.
The USSR, of which Russia was a key part, lost around 25 million people in the fight against Nazi Germany. But even this until recently undisputed fact is now under challenge.
In fact, the Red Army caused 80 per cent of all WWII German military losses and themselves lost 30 times more people than Britain, France and the US combined.
The Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad is cited by many experts as being the decisive turning point in World War II. Between 150,000 and 250,000 Germans are estimated to have died at Stalingrad.
For Nazis, Stalingrad was not the battle that exacted the highest death toll, but the psychological impact of the battle was immense and was decisive in winning the war. It occupied and depleted massive Nazi resources which paved the way for the eventual Allied victory.
Over half a million Soviet soldiers and civilians died in the Battle of Stalingrad, among them numerous civilians. But that clearly was not enough to be invited.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the other hand, was in attendance — as he always seems to be at pretty much anything. I now expect to see Zelensky at any event where a photo opportunity exists but the fact that he is invited to a commemoration of an event about the defeat of the Nazis is particularly insulting given the number of Nazis in his own forces and his applause in Canada last year for a veteran of a Waffen SS brigade that fought in Ukraine.
But the Russians are not the only ones that have been deliberately written out of history. The role of black people of African or Asian descent has continually been discarded.
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More than 134,000 travelled from other colonies, including some 10,000 from the Caribbean to help defeat the Nazis. Only when casualties began to mount during the war were black people enlisted to join the fighting or become part of the Merchant Navy.
But there was no suspension in the standing orders of racism. Caribbean men joining the Merchant Navy were paid around one-third of the wages that white sailors were paid.
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Around two and a half million fighters came from India to support the war effort. About the same time as the D-Day landing Indian, Gurkha and African soldiers fought the historic but little talked about — at least in Britain or the US — battles in Kohima, in north-east India.
These battles fought alongside British soldiers were among some of the toughest in the war and helped to turn the tide against the Japanese. Not for nothing did many of the troops who fought in battles in India and what is now Myanmar during the war call themselves “the Forgotten Army.”
I think they are probably wrong. I don’t think they were forgotten. I believe they were ignored because much of the fighting was carried out by black people. The Battle of Kohima and Imphal was the bloodiest of World War II in India, and it cost Japan many of its most elite fighters.
None of this seems to matter though to those that continue to hide the contribution made by people of African and Asian origin to the victory over the Nazis. We know the erasure of the role of the Red Army in World War II is being carried out for a different purpose.
The leaders of the Western powers can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the massive sacrifice of the Soviet people lest it demonstrate the skill and bravery of its soldiers and the refusal to be defeated by the seemingly invincible Nazis.
It is also part of the inexorable lurch towards a conflict with Russia as Nato ramps up the warmongering rhetoric that could lead to World War III and the catastrophic nuclear destruction of the planet.
Western powers seem far more willing to associate themselves with the Nazis surrounding the leadership of Ukraine and to hobnob with the likes of fascist-inspired Italian leader Giorgia Meloni.
I wonder how fast they will move for a photo opportunity should the far-right Marine Le Pen win the National Assembly election later this month or the next French presidential vote.
They say that history is written by the winners. Well, it seems not all the winners count. This means we must all call out the continued drive to rewrite history.
People take part in a Stand Up to Racism protest in Epping, Essex, July 27, 2025
