DEPUTY Prime Minister David Lammy’s appearance on the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg programme on Sunday was a study in evasion and appeasement of race-baiting US white nationalism. 

Posting on social media last Friday, on the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak in Southampton, US Vice-President, JD Vance wrote: “He would be alive today if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.” 

Lammy’s response was to tell Vance he was wrong to blame Henry Nowak’s murder on a “mass invasion of migrants.” That is a start but does nothing to push back against Vance’s “clash of civilisations” rhetoric — a key far-right mobilisation technique. 

Henry Nowak’s murderer, Vickrum Digwa was not an immigrant. He was born and raised in Britain. Attributing his crime to migrants is of course deliberate misdirection. 

The Digwa family were obsessed with illegal blades and martial arts weapons. Vickrum’s father and brother have now been charged with possessing illegal offensive weapons, including a machete, flick knives, swords, an extendable baton and knuckledusters. 

Their violent obsession had nothing to do with migration. The culture of possessing illegal weapons in Britain and in Europe is a growing far-right phenomenon fuelled by huge quantities of funding from Britain and other European countries that has found its way to neonazi paramilitary formations during the decade-long conflict in Ukraine. 

Lammy’s insipid response to Vance’s race-baiting is a reminder of why we can’t rely on political leaders to oppose white nationalism when it is peddled by the wealthy and powerful. We need to build a mass movement of millions to resist racist demagogues. 

Last week was the 50th anniversary of the murder of another 18-year-old student. On Friday June 4 1976, Gurdip Singh Chaggar was stabbed to death in Southall, west London. Two teenagers, Jody Hill and Robert Hackman, admitted manslaughter and were jailed for four years in May 1977. 

At the time, police and the judge denied Chaggar’s death was a racist murder. They even denied racism was a problem in Britain generally, although National Front leader John Kingsley Read greeted the murder by saying: “One down, a million to go.”

In reality, by the early 1970s Tory MP, Enoch Powell’s demagogic speeches warning of an “invasion” of black immigrants and whipping up racism, led the National Front, a failing fascist party, to resume its tactics of street violence and provocations against black people used by fascists in Notting Hill in the 1950s and against Jews in the 1930s. 

Today, this Powellite playbook is being deployed by Vance, his patron Peter Thiel (co-founder of Palantir and PayPal) who has himself now emigrated to Argentina and their proxies in the British far right. 

Fascist violence, racist abuse, harassment and murder is cultivated and encouraged by “respectable” businessmen with a global platform. 

Demonisation of migrants using a rehashed “clash of civilisation” thesis and the rhetoric of “war on the West” is the mobilising language of the far right. 

In 1976, the unprovoked murder of a Sikh engineering student by a gang of white youths, led to the foundation of the Southall Youth Movement as an anti-racist, self-defence organisation of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. 

1976 also saw a group of mainly Asian women workers walk out of the Grunwick factory in Brent in the most widely supported strike action of the 1970s, which had a profound impact on the trade union movement. 

In 1979, Southall Black Sisters was formed by women campaigning against harassment both from the state and within their own communities. 

At the Southall meeting last weekend attended by the Chaggar family to discuss anti-racist defiance, the Indian Workers’ Association and the Southall Monitoring Group called for us to invest in political education so a younger generation understands our history of resistance and to build links between and across our communities. 

Resistance is the answer to race-baiters and racists.