Siobhan Tolland is SNP councillor for Lochee in Dundee and is a writer with a PhD on Mary Brooksbank and the feminisation of socialism
My son asked me the other week; mum where are you fighting fascism tomorrow? Dundee, son. It has become so scarily normal: clean house, fight fascism. It’s one of those things that we all saw coming, yet it was a huge shock when it finally arrived. I became involved in the independence movement partly because that shift to the right was so visible even back then. The last couple of years has seen a dive to the right that shocked even my darkest predictions when contemplating our future in the Union. I found myself saying “fascism’s coming, its coming”. I said it a lot.
Recently, I found myself changing that to “it’s here. Fascism is here”. There are many complex political, social historical factors that have made us arrive at this point. Far too many for this article. Trump, Musk, the chaos of Conservative governments, and the extreme disappointment of the Labour one that replaced it. In addition to this we had the Covid pandemic, Brexit and the Truss economic disaster. All of this toxically creating an extreme right-wing, and now international, discourse, Scotland sat slightly differently from this UK picture. The social democratic independence movement offered a credible, open and left of centre alternative to the increasingly right-wing, Brexiting UK Westminster government. We lived in a culture where Brexit was utter self-harm, and Trump and Farage were considered as utter idiots that offered Scotland nothing. That left of centre vision of the movement protected us from the extreme right-wing ideology.
But events like the Supreme Court judgment on our right to hold a referendum and the immediate breaking of our legislation through removing trans rights, I think, successfully broke the power of a strong Scottish Government. The subsequent departure of Nicola Sturgeon and the crises within the party and Scottish Government meant that space Scotland had to articulate a positive discourse of equality and social justice was damaged. And somewhere within these cracks, the fascists are black-booting it in our cities and towns. It’s here. And they gathered in our beautiful ‘Swanny ponds’ and marched down in their hundreds to the homes of our refugee communities. The look on their faces. Screwed up, jabbing their finger at us and shouting and screaming “Pe-do! Pe-do” and “refugee-loving scum”. Stone missiles were thrown at us as we countered them, hitting one of the drummers. The crowd was large, angry and aggressive, with local gangsters and flat earthers for organisers.
This is what hate looks like.
This came at the back of some terrible events in my own ward across the city. A young African scientist, Dr Fortune Gomo, was murdered in front of her 8-year-old child and with that came a scared, angry, worried and grieving community. At the back of this came Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson’s despicable attempt to twist another sad local incident into a fascist trope of a 12-year-old Braveheart girl image fighting against those ‘immigrant rapists’. It was terrible and disgusting at all levels. And let us be in no doubt about this: it was racist insurrection. This is a challenge and a struggle like no other, in Dundee and all over now it seems. Those half-mast flags, those boot boys filling the local streets with hate, that extreme right wing political infrastructure gaining the trust of the electorate and an utterly ineffective UK government who seem (for God’s sake!!) utterly incapable of stemming this. This all set against the international fascist players from Bannon to Trump to Musk. These are extremely dangerous times.
I missed my dad’s birthday the first gathering here in Dundee.He was in the anti-Nazi league when I was growing up and painted a very accurate picture of what fascism looked like. I joked my birthday gift to him was fighting fascism. But in my despondent days I keep thinking, is this fight inter-generational now? Me now the third generation in my family. Will my son have to do this? But just as it all seems so overwhelming and awful and terrifying, I do see a glimmer of hope for us. The grieving of the brutal murder of Dr Gomo has sparked a genuine desire and need to build better inclusion, with so much good will across different communities to find common ground. And I am so proud that the people of Lochee did not take Elon Musk’s bait around his attempts to incite racial hatred.
Even as I write racial incitement is being attempted again but still resisted. Across the city outside the refugee accommodation, we saw a much smaller, much more despondent group – still shouting but honestly cut a rather sorry figure. Because our counter-rally were singing, dancing, laughing, eating and chanting about love and community and solidarity. And they just didn’t know what to do with that. They just didn’t know how to respond. I saw similar happened in Glasgow. They were dancing strip the willow and having a ball. The fascists cut a sorry figure there too.
Fascism will be defeated. We got Abba on our side!
Image Credit: DonkeyHotey, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
