Watch: Green Party’s Mothin Ali provides brilliant take on race and social class

The Co-Deputy Leader of the Green Party Mothin Ali has released a beautiful and moving video about his upbringing in Sheffield, conveying some vital truths about the class unity needed to take on Britain’s establishment.

It starts with Ali on a bus talking about a recent encounter in London:

So, I was in London the other day and this bloke, he comes right up to me. He says, “Why don’t you eff off back to where you came from?” And you know what? I thought I will. So, I came back here to Sheffield.

From there, we hear about Ali’s upbringing amidst the heavy industry of the 1980s, and the working class unity that existed across racial groups, even if prejudice wasn’t entirely absent from British life at the time. He recalls how the community was shattered by the policies of Margaret Thatcher. Now 40 years later in a deindustrialised society, the social fragmentation caused by those neoliberal policies has seen racist attitudes skyrocket.

Ali: we must work “side by side” to shatter chains of capitalism

As Ali says:

That man in London, when he saw me, all he saw was my beard, my topi, my brown skin. Like it was me. Like it was me to blame. All he saw was our differences. So I get why we had to come back here to remember what we’d lost. It wasn’t just the work or the factories, it was something else.

In the past, Ali points out, when two such people met:

We saw those chains, chains of hardship and debt. And we knew that the only way we’d ever lift them was together, side by side.

Thatcher knew that sites of industry — coal mines, steel mills, factories — were crucial locations for building class consciousness. Where people of different ethnicities and religions met and saw a common cause with one another, and where trade unions provided a political education on class realities. The employer was the enemy, not the person with a different skin colour beside you on the job. It was your employer who was underpaying you, overworking you, disregarding your safety, and taking most of the profit for themselves.

Thatcher referred to the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) as “the enemy within“. However, in reality it was all trade unions, and all sites of working class organisation that she wanted to crush. That she surely did, and instituted massive waves of privatisation that saw vital national assets sold off to corporations.

Green Party — strong left-wing communicators key to beating back the right

After four decades, the results of this project are clear. Sky high energy prices, a barely functional health service, rivers overflowing with shit and a society where it seems nothing works any more. In the vacuum filled by the fading of trade unions, racist demagogues like those of Reform and Restore have been able to sell fictions about the causes of these problems, blaming migrants and Muslims. Overt racism thought to be virtually extinct has returned in appalling fashion. Mothin Ali is no stranger to this, having been the victim himself on more than one occasion.

George Monbiot has often cited the importance of story telling in political projects, and bemoaned the left’s inability to match the right in this regard. Fortunately, the Green Party have now proven themselves to be effective tellers of simple truths, delivered in an emotionally powerful way. Similarly, leader Zack Polanski is an outstanding communicator, rarely caught flat-footed in an interview.

In a social media age, these are essential skills for beating back racist snake oil salesmen intent on distracting us from our true enemies — bosses, landlords and the craven politicians that back them.

Featured image via the Canary