CanaryPod: how to stop an emboldened far right in Britain

In the first of an occasional series of joint podcasts between the Canary’s Ed Sykes and Collective’s Sean Halsall – leader of Southport Community Independents (SCI) – we discuss the current rise of fascism in Britain and how the left can counter it. Welcome to CanaryPod: the Canary’s podcast is back. You can listen below:

Last year, far-right rioters unsuccessfully sought to divide Southport in the wake of tragic murders in the town. And their hateful, racist thuggery spread across the country. It was a visible culmination of consistent misinformation and scapegoating in mainstream media and on social media. The political system had spent decades destroying communities while distracting them with shameless demonisation of minority communities.

In this context, far-right party Reform UK had been gaining significant political support. It had already allowed Keir Starmer’s Labour an uninspiring 2024 win by taking a massive bite into the Conservative voter base. But in May 2025’s local elections, it very much consolidated its march to the top of the polls as Labour pandered to Reform voters, shifted billions from welfare to warfare, and failed to deliver any positive change for the country.

CanaryPod: a key message for working-class voters – ‘Farage doesn’t understand your struggle’

In the podcast, Halsall emphasises the disconnect between Reform and ordinary people, saying:

99.9% of the people in this country are working class. You’ve gottta sell your labour to keep a roof over your head.

Now, the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage, all these people. They’ve not have to sell their labour to keep roofs over their head. Why would we think they understand struggle, first of all – working-class struggle – or have got absolutely any need to address working people’s struggle?

People are rightly angry with the political and economic system. But the far right are trying to mix that anger with hatred of others in order to get support. And Halsall insists on the need to combine anger and hope instead:

If we haven’t got anger, things don’t get done. We need anger to move us. Anger is a very, very good motivator. But anger without hope is just gonna be useless. It’s gonna be people sitting around screaming at each other. We need to harness that anger and direct it where it needs to be directed, which is at the politicians that are taking the piss out of us. It’s at the corporations that are exploiting workers, not paying tax in this country. That’s where the anger needs to be pointed.

But then we need to give [people] the hope. We need to show them that ‘we have a blueprint to make a better society – this is what we could have’. And from that, we’ve gotta engage them people who want that in action. They’ve got to do it themselves. No one’s gonna deliver something for working-class people. Working-class people need to take it, need to demand it.

One example he gives of a working-class victory in the past is the NHS, which is “the jewel in the crown of what we achieved in the past”. And the NHS is one vital public service that Farage and his Thatcherite fascists have said they will target if they get into government.

‘The left needs to listen and meet people’s needs’

To really counter the far right, Halsall says, the left needs to be active in local communities. And most importantly, we need to listen to what people need. This is a key goal of the assemblies SCI has been organising in Southport. And he gives a recent example:

So out of our assemblies, one of the things recently that’s come out is, we had a discussion around food banks and people using food banks. And coming to summer, if you’re using a food bank, are you likely to be able to afford sunscreen for your kids? Which is no, most likely. So we saw there was the potential there for a group of kids to end up getting sunburned, potentially getting cancer in later life or other skin diseases. So we decided to do a sunscreen drive – something really simple, just trying to collect sunscreen in for the food banks, because that’s where there’s gonna be a need…

We identified a need in the community, and went out and addressed that need. That sort of stuff builds trust with people. We’re listening. And then we’re reacting on things. And people start building trust. It’s not anything new. This is exactly what the Black Panthers did. This is exactly what 1920s trade unionism was. It’s just: you identify people’s needs, meet those needs.