United Kingdom

Anti-racism campaigners are planning to organise unity gigs in the towns and cities blighted by anti-immigrant riots to combat the growing influence of the far right in some parts of Britain.

Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) – the successor organisation to the Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement which helped turn the tide against the National Front in the 1970s – is planning to follow a concert in London in September, featuring singer-songwriter Paloma Faith, with a series of local gigs across the country over the next 12 months.

“We are doing the launch in London, which is home ground for us,” says Samira Ali, an organiser for LMHR and its sister organisation Stand up to Racism. “But we want to organise these gigs in the places the far right see as their territory because we want to show they are in a tiny, hateful minority.”

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Artists including Idles, Nadine Shah and Fontaines DC have backed an LMHR open letter calling for a “united cultural movement which will ward off the threat of the far right and strengthen communities damaged by the corrosive effects of racism”.

LMHR is hoping to replicate the DIY ethos of Rock Against Racism, which inspired local activists to put on gigs featuring black and white musicians. RAR organised 300 local concerts and five anti-Nazi carnivals in the 1970s, with more than 80,000 gathering to hear the Clash and Steel Pulse in Victoria Park, east London, in 1978.

“We’re going to be supporting people throwing gigs in their home towns,” said Alex LoSardo, another LMHR organiser. “We can help them with resources such as T-shirts, posters and stickers, and co-promoting their shows and linking them up with artists.

“The aim is to turn LMHR into a mass grassroots movement like it was in the Rock Against Racism days.”