The Lie of Protection - Unabridged address to the Morning Star Scotland Autumn Conference

I’m here not to speak of generalisations, but of blood. Of bruises. Of bodies. Of the women and girls whose suffering is harvested by fascists and repackaged as propaganda, their pain commodified, their trauma weaponised, their truth erased.

The far right in this country has perfected a particular cruelty: they drape themselves in the language of protection whilst being the very architects of violence. They shout about "safeguarding our women" whilst their hands are stained with the blood of those they claim to defend.

This is not new. This is the oldest trick in the fascist playbook. From the lynching trees of the American South, where Black men were murdered based on lies about protecting white womanhood, to the colonial "civilising missions" that claimed to save brown women from brown men whilst raping and pillaging entire continents, to Nazi propaganda that painted Jewish men as sexual predators whilst the Porajmos—the Roma Holocaust—murdered, sterilised, experimented on our women in their hundreds of thousands. The pattern is ancient, the body count is staggering, and the lie remains the same.

They manufacture a foreign threat whilst the real danger sits at the dinner table, sleeps in the bed beside you, and walks freely down British streets with impunity.

Let us speak plainly. 

The Numbers Don't Lie, But Fascists Do

In England and Wales, approximately 85,000 women are raped every year. The Office for National Statistics tells us that in the year ending March 2023, 1.4 million women experienced domestic abuse. Two women are killed every week by a current or former partner.

Every week. Two women. Dead.

And who are the perpetrators? The Crown Prosecution Service data reveals that over 98% of those prosecuted for rape are men. Around 90% of domestic abuse perpetrators are male. And here's what really shatters their narrative: the overwhelming majority of sexual violence and domestic abuse in the UK is committed by white British men.

Not immigrants. Not Muslims. Not the "other" they demonise in their street marches and their poison-filled manifestos.

White. British. Men.

Ministry of Justice statistics show white offenders account for approximately 85% of those convicted of sexual offences in England and Wales. They'll tell you this is proportionate to the population….and it is. But that's precisely the point. If the far right truly cared about protecting women, they would be addressing the largest absolute number of perpetrators. Their silence reveals everything. This was never about protecting women. It was always about racial hatred, finding a convenient excuse.

The Home Office's own research shows that most child sexual exploitation—both in groups and by lone perpetrators—is committed by white British men. The NSPCC confirms this. The data is unambiguous. And yet, when a white man rapes, he is an individual. A lone wolf. A troubled soul. But when the perpetrator can be racialised, suddenly he represents an entire community, an entire faith, an entire continent.

And here's another number they don't want to talk about: the rape conviction rate in this country is 1.6%. That means 98.4% of reported rapes never result in a conviction. This is systemic failure. This is the state telling women our bodies don't matter, our testimony doesn't count, our lives are expendable.

But the far right isn't marching about that, are they?

The far right doesn't care about violence against women. If they did, they would be outside every football stadium, every pub, every family court. They would be demanding the reinstatement of funding for rape crisis centres—90% of which have faced cuts under austerity. They would be protesting that 1.6% conviction rate.

And let's be clear about what austerity is: it's class war. The ruling class is dismantling the safety nets that working-class women depend on to survive, to escape violence, to rebuild our lives. Every closed refuge, every defunded rape crisis centre, every cut to legal aid—these are weapons in the hands of abusers. Capitalism profits from our vulnerability. It profits from our unpaid domestic labour, from our low-wage care work, from keeping us economically dependent and therefore trapped. Male violence isn't incidental to capitalism—it's structural. It keeps us compliant, keeps us cheap, keeps us quiet.

Working-class women bear the brunt of both male violence and the decimation of support services. Whilst middle-class and wealthy men use social capital and expensive solicitors to evade accountability, working-class women are left with nothing.

But the far right doesn't march for that. They march when they can attach a brown face to the crime, when they can turn tragedy into recruitment, when they can transform a woman's suffering into justification for their racial hatred.

This is the alchemy of fascism: take real pain, strip it of context, bleach it of complexity, and refashion it into a weapon. They don't weep for victims—they conscript them posthumously into a race war they never signed up for.

And here's the truly insidious part: they claim to be saving Muslim women, immigrant women, from the men in their own communities—playing the white saviour whilst simultaneously demonising those same women, denying them agency, using their bodies as justification for imperialist violence.

And when they talk about protecting women, they certainly don't mean Roma women, Traveller women, the women from communities they've spent centuries trying to eradicate. They don't mean the women whose children are still taken at disproportionate rates, whose families the 2022 Police Act criminalised through trespass laws, criminalising our very existence as Travellers, who face violence both within patriarchal structures and from racist violence without, and who have no services, no refuge, no justice waiting for them.

Meanwhile, the criminal justice system does their work for them. Minoritised men are disproportionately criminalised and given harsher sentences for the same offences that white men commit with impunity. This isn't about holding perpetrators accountable—it's about racist double standards. The system was never designed to protect women. It was designed to protect white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy—and it does all three jobs beautifully.

The Truth They Bury

Rape is not a cultural import. It is a structural reality of patriarchy, and patriarchy is colour-blind in its cruelty. Domestic abuse doesn't arrive on boats across the Channel—it festers in homes across every postcode, every class, every ethnicity.

The murder of women by intimate partners is so common we have euphemisms for it. "Domestic incident." "Crime of passion." "Tragic accident." Entire linguistic infrastructures designed to soften the edges of male violence, to make it seem inevitable.

And the far right? They rely on this. Because if we truly reckoned with the scale of male violence in this country—if we named it, funded services to combat it, dismantled the systems that enable it—we would have no energy left for their race hate. We would see them for what they are: not protectors, but predators in a different uniform.

Capitalism and patriarchy are not separate systems—they are interlocking structures of oppression. Capitalism profits from women's unpaid labour, from our bodies, from our exploitation. It uses the threat of violence to keep us in precarious work, in economic dependence, in silence. Patriarchy ensures we remain divided, that working-class men are offered the false compensation of dominance over women instead of solidarity with us in the fight against the bosses. And white supremacy ensures that when we talk about violence, we're encouraged to look anywhere but at the white men who commit the vast majority of it.

What We Do Now

So, what do we do? We name it. We refuse their narrative. We stand with survivors—all survivors—and we reject the hierarchies of victimhood that fascists try to impose.

But we also need concrete demands:

Reinstate full funding for rape crisis centres and domestic violence services. No more austerity cuts. No more postcode lotteries for survival. Make it a class issue—ensure working-class women have the resources to escape violence, to rebuild, to survive.

Demand accountability from the Crown Prosecution Service. A 1.6% conviction rate is a national disgrace. Specialist training. Believing women. A system that doesn't retraumatise survivors. Prosecutors who understand that rape is about power, not a misunderstanding.

Support survivor-led justice initiatives. The women who have lived through this violence are not victims waiting to be saved; they are organisers, activists, experts. From Black women organising against state violence to the Roma women of ERIAC's WOMNET building power across Europe, we must follow their leadership.

Build cross-community solidarity against both male violence and fascism. Working-class unity across race and ethnicity. Refusing to let the far right divide us. Understanding that a Muslim woman facing domestic violence, a white working-class woman facing domestic violence, a Roma woman facing domestic violence, we have a common enemy, and it's not each other. It's the system that profits from our pain.

Hold perpetrators accountable regardless of their race, their class, or their proximity to power. Dismantle the structures—capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy—that make violence against women profitable, permissible, and predictable.

And we do not let fascists speak for us. Not for our safety. Not for our bodies. Not for our rage.

The far right doesn't protect women. They exploit us. They use our bodies as propaganda and our corpses as recruitment posters. They scream about "our women" whilst being the very men we cross the street to avoid, the men we text our friends about when we get home safe, the men whose violence is so normalised we have learned to navigate it like weather.

But we are not theirs to protect. We are not theirs to speak for. And we will not let them turn our pain into their power.

Two women. Every week. Dead.

Their names will be in the local papers. Their deaths will be called tragedies. The far right will say nothing. Because they were killed by white British men. Because their deaths are inconvenient. Because they were never the point.

But they are our point. They are why we organise. They are why we fight. They are why we will win.

The threat is not at the border. It is in the home. It is in the parliament. It is in the street outside this very hall. And it wears a familiar face.

Solidarity. Not supremacy. Liberation. Not lies. Justice. Not fascism.