RISHI SUNAK takes the gold for brazen hypocrisy. He joined the chorus of denouncing “violent, criminal behaviour” at the weekend. He failed to mention that racist mobs attacking mosques and asylum accommodation were raising his own slogan: “Stop the boats.”

Keir Starmer spent last week spouting similar sanitising language and likening far-right mobs to “football hooligans.” The proper comparisons are with lynch mobs, pogroms and fascist squads.

He was forced to shift a little on Sunday, at least mentioning the far right and racism. But with mosques attacked and asylum-seekers taken to be Muslim, he refused to utter the word Islamophobia. The reality is that years of anti-Muslim racism have brought onto the streets something that has an accurate name: fascism.

Successive governments and politicians beyond the radical right in Reform and in a part of the Tory Party have driven Islamophobia.

Starmer is reluctant to look at why Muslims are being targeted, spilling over to black and Asian people generally. We hear the racist abuse of “P*ki” once again from fascist-led gangs like the ones we had to smash in the 1970s.

The police have accepted a political role for nearly a year in the smearing of the pro-Palestinian movement. The implication is that Muslim communities are in some way incubating violence and joining “hate marches.”

Louise Casey’s report last year found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist and misogynistic, with hard-right attitudes widespread.

So it is right to say at this moment of an explosion of fascist street violence that we cannot rely upon the government or the police to deal with it.

Across the labour movement, the call is growing for a united mass movement that can push back the fascists, equip wider numbers with arguments against the racism they feed from, and cut them off from the impoverished layers they are trying to build among.

That is not the same as saying just forget the government and the police – they are on the other side. As if we were indifferent to the politics of the government or to state racism. As if we cared about getting the state to act in a way we want only when it is one under our democratic control.

We must care what the state does and doesn’t do.

The experience of the anti-fascist movement in Greece is helpful.

For decades the neonazi Golden Dawn was allowed to act with impunity. When the debt crisis hit post-2008 it was in a position to establish itself as a national force combining violent control of neighbourhoods with an electoral operation that could secure 18 MPs in 2012.

The two aspects were a particularly dangerous and deliberate amalgam. Imagine the fascist core of the racist rioting in Britain in the same outfit as the Reform party and its MPs.

The near-fatal attack on a group of Egyptian fishermen in 2012 took place between the two general elections and was part of Golden Dawn’s election campaign. A local display of “cleansing” an area that they promised on a national scale if given enough support.

The police collaborated with the fascists in one area after another, refusing to bring prosecutions and working directly with them. On the mainstream right, the party led by national-conservative Antonis Samaras had back-channel communication with Golden Dawn.

He used it to discipline his junior coalition partners of the centre left by threatening to embrace a “moderated” fascist right if they did not concede to him.

He also pointed to the fascists to justify racist and authoritarian policies — “If I don’t do it officially, they will do it unofficially.” Of course, the result was to boost the fascists and their boast to be simply implementing with “direct action” the government’s aims.

There could be no question for the anti-capitalist left of promoting a liberal front which would subordinate the left to the centre and to the right, which were both more concerned with crushing left and working-class opposition than confronting the fascists. That is what Emmanuel Macron is trying to do in France. Jean-Luc Melenchon and the radical left are right to resist him.

Instead, several forces looked to build a combative workers’ united front. Crucially, it involved newly arrived workers – immigrants and migrants. They were prime targets of the fascists but had too often barely figured in Greek left consideration.

The aim was to unite in action all the forces of the left and labour movement to stop the fascist attacks. It involved building an alternative to them and exposing them as fascists in areas where they had been allowed to gain support.

It meant popularising facts and arguments so more people, school students and pensioners, could themselves take on Islamophobia and the anti-refugee lies.

Stopping the fascists clearly could not rely on the police. But that did not mean intoning, “That’s what the police are like — don’t have illusions!”

The movement called for purging the police of pro-fascist officers and for prosecuting the fascists. It said the bloated police and security agencies did not need more powers. They had to stop deploying them against the left and instead be forced to act against the criminal far right.

The campaign argued for a cordon sanitaire around the far right because they are not a normal political force but at their core a fascist and necessarily criminal organisation — one to be stopped on the streets, but also to be isolated in all areas of public life.

It refused to accept the racism of the government as a fact of life. It did not seek a common front with Greek Tory MPs. The front was of working-class and immigrant organisations, of the left plus civil society sectors from actors and cultural circles through to disabled, women’s, and LGBT groups, and those committed to democratic rights.

But that did mean demanding all the parties – including the Tories – expel any of its MPs or members who were co-operating with the violent right or engaging in racist agitation.

When there was a national eruption in September 2013 following the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, Samaras was forced to act out of fear of losing control.

Golden Dawn leaders were arrested, the start of the process that would lead to the trial the anti-fascist movement had been pressing for. The anti-capitalist left, the Fyssas family and their supporters, and the Communist Party were in that trial driving it forward through their lawyers, working voluntarily.

The strategy centred upon mass mobilisation but did not put that in opposition to the official court process, with only warnings not to trust judges and so on.

It was for mobilising from below while also intervening in every aspect of society, state and politics at every level – such as in the trial.

The two aspects were reinforcing. For five years we were able in the court constantly to undermine the fascists and to provide a permanent stream of stories for use by the wider movement. That helped also shift mass opinion further against racism.

It led to increased scrutiny of the border force and of the police, whose closeness to Golden Dawn came out in court.

The United Movement Against Racism and the Fascist Threat (Keerfa), the Communist Party, and others demanded the cleansing from the state of outright racists and collaborators, in the way Portuguese revolutionaries called for 50 years ago on the overthrow of the fascist regime.

Anarchist and autonomist circles were sceptical, or in some cases opposed to such a political yet combative approach. Many came to see its value. One group of comrades attacked by Golden Dawn concluded that it was right to engage in the legal process, not least because the Muslims and ethnic minorities did not have the luxury of taking a position of “not recognising the courts or the police.”

The immigrant organisations rightly argued that they were not guests in Greece but Greeks who paid their taxes and were entitled to protection not demonisation by the state.

The strategy was rooted in workplaces, schools and neighbourhoods. It did beat Golden Dawn: its leaders were jailed, its “battalion squads” disbanded and its cadre split.

Few believed that elections and courts would stop fascism permanently and in general. But interventions into both were a big part of winning the battle through mass mobilisation.

The failed Syriza government means the right is back and with it three far-right parties in parliament.

A bigger movement and a stronger, more united radical left are urgent everywhere in Europe.

Historical experiences can help. Greece in the last decade and a half provides one.

The state and even a centre-left government will not stop the far right. The Macron government uses Le Pen’s fascists as a scarecrow to discipline working people behind him.

We on the left, however, are acutely concerned with forcing governments like Starmer’s to break from attacking false “twin extremes" of left and right and to move directly against fascism and Islamophobia.

That is not having illusions, but rather having the greatest confidence in what a combative united front can do with strong politics, verve and a common purpose.

It can beat fascism and also tip the political balance to the left.

Ultimately, the only secure victory will be on the basis of a transformation of society such that working people have control, not capitalist elites, their states and allies, who include the far right despite their pseudo-anti-establishment rhetoric.

A step towards that, and an immediate imperative, is deploying the collective methods of the working class and oppressed to destroy this latest fascist threat and to undermine Islamophobia and racism.

From the 1930s onwards we have successfully done it before. We can do so again.