Creeping Fascism
From Ankara to Manchester: what Turkey teaches the British left

7 pm, Thursday 3 September 2026

Speaker: Can Koçak, chairman of TİP Britain

Friends Meeting House, Mount Street, Manchester M1

Registration is free via redmole@substack.com

Say whether you would like to listen online or attend in person.

Jointly sponsored by

Red Mole Substack   ·   Anti-Capitalist Resistance   ·   Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP)

Why this meeting

Fascism does not arrive. It accumulates.

Turkey still has courts. It still has a parliament, an opposition, elections held on the appointed day and counted in public. And the mayor of Istanbul, elected by millions, sits in a cell awaiting trial; an MP elected while imprisoned is refused his seat in defiance of the country’s own Constitutional Court; elected councils across the Kurdish south-east are handed to trustees appointed from Ankara; journalists and trade unionists are prosecuted under laws written for terrorists. The shell of the republic is intact. The content has been eaten out from the inside, piece by piece, by a Bonapartist regime (one using authoritarian methods to manage a crisis) that never needed to abolish the constitution because it learned to administer it.

That is the lesson, and it is not a comfortable one for the British left.

The obvious reading is that Britain is a long way behind, that this is a story about somewhere else, that we are sending our sympathy eastwards. But that is not quite right either. A Labour government proscribes a direct action group under terrorism legislation and hundreds are arrested for holding cardboard in a square. Migrants are made the organising principle of national politics by a party that expects to win. Reform is not the danger on its own; the danger is a state apparatus being fitted out, statute by statute, for whoever arrives next to use it.

Can Koçak will speak on how the Turkish left has organised inside that machinery rather than around it: what a united front looks like when the courts are an instrument of the executive, what survives a defeat and what does not.

Come because Manchester has a Turkish and Kurdish community that has been living this for a decade, and because the rest of us have run out of excuses for not listening to them. The Friends Meeting House stands on St Peter’s Square. A few minutes from the room we will be arguing in, the yeomanry rode into a crowd of sixty thousand who had come to demand the vote. The British state has a longer memory of that afternoon than the British left does.

No conclusions are on offer. Nobody in that room, ourselves included, yet knows what a united front against creeping fascism looks like when the legislation is being passed by a party that still calls itself the party of labour. Which is precisely why the discussion after the speaker matters more than the speech.