The Manchester bombing has shone a spotlight on the division in British society – between those who want to stand up for the values of solidarity, compassion and care for each other without thought of personal cost, and those who wish to exploit this tragedy to stoke racism, militarism, repression and their own narrow political advantage.

Within two hours of the explosion at the Manchester Arena, hundreds of health and emergency services workers had left their beds and rushed to their posts in the hospitals to treat the wounded. David McCarthy, a consultant anaesthetist at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, wrote on Facebook:

“Once an incident had been declared, dozens upon dozens attended to help … Staff from almost every imaginable background, race and religion came together and put their all into caring for those wounded. Actions, such as those displayed by NHS [National Health Service] staff across Manchester last night, will always demonstrate that together we are stronger.”

And for every act of devoted service by emergency service workers, there are tales of the everyday heroism and self-sacrifice of the “ordinary people”.

These include the two homeless men who rushed to help injured children and young adults staggering from the blast scene. One of them told Channel 4 News about pulling nails out of the arms and faces of children and preventing a woman from haemorrhaging to death from a severe wound to her body. He spoke for many who helped on the night: “It had to be done, you had to help. If I didn’t help, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself for walking away and leaving kids like that”.

Then there were those who queued to donate blood – so much that the blood donor centres were turning people away after a few hours.

There were the taxi drivers who ferried people away from the scene, waiving their fares.

There were the people who rushed to offer rooms in their homes and the hotel workers who offered beds to those stranded by the police lockdown of the city centre.

The restaurant owners who fed people for free and the residents from nearby towns who collected donations and drove them to Manchester to help feed the emergency service workers.

Resistance to the racists

A vigil was called by the mayor of Manchester for Tuesday night, less than 24 hours after the bombing, which drew thousands to the city centre.

Again and again, the message was the same, that the people of Manchester stood together against any attempt to sow division and hatred.

And when scum from the English Defence League showed up to promote their message of racist hatred, they were driven from the vigil. One local yelled at them as they were protected behind a line of police:

“The people of Manchester don’t stand with your xenophobia and racism! The people of Manchester are going to stick together, no matter what religion you follow, no matter what the colour of the skin is. We’re not going to stand with people like you. We’re going to stick together, because together we are stronger and the people of Manchester are not going to be afraid of who is responsible for this violence.”

Muslims community groups attending the vigil with banners declaring their desire for communal unity were loudly cheered.

Tory hypocrisy

The broad mass of the people of Manchester showed the best of the human spirit – cooperation and the desire to rise above sectarian divisiveness. But the narrow elite at the top – the British ruling class represented by the Tory government of Theresa May – used the atrocity as an excuse to revive all the toxic language and repressive measures that have dominated since the onset of the war on terror.

Within 24 hours, prime minister May, who had just been forced to back away from an appalling plan to rip the homes off elderly people in return for social care, announced a string of police-state measures in an attempt to bolster her public support.

The security alert level was raised to “critical” and soldiers were deployed onto the streets of big British cities to work alongside heavily armed British police. And two meetings of the government’s national security cabinet, named Cobra, discussed a range of other measures to be rolled out in coming days and weeks.

The Tory government hopes to use the heightened “national security” environment to push for more warmongering and bigger police and military budgets. But, as we have seen from the entire experience since 9/11, more repression, more police raids, more surveillance and more weaponry in the hands of the police have done nothing to make people safer.

In the name of resisting “fear and division”, the Tories, and the Labour government before them, have created more fear and greater bitterness among the target Muslim population and accelerated the infringements on civil rights.

In these times of tragedy, the call is always to “put politics to one side”. But honesty demands that we confront the fact that the British government is the world’s second largest arms dealer. The prime minister justified the recent decision to sell more weapons to Saudi Arabia on the grounds that this would “keep people on the streets of Britain safe”.

These weapons are being used by Saudi armed forces to bomb international hospitals run by Medicins sans Frontieres in Yemen, as well as schools, wedding parties and food factories. No tears from Theresa May for the children of Yemen, nor for those of Syria and Iraq, whose young bodies have recently been torn to bits by US bombing campaigns ordered by Donald Trump – who also joined in May’s hypocritical condemnation of the Manchester attack.

The Tories suspended their election campaigning, supposedly out of respect for the dead, as did the other parties. But this has not stopped them, nor the gutter Tory press, from insinuating, via references to the IRA, that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is “soft on terrorism” and cannot be trusted to secure the nation’s safety. May is trying to position the Tories as the party of national security and herself as its guarantor. Every day that the moratorium on campaigning is observed only puts Labour further behind the 8-ball.

For all the humbug about “respecting the dead” the royal family wasn’t moved to cancel the Buckingham Palace garden party on the day after the bombing. The monarchy’s rituals continue uninterrupted while public politics, through which people get a chance to debate their future, ceases.

Predictably enough, the Tory columnists sought to make hay from the tragedy. Daily Mail columnist Katie Hopkins referenced the Holocaust, now to be directed at Muslims, tweeting: “We need a final solution”. Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson wrote: “We need a State of Emergency as France has. We need internment of thousands of terror suspects now to protect our children”. In the name of “protecting children”, these vultures sow the seeds of more race hate and more carnage in coming years.

Also predictable was Theresa May spouting two-faced praise for the emergency service workers. Tory governments have been carrying out the most savage attacks to the very services she lauded.

National Health Service staff are forced to work under a constant state of siege because of lack of resources and the constant restructures that make their work almost impossible to carry out. The nurses who tended to the sick have seen rents and house prices rise so much and their wages held down so tightly that they are now being forced to use food banks.

The firefighters who rushed to the Manchester Arena have endured waves of redundancies under the impact of Tory cuts. The Greater Manchester Fire Service has had its funding cut by £28 million, with the government imposing another £14 million in cuts over the next four years. More than 400 jobs in the fire service have gone since the Tories won office in 2010.

The Tories praise the people of Manchester for rallying together in the aftermath of the bombing. But the same government that has kind words to say about the homeless men who threw themselves into the fray has also been stripping funds from public housing.

The Tories urge people to remember the children and young adults who died and those who survived. But the survivors will soon lose their school lunches and social benefits if the Tories have their way. These young people make admirable stage props for the government when they can be used to rally people behind its repressive agenda, but they are just disposable trash when their social, educational and financial needs are raised.

The battle is on

The battle is now on in Britain between these two sides – those who want to push to the fore solidarity, humanity, cooperation and basic decency, and those who want to promote hatred, division and repression.

But the battle is universal. Everywhere, we need to push back against the toxic politics that have become entrenched across the Western world since 9/11. The more our side is poisoned by racism and the more we succumb to the dystopian vision of a soldier on every street corner, the less capable we are of pushing back to defend jobs and social welfare.

The fight against racism and the fight for jobs and services go hand in hand. The more we struggle arm in arm to defend our lives and livelihoods, the more we can overcome the relentless campaign to divide us. The immediate response of the people of Manchester to this horrific act shows that this is possible.