Despite all the hype about bans from the home secretary, in both Bradford and Leicester the EDL protests went ahead as so-called “static” demos. All that was banned were proposed marches that the EDL had applied for permission to hold.
In fact, the banning orders made no specific reference to the EDL, instead banning all marches in the city – including any anti-racist ones. So the EDL got to hold their static demos as they had done on every other occasion, including Stoke-on-Trent where they ran riot. In fact, it is common practice for the police to “escort” the EDL to their assembly point – thus creating a de facto march even when the protest is officially a static one.
Moreover, once the EDL has assembled for its rally, police efforts to contain them have been patchy to say the least. On almost every occasion groups of EDL have broken out of their pen and attempted to go on the rampage – in Stoke, Dudley, Bradford and Leicester.

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Moreover, when legislation is passed giving the state powers to control protests, it is invariably framed in terms of “public order” rather than being deployed against racist or fascist groups. These supposedly “neutral” formulations are then used to crack down on the left and the right, or on the left rather than the right.
We can see this logic at work in the bans on marches mentioned earlier. We can also see it in historical examples. The 1936 Public Order Act banned political uniforms and required police consent for political marches – measures ostensibly directed against the Blackshirts. In practice these measures were deployed primarily against the left, striking workers and Irish Republicans. We can expect an identical pattern today.

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But there is a deeper problem with the strategy of calling for state bans, above and beyond the documented ineffectiveness of such tactics and the risks of strengthening the state’s repressive apparatus.
The problem lies in the very gesture of appealing to the authorities to “do something”, rather than looking to our class’s own power. Capitalist society tries to structure our lives as powerless individuals, and capitalist ideology encourages us to think of ourselves as powerless individuals. Revolutionaries face a constant uphill struggle to counter these processes and instil collective self-confidence into the working class.
This is why the “common sense” position adopted by much of the left – that of supporting both counter demos and state bans – is problematic. In practice, the first of these works to mobilise a mass movement, while the second demobilises it. That is why those who formally adopt the “common sense” position in practice always tip one way or the other.
Searchlight’s latest policy shift moves from implicit to explicit demobilisation. They are now openly trying to dissuade people from attending counter demonstrations and undermine those who attempt to organise such protests. And Searchlight’s allies in Bradford and Leicester have gone further, branding anti-fascist counter demonstrators as an equivalent threat to the EDL.
The administrator of Hope Not Hate’s Facebook page for Bradford sent out a message on the eve of the demo declaring that “the UAF are just as dangerous” as the EDL. In Leicester, a councillor working with Hope Not Hate told the local paper: “People will have heard about the EDL’s plans to protest in Leicester on Saturday, and about the counter-protest planned by UAF. There is nothing we can do to prevent these demonstrations, but what we can do is to make it clear that any organisation that promotes hatred and fear is not welcome here.”
In fact Searchlight has for some time now been arguing against any anti-fascist tactic that involves mobilising large numbers of people. It opposes anti-racist music carnivals, claiming that such activity “drains and diverts activism away from local campaigning”. It opposes “rallies, marches and pickets” against the fascists on similar grounds – they are, allegedly, “a distraction from the real work required in the communities”. The nature of this “real work” is never very clear. In Bradford it involved getting people to sign a statement against the EDL that did not even mention the word “racism”.
But as the October 2010 issue of Searchlight makes clear, this strategy of demobilisation is not intended to be restricted to anti-fascism. Nick Lowles and Paul Meszaros write: “This debate over strategy reflects a wider debate in the trade union movement over direction and tactics. At the TUC conference there were clear lines of disagreement between those who preferred a strike-based approach to opposing the cuts and those who believed the focus needed to be on winning the hearts and minds of union members and then taking the campaign out into the community.” The tactics being used by Searchlight to demobilise anti-fascist activism are a test case. The intention is to use the same tactics to choke off militant action against cuts and job losses. “Winning hearts and minds” in a nebulous “community” becomes the excuse for scuppering strike action by actual workers.

Libya, the source of so many American nightmares, is fast becoming an American dream. 
Reagan was tortured by Tripoli, and its big boss man, sassing the US. He imposed sanctions, and bombed the country, but had no peace. Bush the Younger was reconciled with the prodigal Colonel Gaddafi, but somehow this alliance seemed, well, un-American.
Obama, though, will have the privilege of being an ally of an ostensibly free Libya that he helped birth into existence. At minimal outlay (a mere $1 billion, which is peanuts in Pentagon terms), and with relatively few lives lost from bombing, a US-led operation has deposed a Middle East regime and empowered a transitional regime that is committed to human rights and free elections.
After the carnage of Iraq, such a simple, swift and (apparently) morally uncomplicated victory seemed impossible.
Lest we swoon too quickly, however, it is worth remembering that there are other ways to look at this.

At the onset of NATO’s Operation Unified Protector in Libya, the main justification for it was that Gaddafi’s forces would massacre the resistance and civilians living in the places taken by the resistance, especially Benghazi. What has been learned since then about how likely such a scenario was?
In situations of urgency, there is no better judge than the people directly concerned, and there was unanimity on that score.  Did you ever hear of any significant group in Benghazi opposed to the request of a No-Fly zone made to the UN and advocating another way to prevent Gaddafi’s troops from taking the city?  ... Anyone who from far away disputes the fact that Benghazi would have been crushed is just lacking decency in my view.  Telling a besieged people from the safety of a Western city that they are cowards – because that’s what disputing their claim that they were facing a massacre amounts to – is just indecent.
That’s about the balance of forces.  What about the likelihood that if Benghazi had fallen there would have been a massacre?  Isn’t that still a matter of speculation?
No, not at all.  Let me first remind you that the repression that Gaddafi unleashed in February, from the very beginning of the Libyan uprising, was much greater than anything else we have seen since then.  Take even the case of Syria: today, several months after the protest movement started in March, it is estimated that the number of people killed in Syria has reached 2,200.  The range of estimates of the number of people who were killed in Libya in the first month alone, before the Western intervention, starts at more than that figure and reaches 10,000.  The use by Gaddafi of all sorts of weapons, including his air force, was much more extensive and intensive than anything we have seen until now in other Arab countries.
... When Adolphe Thiers’s forces took back Paris at the time of the Commune in 1871, with much less lethal weaponry they killed and executed 25,000 persons.  This is the kind of massacre that Benghazi was facing, and that is why I said under such circumstances – when the city’s population and the rebellion requested, even implored the UN to provide them with air cover, and in the absence of any alternative – that it was neither acceptable nor decent from the comfort of London or New York to say, ‘No to the no-fly zone’.  Those on the left who did so were in my view reacting out of knee-jerk anti-imperialism, showing little care for the people concerned on the ground.  That’s not my understanding of what it means to be on the left. [Emphases added]