Crivvens! Jings! And Help Ma Boab! In a festive fit of self-congratulation it is fair to say that 2012 was a good year for antifascists but for the far right it has been a complete shuttle-crash! The year ends for the English Defence League with their ‘leader’ Stephen Caxley-Mainwaring in jail until at least May 2013 facing a number of ‘trumped up’, i.e., true, charges and he will no doubt be looking forward to his halal Turkey Twizzlers tomorrow in whatever nick he’s been ghosted to this week. Kousin Kev Karol was arrested over the ridiculous EDL stunt that saw 50 odd of them arrested in balaclavas in the back of a van. Who’s idea was that? Kousin Kev is now banned from attending EDL demos. Their PR, Hel ‘Hath No Fury’ Goitre is left in charge of the hoovering at EDL Central and boy, do the EDL foot and mouth soldiers hate her! So the EDL are leaderless. Not only that, but Kousin Kev Karol failed to make much of an impression when standing as Police Commissioner for the fluffy fascist British Freedom party, a tiny far right groupuscule with even less charm and political acumen than the BNP. To make matters worse, the Fluffies made Mr Tommy deputy leader then booted him out when Tommy failed to deliver the EDL to them and was heading for a legal fiasco that makes Jarndyce & Jarndyce seem like a tiff over a parking ticket! And to make matters worse the Fluffies finished this year being deregulated through non-payment of fees to the Electoral Commission which has made them look completely incompetent. Brilliant. It would be funny if it wasn’t so hilarious! Any leadership potential has long been exorcised from the EDL, the most recent being one Tony Curtis – whose speeches are so unedifying that they  make Kousin Kev sound hypomanic. Rather amusingly, when Mr Tommy and Kev went off to America, Curtis wasn’t allowed to go so he stormed off and joined the miniscule English Volunteer Force which he left the same day as they were ‘racist.’ Didn’t really do your research there Mr Tony, did we? The EVF are yet another tiny splinter movement from the EDL Borg and destined for nowhere.

2012 was supposed to be the Year of the Infidels which it quite clearly wasn’t. One of their number who had recently got out of jail for heroin possession is now safely back on firearms charges. Merry Christmas! And let’s hope he didn’t buy the skag from one of them ‘Asian drug gangs’ they keep going on about. The Infidels are either too busy stealing cameras off each other or are in and out of prison and when they haven’t got the lighter under the tinfoil they are hanging about the Combined Ex-Farcicals, a deluded bunch of wannabe soldiers who pretend they have either been in the forces or weren’t kicked out for criminal crimes! The CXF and Infidels did catch anti-fascists on the hop in Liverpool in February and tried to disrupt a republican march. This did little except motivate anti-fascists in ever bigger numbers throughout the year. We hardly need to mention the mass swamping of Brighton, Bristol and Walthamstow #1 when thousands of anti-fascists got on the street and prevented the EDL from marching.

The far right are forever protesting about paedophiles and almost caused a case in Liverpool to be cancelled through their bugling about outside. They always seem to forget the sex criminals that have been members of their ranks. Just cos its Christmas let us remember Richard Price, child porn possession and EDL ‘political prisoner,’ Matthew Woodward, CXF, Brett Moses, Michael Coates and  Liam Pinkham who we exposed for ‘grooming’ a 15 year old.

The EDL has shrunk dramatically over the year and has been riven with infighting and accusations of grassing. This is common on the far right. As they rely on quantity not quality, they have to put up with all manner of drunks, druggies, deluded Nazis and sex cases and they argue over who is leader or ‘regional organ-grinder’ which causes ego bruising, fall outs and ‘grass’ accusations which makes for great entertainment on the forums. Unite the right? Not this year my fascist friends! So all in all anti-fascists can say they have had a very successful year and mobilised in large numbers. This does not mean the far right have gone away though. The arse clowns constantly reorganise into progressively smaller groupuscules so vigilance is still required. The far right move into 2013 considerably weaker than this time last year whilst anti-fascists remain strong! Happy Holidays!