East Midlands Anti-fascists

With less than a week to go before the EDL’s demo in Nottingham it’s becoming clear just how half-cocked the whole thing is. The demo is being organised by Jack Stevens, last spotted stumbling out of the off-license after the Notts Casual Infidels demo last month providing plenty of entertainment for the antifascists. The Twat in the Hat, as we affectionately know him, is rarely sober as you can tell from his long Facebook rants, casual racism and loyalty to the EDL. If the EDL is relying on this muppet to run their national demos they’re in trouble. Which of course they are.

Helping him along is Mansfield’s Daniel Hall, best known for inciting the murder of Labour MPs on his Notts Casual Infidels page. Clearly the EDL have forgiven him for stealing their money, splitting away to form his own gang and the pending legal action. Or they’re just desperate. You decide. We wonder whether he’ll bring his bogus “charity” collecting bucket again this time?

According to Jack, the EDL are coming to Nottingham because of an obscure Islamist sect that no one had heard of until the EDL started giving them publicity. But that’s the way with the EDL and their fellow travellers – they know they need to prop up the most extreme, attention-seeking elements within the Islamist community to boost their own support.

The EDL do nothing to prevent Islamic extremism – on the contrary, they actually help out these Islamist groups by trying to reduce the world into a street fight between white nationalists and Muslims – Isis would love it!   (It’s also worth noting that the most effective fighters against Isis in Syria and Iraq have been the Kurdish YPG, who are predominantly muslim and avowedly anti-fascist…..the idiotic anti-Isis pub rhetoric of the EDL becomes even more laughable….)

Oppose the fascists in Nottingham on Saturday 6th. UAF are meeting at the Brian Clough statue at 12pm and keep an eye on the Midlands Antifascists page for details of their own mobilisation. These pictures from the last Nottingham demo will give you an idea of who to look out for.

The EDL’s “Nottingham Division” has announced a demonstration in Nottingham on Saturday August 6th.

This hasn’t exactly gone down well with city council leader Jon Collins who has called on the police to ban the march.

The city’s Market Square is currently the site of a beach, complete with sand, water and fairground rides. A horde of drunken fascists doesn’t exactly fit with the intended ambiance.

Collins says:

“We’re extremely concerned about the prospect of an event of this kind taking place in the heart of the city centre during the school holidays.

“That can’t be right when families are enjoying the beach, the water feature and everything else Nottingham has to offer during the summer holidays.”

Banning the march is unlikely to be very effective. Under the Public Order Act, it’s only possible to ban marches, not static demos. Whatever the police decide, the EDL will likely turn up anyway.

That said, they aren’t likely to get many people out. The EDL is a drink-addled shadow of the organisation that brought several hundred members to Nottingham in 2009.

On Saturday they held a national demonstration in London. It wasn’t a great success, as EDL News explain: “Only 50 turned up and those that did were staggering around drunk and high on drugs.” The latest EDL split (ironically using the moniker United People of Britain) followed days later.

Recent protests in Nottingham by the Notts Casuals Infidels have hardly been major victories for the far-right and suggest the the inevitable handful of drunken fascists are unlikely to be get a warm welcome.

Britain First apparently think they are some kind of low-rent Sheriff of Nottingham and have travelled to Sherwood Forest to search for an alleged “migrant camp”. Except there’s no migrants. And there never were.

In a video posted online, the group’s deputy leader Jayda Fransen (who has a fascinating family tree) says:

“You may have seen reports in the media that migrants have set up illegal camps and within these camps they’ve been causing a huge amount of destruction and disturbance.

“There’s litter everywhere, they’ve been cutting, hacking at trees, cutting bushes down.

“They’ve got knives and locals have been threatened by these migrants occupying these illegal camps.

“It really is an issue around here.”

Sounds scary right? Except she’s talking utter bollocks.

There is an abandoned camp in the forest. But it has bugger all to do with migrants.

The claims about a “migrant camp” in the forest originated on Facebook and were reported in local rag the Mansfield Chad. As a neat fit with their anti-immigrant agenda it was uncritically repeated by the Daily Express and probably elsewhere.

It quickly turned out that the camp had in fact been built by local teenagers in 2010. Brad Dury told the Chad:

“The truth is me and a few friends just decided to build it in 2010 when we were bored in the summer. We wanted somewhere to camp and have a party, as you do.

“We never chopped down any of the trees we used ones that had already been knocked down and pieced it all together. It took about five of us to put the arched trunk up there!”

Assorted detailed claims about the supposed inhabitants of the camp were made to the Chad by a local man who refused to give his real name. Whether he made them up or actually believed his own bullshit isn’t clear. He certainly wasn’t pleased to get called up on it. Chad reporter Nick Charity told the Huffington Post:

“The source also claimed a very elaborate treehouse was built by migrants. When we confronted him with the knowledge it was actually built by local teens in the summer of 2010, he argued with this presuming they were lying and must ‘be with some immigration protection outfit’. Eventually he submitted but asked if our contact was foreign.”

Fascists have never troubled themselves greatly about facts. It probably shouldn’t be a great surprise that despite an overwhelming body of evidence that this isn’t an issue they decided to try and build a campaign around it.

This latest instance of stupidity by the party comes only a week after they released a video of themselves harassing a homeless couple in Mansfield.

All of this is amusing in it’s own way. Everybody enjoys a chance to watch fascists making tits of themselves. But it should also stand as a warning to anti-fascists. They clearly feel confident to openly throw their weight around in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere. If they ever get their shit together enough to identify a real target they could prove to be a genuine threat.