So what did we see on Saturday from the far-right? On this high-stakes day in the national spotlight? In a nutshell, they fucked it. Yaxley-Lennon had plugged the demo with old EDL videos enticing the faithful with memories of their glory days smashing up kebab shops the length and breadth of the land. His promise was getting the gang back together for one final job. And on that count at least, they did not disappoint: it was like an EDL re-enactment society. They got the beers in early, did a few lines in the pub bogs and were all steaming, ready to remembrance the shit out of stuff by 10am.
They were not policed initially and quickly got rowdy. The minutes leading up to the solemn ceremony at the Cenotaph they were meant to be there ‘defending’ from disrespect saw them chanting, waving cans of Stella and fighting with the police. All that was missing was one of the ‘patriots’ pissing on the Cenotaph. There were estimated to be 1500-2000 far-right hooligans in Whitehall. But as soon as 11am was past, they split up and scattered so they could get down to the real business of the day – baiting and attacking Muslims. Two hundred fanboys followed Tommy up to Chinatown for no clear reason. Momentarily it must have felt like the glory days were back again as they charged around behind their leader – E… E… E.D.L! But then harsh reality intervened and they ran into a load of riot cops and people started getting nicked. The Glorious Leader promptly jumped in a taxi and fucked off, leaving his minions to cop the flak for that little adventure. Classic Tommy.
What’s an anti-fascist to do when the Home Secretary calls an EDL demo?
A bizarre turn of events this week has seen the buffer zone (normally inhabited by a spectrum of right wing commentators) between the great offices of state and the street far-right disappear. Rattled by the size and popularity of the pro-Palestine ceasefire demos, the establishment, united in their support for Israel, have whistled up their dogs. Now we have calls for a far-right presence in central London on the 11th as a direct intimidatory counter.
Suella Bravermann has invoked counter-jihadist rhetoric and dismissed those demanding a ceasefire as “hate marchers”. A fiction has been obligingly created in the right wing media sphere that the Palestine demos are pro-Hamas, blood thirstily anti semitic and exclusively Muslim. We are just shy of them being named a new ‘enemy within’. In fact, of course the demos represent a mass resurgence of the Left and are far bigger and more diverse than the government is comfortable with.
The biggest lie is that they represent some kind of threat to Remembrance ceremonies, which are actually happening a day later and two miles away. This fib has been repeated and amplified by the right wing media pundits from Andrew Neill to Lawrence Fox, who have all obligingly done a complete 180 on their cast iron commitments to free speech and assembly and are calling for ban on the marches.
The government are actively orchestrating a gaggle of useful idiots, a ‘King & Country’ mob, to make their way to the Cenotaph on Saturday, obligingly fight with the police and provide an excuse for the banning of further Palestine demos for ‘fear of disorder’.
Possibly the most significant move has been the reinstatement of Tommy Robinson/Steven Yaxley-Lennon on Twitter, a week before the 11th and curiously three days after Rishi Sunak met Elon Musk.
Robinson has made no secret of his allegiance to Israel, enjoying trips (lavishly funded by the US counter-jihadist right) to the Zionist state, posing on an IDF tank etc. It is no surprise then to find him in full support of UK foreign policy here. Of all the far-right figures, he has the most potential ‘street clout’. His first tweet was of course a call out to “defend the Cenotaph” on the 11th.
During the 2010s the likes of the EDL may have had some kind of adversarial relationship with the state (who preferred at the time to keep their anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies in-house) but now they’re being redeployed as foot soldiers in the government’s culture wars, a step arguably first taken when mobs of ‘statue defenders’ formed to protest Black Lives Matter. Within the far-right there are already suspicions forming that this is a set up, with them as pawns.
This puts us in a dangerous situation. We have the Trump-like spectacle of the violent street far-right jumping to the tune of increasing unhinged rhetoric from the very top of Government. All of this stoked and cheered on by a rabid billionaire-owned right wing press. As antifascists we are meant to be on the look out for the accumulating signs of creeping fascism. This is ticking quite a lot of boxes.
A lot is riding on what happens on Saturday. We may be looking at a new incarnation of a far-right force, closely allied to the Tories in their ‘war on woke’ (and Muslims, and protesters etc etc). Or it may all backfire if it fails to serve its purpose in whatever games Braverman is playing to stake out ground on the (far) right for a Tory leadership bid. Or again, if the far-right decide they don’t like being used, it may get marked down as yet another imploding damp squib of a comeback tour for Tommy Robinson.
As ever, antifascists need to be on guard. Roll on Saturday.
AFN activists formed part of a large ‘Yorkshire Against Hate’ mobilisation on Saturday, opposing the latest attempt by the right to capitalise on the Home Office warehousing refugees in large hotels. In this case it was the Holiday Inn in Manvers, Rotherham. Initially called by anti-migrant livestreamers Yorkshire Rose and English Bulldog, the demo was later backed by Patriotic Alternative fascists. At its height at 2pm there was a turnout of around 150 on the far-right demo. Although this was largely a travelling roadshow featuring the usual cast of Walter Mittys and Magna Carta cranks, there were, according to anti-fascists who infiltrated the demo, also many locals.
As anti-fascists from the ‘Yorkshire Against Hate’ coalition got to the front of the hotel first, the far-right demo ended up on the verge near the ring road. This meant no direct intimidation of the refugee families in the hotel could happen. The fascist demo was however more visible. By one o’clock there was a respectable crowd of 300 or more anti-fascists and refugee solidarity activists in front of the hotel. Although there was a certain amount of mingling and scuffling and even an anti-fascist attempt to break out of the kettle, for the most part the two demos were separate and passed off peacefully.
Trump appears to be on the way out, but none of us can have failed to notice all his numerous heavily-armed gangs of supporters out on the streets across the USA. And even if the man may be finished, Trumpism isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. These militias, “boogaloo bois”, ‘three percenters’ etc are constantly readying themselves for the apocalyptic civil war they believe is imminently coming. Meanwhile, mainstream liberals in America are very keen on gun control for the masses but fully support the police, who are themselves the main armed danger to large sections of America’s population.
How are the left responding to these threats? How do leftists, antifascists and minorities operate when the opposition are all armed to the teeth? Where is this all heading? One of the left responses to this situation is the Socialist Rifle Association – a national network of left wing gun clubs that has rapidly expanded in the last four years and now has over 10,000 members across the USA. We talked to Faye Ecklar, co-founder and Director of Mutual Aid for the SRA.
So thank you to Faye for very patiently answering our (numerous) naive questions…
Anti-Fascist Network members travelled to Dover on Saturday to support the Kent Anti-Racist Network demo in support of migrants and refugee rights and against a planned far-right anti-migrant demo.
The first we heard of this a few weeks ago was when Tony Burras, a white nationalist and associate of the Pie and Mash Squad (fascist hooligans), posted an advert for a demo in Dover on 5th September. Initially it was hard to know whether this was a real thing that would amount to anything or not and over the following weeks a confusing array of right-wing grifters and wannabes piled in, making it, if anything more confusing and hard to know what was going on.
The right wing media has been fomenting a panic over migrants crossing the channel in small dinghies, pitching it as an “invasion” of unprecedented size. Nigel Farage was partly the origin of this, but the Tory government was swift to pile in, responded with dehumanising Trumpian rhetoric about “criminals” “breaking in” to Britain, deploying the armed forces against desperate refugees, appointing an ex-Royal Marine to the ludicrous role of “Clandestine Channel Threat Commander”, as well as attacking “activist lawyers” who shockingly uphold the law against a government often determined to break it by illegally deporting people.
A good explanation of the workings of conspiracy theories, robbed off Facebook.
Fictional conspiracy theories such as Qanon, and conspiracy theories about the imaginary “deep state” are cooked up by the far-right and weaponized to distract attention from really-existing geopolitical strategic game playing and really-existing empire building on the part of fascists: that is part of the purpose these conspiracy theories are designed for.
reposted from While Rome Burns – a good write up of Tommy Robinson’s latest attempted venture.
Saturday saw the public debut of a new attempt to “unite the right”. A new organisation called “Hearts of Oak” held its inaugural demo in Parliament Square. The backers of this new organisation makes it look like an attempt to reboot the coalition that emerged around the “Day for Freedom” in May 2018, which saw […]
Like everyone else we’ve been in lockdown, spending a lot of time at home with our stockpile of beans in our Antifa™ bunker. But we’ve also stayed active playing our part in local organising initiatives in Brighton and further afield – food banks, food deliveries, mutual aid groups, projects manufacturing PPE etc. And we’ve also made time to chat to some comrades from Oregon about what’s going down in the USA, where they have also had to contend with a social situation that is in some ways more extreme and also with right-wing street movements protesting the lockdown. The following is an interview with Alexander and Thomas, two anarchists who are active in anti-fascist and left organizing in Portland, Oregon.
Can you tell us how the anti-authoritarian left and antifascist movement is responding to the current crisis ? Are there any mutual aid networks forming? We have seen for example images of Portland antifascists involved in production of hand sanitiser that was then distributed for free for those in need. Can you tell us more about those kind of initiatives?
There are a variety of mutual aid projects in Portland, surrounding housing, food, and pandemic preparedness goods like PPE and sanitation products. The two of us are actually essential workers, and are still working in our respective industries to keep parts of the city moving, such as it is. But from our networks and friends we can report some mutual aid projects of note: barter networks, trading, and free distribution of goods that are in high demand, including food; making and distributing PPE to people who cannot obtain them; resource lists, to inform people where scarce goods are available (like which stores have toilet tissue or sanitizer in stock); and organized community camps for the houseless who are at-risk or marginalized.
As our personal organizing work typically is anti-fascism, we should also note that there is still a great need for that in this current crisis as well. Like in many crises, the far-right is attempting to take advantage of the political moment in order to gain strength. We’ve seen groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front attending protests against the stay-at-home protocols. Racist and nationalistic conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease and cures are spreading. There have been attacks and other displays of bigotry against people of Asian ethnicity. White supremacists online are talking about spreading the disease deliberately, and fantasizing about this crisis creating a state of open war in society. While we all have to do our part to fight the pandemic, we cannot let up our guard against fascism and the far-right. So it is good that those networks are continuing their work as well, even as we all are having to deal with the pandemic.
In September 2019 he received a 21 month sentence for stirring up racial hatred during his campaign that was supposed to be against rape and violence towards women. Turns out he is just another nonce and strangely enough Robinson’s crew seems to have quite a number of them.
Since we first posted this online, it seems like we have seriously upset a lot of far right specimens. Responses vary from “this is all fake news” to “but what about the…”. It seems like nonces and other sex predators are bad only if they are brown. The truth is that the ranks of far-right organisations are riddled with all sorts of sex offenders. It must be something about the ideology that attracts these sort of people.
On Saturday, people from all over the country came together to oppose a ‘Free Tommy’ demonstration in London in support of imprisoned anti-Muslim hate preacher Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA “Tommy Robinson”). It was a difficult day, but we stood strong, and our demo was solid. Old fascist faces like Paul Pitt and numpties like Danny Tommo were doing their usual attention-seeking, the police had helicopters and ‘Sieg Heils’ and MAGA hats were out.
The fascists’ turnout was much lower than for “Free Tommy” events last year – last year they got possibly 10,000. Saturday they got somewhere up to 1000.
However, anti-fascists should have been able to comprehensively outnumber them and prevent them from having the run of the streets which were not able to do.
Anti-Fascist Network 