Anti-fascist strategies tested in Bradford

Police lines coming between fascists and anti-fascists

We’ve previously covered the run-up to last weekend’s English Defence League march in Bradford. Despite a successful campaign to have the government ban the march, it was always clear that the EDL would come anyway. The “official” anti-fascist movement made no plans to take direct action to try and stop the EDL from being able to take the streets, while a smaller number took action like we’ve done up here with the Scottish Anti-Fascist Alliance.

Daniel Randall is a member of Workers’ Liberty and a supporter of the Stop Racism & Fascism Network who has participated in mobilisations against the EDL in Bradford, Nottingham and London. The following is a guest post giving his impressions of what went on last Saturday in Bradford.

August 28 in Bradford will rightly be remembered by many of the activists involved as the day we defied the police, the local establishment, and, significantly, both poles of mainstream anti-fascism (and their supporters in the left and labour movement) to physically confront the EDL (which, as I’m sure SSYers will be pleased to know, resulted in the EDL getting a good kicking).

The background and build-up to the day is complex and is fundamentally a reflection of the political divisions within the anti-fascist movement in Britain (I understand the situation in Scotland is largely similar to ours in England).

The Hope Not Hate/Searchlight campaign, the anti-fascist formation of choice for large sections of the trade union bureaucracy, focused on collecting signatures for a petition calling on the (Tory) Home Secretary to ban the EDL’s march.

When such a ban was secured, HnH began organising “Be Bradford – Peaceful Together”, a “multicultural festival” (music, face-painting, bouncy castles… precisely the sort of stuff that were key weapons for the anti-fascist militias in Spain in 1936/7) at a location a couple of miles away from where the EDL (now reduced to a static protest) would be gathering. Their event secured the backing of various local religious institutions, the local trade union bureaucracy and indeed local government.

The SWP-run Unite Against Fascism, frequently politically indistinguishable from HnH (same “unite with anyone – and we mean anyone – against fascism” approach, same celebrity fetish, same slavish deference to trade union bureaucrats and religious leaders, same faith in the state to sort things out by banning fascist parties or organisations), called their own “We Are Bradford” event in the city centre, close to where the EDL would be amassed. The list of initial supporters for the event was a chemically-pure mini-popular front, including everyone from trade union leaders to Lib Dem MPs to religious zealots.

However, they were at great pains to ensure everyone that the event WASN’T a counter protest. Oh no. Nothing as radical or confrontational as that; just a “peaceful multicultural celebration of Bradford”. Undoubtedly the EDL were quaking in their boots.

Local supporters of the Stop Racism & Fascism Network called for a genuine counter-mobilisation to confront the EDL from the start.. SRFN doesn’t have a fraction of the resources that either HnH or UAF have so we were sanguine about our prospects. Nevertheless, SRFN supporters spent the build-up to the event leafleting local working-class estates, particularly in Asian areas, calling on people to mobilise on the day to confront the EDL rather than spending the day at HnH’s limp “festival” or at UAF’s non-protest.  SRFN called on people to meet at separate location, Centenary Square, near to the EDL’s rally point.

The other key element in the picture, which would ultimately prove decisive, was local Muslim youth. Unfortunately the left has no real implantation amongst those communities and before the event it was unclear to us whether they would mobilise independently in any significant numbers or follow the advice of community “leaders” to either stay at home or attend the HnH or UAF events.

The experience of previous anti-EDL mobilisations told us that policing would be pretty tight, and we weren’t disappointed. On the day, the cops were out in force. SRFN supporters who attempted to remain outside of police cordons and leaflet members of the public were told to move on and disperse, under threat of arrest. However, in spite of almost every organised element in the equation militating against it, a crowd of several hundred of us managed to gather across the street from the EDL’s rally point, almost literally within spitting distance of the enormous pen the police had constructed to contain the racists. The crowd was made up of SRFN supporters and other independent anti-fascists along with hundreds of Muslim youth, and police soon mobilised to make sure we didn’t get any closer to the EDL.

I think a lot of us were preparing to dig in for a day of fairly typical anti-fascist activism; shouting at a group of nearby racists plus a bit of low-level scuffling with the cops as they try and push us back and we try and get a bit closer. Even if that had been the end-result, it would have represented a significant improvement on UAF or HnH’s strategy; at least the EDL would’ve encountered some visible, vocal opposition (even if it was from the other side of a fenced-off pen and a few lines of cops) rather than having every anti-fascist in town neatly swept off into either the UAF or HnH distractions where they were visible only to other anti-fascists and maybe a few passers-by who took the time to find out what was going on.

As it turned out, we were able to do rather more than just shout at the EDL. They were obviously just as agitated as we were about being held in one place and made several attempts to break out of their pen. At one point, a small group made it onto the pavement and lobbed a few bottles and rocks in our direction. Then, a few hours later, around a 100 EDLers managed to escape and headed off; we could only assume their intention was to cause a bit of (probably-violent) havoc in town. We figured that trying to head off and confront that group was a more useful thing for us to do than spending the rest of the day shouting ourselves hoarse and shoving the cops, so a group of maybe three hundred of us turned back up the street we were on and ran to find them.

We tracked the EDLers down to a roundabout by a retail park and managed to bloody a few noses before police stepped in to break us up and quickly herded the EDLers into Forster Square train station and out of town.

We shouldn’t overstate what we achieved; the EDLers we confronted represented maybe 1/8th of their entire forces on the day. We should also take care not to fall into a crude idealisation of physical-confrontation anti-fascism; it’s a form of activism that excludes those less-able to take part in it and is only one aspect of the anti-fascist strategy we need to develop.

But we did prove that with a bit of tactical dexterity, the EDL can be confronted. We challenged their right to bring their racist bile onto the streets of our cities without encountering any visible opposition. We challenged the pro-state, popular-frontist perspective of mainstream anti-fascism that asserts that calls for state bans or polite rallies are sufficient responses. A lot of us didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when we received reports that leading SWPers had led chants of “whose streets? Our streets!” from the platform of the UAF rally while we were actually doing the work of defending the streets from the EDL hundreds of yards away.

Darth Vader and pals move in

Beneath the practical unity built on the day between Muslim youth and independent anti-fascists, there are some politics that need unpicking; during the lulls between scraps with the cops, we chanted “unemployment and inflation are not caused by immigration; bullshit, come off the enemy is profit” while many of them chanted “Allahu akhbar!” Some of them also chanted “the EDL are faggots!” and hurled sexist abuse at women police officers.

The point is that practical unity in confronting fascist organisation is the best framework from within which to challenge the religious, homophobic and sexist politics that some Muslim youth hold. The left must break from the essentially racist assumption that working-class Muslims can only be related to on the basis of religious communalism and can only be engaged with through the religious establishment and community “leadership”. At one point the self-same community “leaders” who had backed the HnH and UAF events turned up on the frontlines of our confrontation with the police to plead with local kids to go home. Fortunately, their pleas were ignored.

The English Defence League promised us a summer of mass mobilisations intended to cause havoc in some of England’s key centres of Asian, and specifically Muslim, population. They crowed about mobilising up to 5,000 to come to Bradford. Those claims have come to nothing; they were not strong enough to meaningfully impose themselves on the streets of Bradford on August 28, and when a few of them did manage to defy the police they were sent packing by our hastily-convened anti-fascist rapid response unit.

Hopefully, the dismal and disgraceful role of HnH and UAF on the day will help break the stranglehold that these groups hold on anti-fascist politics in the organised workers’ movement. One battering isn’t going to make the EDL go away and the social problems leading many white working-class people into the arms of the EDL and, beyond them, the BNP haven’t gone away either.

We still need to build a national anti-fascist movement that combines a direct-action approach with ongoing campaigning on issues like jobs, homes and services so we can provide anti-capitalist, anti-racist answers to the legitimate grievances which the far-right attempts to exploit. Young working-class people from every community will be at the centre of that; the ruling-class figures and popular-frontist ideas that existing mainstream anti-fascism looks to will be no part of it at all.