Anti-Fascist Network

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.