This article is reproduced with permission of the authors, Martin Smith and Tash Shifrin and first appeared on the Dream Deferred website on 24 June 2017 here. It includes their eyewitness report from the FLA march.

Up to 5,000 assorted Islamophobes, racists and fascists marched through central London today, mobilised by a rightwing coalition of football hooligan firms called the Football Lads Alliance.

It is the second time in a fortnight that such a sizeable march of this type has taken place. It follows the “UK Against Hate” demo in Manchester on 11 June, led and promoted by former English Defence League leader and long-time fascist Stephen Yaxley Lennon, AKA “Tommy Robinson”. This one was called “Unite Against Extremism”.

One swallow does not make a summer, but two large scale mobilisations in the space of two weeks clearly shows that the far right are finding new ways to organise. We have not seen anything on this scale for more than five years – since the EDL was broken into tiny splinters after a campaign of counter-protests by antifascists.

The new developments strike worrying parallels with the early days of the EDL.

It’s important to understand how they are regrouping. What we are seeing is a reconfiguration of the same elements that made up the EDL – the football firms providing the feet on the street, the Islamophobic ideologues, and the nazis and fascists seeking to gain influence and build within the new formation.

The FLA, which organised today’s demo, is made up of “football lads” – football hooligan “firms” connected with different clubs. These “lads” are experienced at fighting, and at organising under the radar.

Hardcore groups of football thugs such as the former Casuals United (now calling themselves the “Pie and Mash Squad”), with a nazi following, have been quick to try to move in. At the same time FLA activists are trying to draw in more ordinary football fans, via club messageboards.

The FLA demo – eyewitness report

Events began early, with gatherings of different football firms in pubs in and around central London, including large numbers in Stratford.

The demo assembled at St Paul’s Cathedral and marched to London Bridge, scene of one of the recent terrorist attacks. Unlike the Manchester demo, where the thugs broke through police lines and threatened counter-protestors and others, this was a very disciplined event.

Organisers and marchers have sought to learn lessons from the rapid degeneration of many EDL demos into drunken violence.

Those on the FLA did not wear colours or carry flags – important both to maintain the unity of the many different football firms involved and to keep the fascist element under wraps.

Some fascist organisations, such as the nazi “Pie and mash squad”, formerly Casuals United, had been asked by FLA organisers to publicly state that they were not organising the event – although they made clear they would turn up anyway in plain clothes. This is a similar tactic to the early EDL’s barring of BNP members – it works in exactly the same way now.

Although the FLA organises mainly through a secret Facebook group to keep it under the radar, it was clear – worryingly – that the strategy of promoting the demo on forums used by genuine football fans from various clubs had succeeded in pulling in a number of ordinary football fans.

Before the march, there were speeches, including a token Sikh – remarkably, exactly the same token Sikh, Mohan Singh, who spoke at Lennon’s demo in Manchester a fortnight ago.

The strategy of including token minority group “representatives” is well understood by the more experienced marchers: “That’s good – it’s so we can’t get Nazi-ed off,” as one said.

Another speaker was Toni Bugle, founder of the far right Islamophobic organisation Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia (“Marias”) who has previous links with the EDL.

Watching as the march began, it became clear that it was very big – clearly a boost to the marchers themselves. There were a handful of black people and women, but the turnout was overwhelmingly white men.

Despite the recent racist terror attack at Finsbury Park Mosque, there was no sign that Muslim organisations had been invited – and the amount of general Islamophobic abuse being bandied around would have made this a very dangerous place for Muslims to be.

That was the main note of hostility, at what otherwise felt like an event whose participants were lifted by the realisation of their own numbers.

There were no flags or banners, save a single England flag and the banner at the front of the march, and almost no chanting other than a few rounds of “England, England” and “Rule Britannia”.

On London Bridge itself, the march stopped for a minute’s silence – then the chant “FLA, here to stay” broke out. Some marchers left wreaths in football club colours among the flowers and candles marking the spot where the attacks took place.

This has been a successful day for the FLA and the fascists in its midst – they have held a huge mobilisation that succeeded in looking “respectable” and allows them to attract more people in future.

With the EDL, we saw a regular “hardening up” process as the fascists try to build their influence among the softer demo supporters. That is what they will be trying again.

Moving fast

The Manchester and London demos have involved slightly different but largely overlapping configurations of individuals and organisations, and Stephen Lennon was quick to cheer the FLA event and BF’s Birmingham demo via his very substantial social media following.

The rump of the EDL had called its own demo elsewhere in central London today – a “coincidence” that allowed one-time EDL adherents to make a late switch to the FLA event. The official EDL managed to put only a few dozen on the streets as the main event was obviously elsewhere.

And in Birmingham, fascist group Britain First pulled a few hundred protestors together – a far higher number than the 20 or 30-odd that BF used to attract.

A definite shape for a new racist and fascist street movement has yet to emerge, but all the elements are in place and two very big demos have shown the danger ahead.

It will be important to watch developments closely, to start to expose the fascists at the heart of the newly forming organisations in order to deter softer supporters – and to mobilise against these demos just as antifascists did against the EDL.

We have to try and split the soft core racists from the hardened Nazis, by exposing the leadership’s real agenda. This is not the first time the fascists and far right have tried to organise football firms.

In the 1970s and 1990s the National Front and BNP tried to organise on the terraces. Antifascist groups and supporters’ clubs set up antifascist fans’ groups to drive the fascists off the terraces. Likewise when the EDL tried to do the same, antifascists also organised mass anti-EDL leafletings.

After the Manchester demo, we included in our report an outline of how the EDL was defeated. We make no apologies for including it again below. And it is important to note that far right street movements can grow very fast. Speed is of the essence in the antifascist response.

How the EDL was broken

When the campaign to stop the EDL was launched by Unite Against Fascism and other groups, back in 2009, some organisations argued that it was not a threat and that it should be left alone in the hope that the street movement would wither on the vine.

But the EDL’s strategy echoed that of street fighting fascists through the years, including in the BNP before Nick Griffin steered it towards electoralism. That strategy was then dubbed “march and grow”.

At the beginning campaigners described the EDL as a far right, single issue street movement.

But as the EDL’s protests got bigger as they showed their strength – on occasions they were able to put up to 3,000 people on the streets. Worse was the fact that the protests became more and more violent – and as fascist elements worked to harden up the racist street thugs, their targets widened.

The EDL threatened to break up the anti-capitalist Occupy Camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. EDL members attacked trade union meetings in Liverpool and London and they also attacked anti-racist meetings in Brighton, Barking and Newcastle. It was during this period campaigners recognized that we were no longer dealing with just an anti Islam movement, but one which had now morphed into a fascist type organisation.

The campaign against the EDL involved two main elements. First, a campaign to expose its fascist connections and challenge its Islamophobia and racism.

Second, whenever and wherever the EDL attempted to march, antifascists staged counter-demonstrations to oppose it.

To build the counter-protests, antifascists built a broad coalition to oppose them, including local antifascist and antiracist groups, trade unions, Muslim organisations and other minority ethnic and LGBT+ community groups.

The big anti-EDL protest in Bolton in March 2010 was a major turning point. It was one of the first times that antifascists significantly outnumbered the EDL. And importantly, despite police arresting large numbers of antifascists, the court cases against them collapsed – preventing the police from treating antifascists and fascists as “two sides of the same coin” on future demos.

It was this unity – and the huge numbers of local people who joined the counter-protests – that eventually broke the back of the EDL after its miserable failure of its repeated attempts to march through east London’s Tower Hamlets and its crushing defeat when thousands of antiracists blocked the fascists’ route in nearby Walthamstow in 2012.

A key feature of all racist and fascist street movements is that if left unchecked they can grow very fast and create a climate of fear and wider racism in society.

But where they are opposed, and their marches outnumbered or blocked, their members quickly become demoralised and turn inwards on themselves. This is what we witnessed with the EDL, which broke up into tiny splinter groups.

Now as the racists and fascists reorganise, we must recognise the danger – and use the experience of the past to help us drive them back again.

>> For more on the realignment of fascist and far right forces today and the parallels with the early development of the EDL, see our report on the 11 June Manchester demo.

This article is reproduced with permission of the authors, Martin Smith and Tash Shifrin and first appeared on the Dream Deferred website on 19 June 2017 here.

This post was written shortly after the fascist march in Manchester, but we decided to hold back its publication in the wake of the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower. The terrorist attack on worshipers near the Finsbury Park Mosque shows the dangers of the far right in Britain – but, disgracefully, sections of the media have given fascist “Tommy Robinson” more airtime this week.

Several thousand racists, fascists and assorted Islamophobes took to the streets of Manchester on Sunday 11 June. The so-called “UK Against Hate” demonstration was the biggest organised by a fascist street movement in Britain for more than five years.

The organisers billed it as a “silent march”, but nothing could be further from the truth. Press reports and photos showed it was an orgy of hate. As they marched down the streets the demonstrators chanted, “Allah is a peado” and the Loyalist paramilitary slogan that is also a signature tune for fascists organised around the football hooligan scene, “No Surrender”.

Some demonstrators wore Nazi insignia, others gave the Nazi “sieg heil” salute and threw bottles at passers by. One thug sprayed what seemed to be CS gas into the faces of antifascist protestors. The thugs broke through police lines threatening, among others, a Sikh group distributing food to homeless people.

It was the counter-demonstrators who upheld the true spirit of unity in Manchester after the bombing. Hundreds of protestors joined a counter-rally organised by Stand up to Racism, local LGBT+ activists and other groups. They ensured that the fascist march did not take place unopposed and declared that racists and fascists cannot be allowed to divide the city.

The march was called by a sham organisation called “Gays Against Sharia” – a facebook page run by “Tommy English”, formerly the token LGBT member of the English Defence League (EDL).

But in the wake of the horrific bombing at the Manchester Arena in May, the EDL’s former leader “Tommy Robinson” – real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon – jumped in on the act. Lennon had previously shown up like a vulture after the Westminster terror attack, making a video for Rebel Media, a Canada-based “alt-right” outlet for which he now appears as a “UK contributor”. Never ashamed to capitalise on tragedy, Lennon took over the organisation of the Manchester demonstration after the Manchester Arena attack, rebranding it “UK Against Hate”.

To most observers, the march looked horribly familiar: it was effectively the EDL Mark II. Here we look at how this new version has been put together – and the lessons from the defeat of the EDL in 2011-12.

The return of “Tommy Robinson”

“Tommy Robinson” / Stephen Yaxley Lennon is a longstanding fascist. He began as a member of the British National Party, for which his cousin Kevin Carroll stood as an election candidate. In 2009 he and a small group, including other former BNP members and deeply Islamophobic “Counterjihad” activists, set up the EDL.

In line with the strategy put forward by the Counterjihad ideologue “Alan Lake” – a businessman with links to the fascist Sweden Democrats party whose real name is Alan Ayling – this was to be a street army, mobilised around anti-Muslim racism, with football hooligans as the thuggish feet on the street.

Lennon and cousin Kevin Carroll, his No2 at the EDL, quit the organisation in 2013. By then the EDL was largely broken and riven with infighting.

He later attempted – unsuccessfully – to set up a UK franchise of the German racist street movement Pegida, alongside Islamophobic activists such as former UKIP candidate and leader of “Sharia Watch UK” Anne Marie Waters, who spoke at a small rally that was attended by Ayling in 2014.

Fascists look for new vehicle

The defeat of the EDL left it split into tiny fascist grouplets unable to mobilise in any strength and this, along with the earlier defeat of the BNP, has left Britain’s fascists and far right activists looking repeatedly to regroup with a new vehicle.

Although they are usually seen as rivals, these people also get together.

Lennon turned up on a central London demo called jointly by Britain First and the rump of the EDL – the organisation he supposedly left – on 1 April after the Westminster attacks.

The rise of fascism and the far right internationally gives its adherents in Britain a renewed confidence boost. The election of far right racist populist Donald Trump in the US and the record 10.6 million votes won by Marine Le Pen, leader of the fascist Front National in the French presidential elections has shown how bitterness at economic crisis and austerity can produce a huge surge to the right. This is part of an increasing polarisation of politics that we can see across Europe and the US.

In Britain, we have just seen a welcome surge to the left with the huge vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the snap general election. Importantly, this now provides an outlet for discontent that pushes leftwards and away from the racist fascists and far right.

But that polarisation can go both ways, and the fascists see an opening to try to regain lost ground. They are quite willing to exploit the recent attacks in Manchester and London Bridge to stir up anti-Muslim racism and try to build.

Contradictory developments lie behind what could be a revival of the racist streetfighting movement. On the one hand the gains of fascists and the far right internationally – plus Theresa May’s tie-up with the DUP bigots – can give them confidence. On the other hand the collapse of UKIP and before that the BNP in Britain have helped redirect rightwing elements back towards an EDL-type street movement.

Putting the march together

“Ex-EDL leader Tommy Robinson” is a much bigger draw for fascists and racists than “Gays Against Sharia” and his presence helped put the proposed Manchester protest on a new level.

His Rebel Media gig is adding to his already very large social media profile. The Breitbart-style outlet’s contributors spout Islamophobia, antisemitism and anti-Roma racism. Its resources and Lennon’s substantial facebook and twitter following gave the rebranded “UK Against Hate” demo in Manchester a big publicity boost.

The main speakers at the UK Against Hate event were Lennon, Anne Marie Waters and Caolan Robertson, Lennon’s Rebel Media colleague.

All appeared in a Rebel Media promo video ahead of the march. Two members of the strange, sad clutch of token black and Asian speakers used to decorate the almost entirely white, male demonstration on the day are in the video as well – they have clearly had previous contact with Rebel Media. The web address for “UK Against Hate” actually redirects to Rebel Media too.

The march drew a ragbag of fascists and racists, including parts of the rump EDL.
A solid core of the marchers on the day were “football lads” – thugs belonging to football hooligan “firms”, who have themselves been reorganising, especially following the terror attacks.

The “football lads” are experienced at fighting, and at organising under the radar. And this is a milieu where racists and nazis have organised on and off for decades. The football firms, uniting across club rivalries, were the central component of the early EDL.

Now they are organising again, under banners such as the Football Lads Alliance. Hardcore groups of football thugs such as the former Casuals United (now calling themselves the “Pie and Mash Squad”), with a hardcore nazi following, have been quick to latch onto this.

It’s worth noting that the FLA has called a demo in London on 24 June – the same day, amazingly enough, as the rump of the EDL.

Worryingly, the Manchester demo was also able to pull some local people along too.

EDL reloaded

The UK Against Hate demo showed a number of similarities to the early EDL protests of 2009 and 2010. Just like the EDL in its early years, Lennon and the other organisers were able to unite various fascist and nazi grouplets, Islamophobic ideologues, football hooligan firms and defunct EDL divisions.

And just like the EDL demos in Stoke (January 2010), Dudley (July 2010) and Preston (November 2010) the thugs were confident enough to charge the police lines and try to attack antifascists and LGBT+ campaigners who bravely mounted a counter-demonstration.

UK Against Hate showed the potential, just like the EDL, for a street movement led by nazis. They claim to only oppose “radical Islam”, but as Sunday’s protest showed they want to attack ethnic minorities and leftwing groups.

Lastly, Lennon resorted to the old EDL trick of putting forward a token Sikh, a token black guy, a token LGBT+ person etc in an attempt to hide the true nature of his movement and pose as “progressive”, “non-racist” and only against Islam.

The experience of the EDL showed its utter failure to attract real support from these communities.

How the EDL was broken

When the campaign to stop the EDL was launched by Unite Against Fascism and other groups, back in 2009, some organisations argued that it was not a threat and that it should be left alone in the hope that the street movement would wither on the vine.

But the EDL’s strategy echoed that of street fighting fascists through the years, including in the BNP before Nick Griffin steered it towards electoralism. That strategy was then dubbed “march and grow”.

The EDL’s protests got bigger as they showed their strength – on occasions they were able to put up to 3,000 people on the streets. Worse was the fact that the protests became more and more violent – and as fascist elements worked to harden up the racist street thugs, their targets widened.

The EDL threatened to break up the anticapitalist Occupy Camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. EDL members attacked trade union meetings in Liverpool and London and they also attacked anti-racist meetings in Brighton, Barking and Newcastle.

The campaign against the EDL involved two main elements. First, a campaign to expose its fascist connections and challenge its Islamophobia and racism. Second, whenever and wherever the EDL attempted to march, antifascists staged counter-demonstrations to oppose it.

To build the counter-protests, antifascists built a broad coalition to oppose them, including local antifascist and antiracist groups, trade unions, Muslim organisations and other minority ethnic and LGBT+ community groups.

The big anti-EDL protest in Bolton in March 2010 was a major turning point. It was one of the first times that antifascists significantly outnumbered the EDL. And importantly, despite police arresting large numbers of antifascists, the court cases against them collapsed – preventing the police from treating antifascists and fascists as “two sides of the same coin” on future demos.

It was this unity – and the huge numbers of local people who joined the counter-protests – that eventually broke the back of the EDL after its miserable failure of its repeated attempts to march through east London’s Tower Hamlets and its crushing defeat when thousands of antiracists blocked the fascists’ route in nearby Walthamstow in 2012.

A key feature of all racist and fascist street movements is that if left unchecked they can grow very fast and create a climate of fear and wider racism in society.

But where they are opposed, and their marches outnumbered or blocked, their members quickly become demoralised and turn inwards on themselves. This is what we witnessed with the EDL, which broke up into tiny splinter groups.

The UK Against Hate protest in Manchester should sound a warning to all antifascists and antiracists – one we cannot ignore.