No pasaran?

By Dan Hodges / @dpjhodges

Luton has a population of approximately 200,000 people. Last February it was deserted. The entire centre was boarded up. No children were out playing. No one was doing their shopping. The local population had been effectively banned from the heart of their own town by the English Defence League.

I was there. I heard their drunken chanting of “We’ve fucked all of Allah’s wives”. I heard the Scottish Defence Leagues own favourite chant of “SSDL”, the extra S inserted in homage to Hitler’s storm-troopers. I didn’t personally see them shouting “scum, scum, scum” at the Asian mother and her young daughter who were watching from the window of their flat, a flat they couldn’t leave until the EDL had fully exercised their sacred right to free assembly, but I heard about it from local journalists.

In fact Luton passed of relatively peacefully, with only 19 injuries and six people hospitalised. That was mainly due to the activities of local community leaders and a heavy presence from 27 different police forces.

It wasn’t as bad as the disorder in Leicester. Or Bradford. Or Dudley. Or Plymouth. Or Dagenham. Dagenham was especially nasty, when three Asian youngsters who accidentally ventured into the path of the EDL’s ‘protest’ were brutally assaulted.

No one likes banning marches. Curtailing the right to protest is a major step that should only be taken as a last resort.

But I personally don’t like fascists either. And I know that if I were to be presented with a choice between upholding the principles of liberal democracy by allowing the EDL to march past my front door, or banning the bastards, I’d choose the latter.

I read Darrell Goodliffe’s article. I’ve seen Sunny Hundal’s campaign on twitter. I saw Nina Power’s piece in the Guardian.

Nina’s article was especially illuminating. “Let the EDL racists march”, ran the headline. “By denying one group its right to public protest, the government moves closer to banning us all”.

For starters, the government is not trying to “ban us all”. The extended ban in Tower Hamlets was specifically aimed at the EDL and, crucially, limiting their ability to play the white martyr, which they would have done had other demonstrations scheduled for the same period been allowed to proceed. It was a sensible tactical decision on the part of Theresa May, not the beginning of the introduction of martial law.

But Nina and Darrell and Sunny are right on one level. We should be fearful. Those of us who want to storm into racially diverse communities and start a riot have suffered a setback. Anyone who gets their fun cornering young Asians and kicking them to within in an inch of their lives has undoubtedly been hurt by the government’s decision. The argument the Woodcraft Folk should be shredding membership lists and heading for their safe houses is, however, a little harder to sustain.

I understand the principle behind opposition to the ban. But frankly, and please excuse my coarseness, screw principle. The EDL are not an abstraction. They are real, violent, racists, thugs. Nor are they protestors. They are twenty first century Brownshirts.

What in God’s name do we on the left think we’re doing? “Let the EDL racists march”. Seriously? Let the racists march?

How do we get ourselves in these positions? Time and time again we do it; binding ourselves through these ridiculous, ideological contortions.

We are the left. We stop Nazis marching. We don’t campaign for it.

So what if it’s the state, rather than local communities that bars their way? Good. That’s what we want. We want a government that stands up to fascists.

And if we don’t want it, the people in the communities targeted by them certainly do. “I support local communities right to self-organise”, Darrell told me yesterday. But why should they have to?

Our minority ethnic communities deserve protection by the state. They vote and pay their taxes. They have the right to live their lives free from violence, intimidation and fear. When racist thugs express a desire to come marching down their high street, the response of their government shouldn’t be “tough, you’re on your own”.

People have a right to protest. What they don’t have a right to do is assault and oppress and bully their fellow citizens. That is what the EDL does wherever it marches. And it’s what they would have done had they been allowed to march through Tower Hamlets.

Our democracy has not been undermined by Theresa May listening to the people of East London. Freedom of speech has not been curtailed because those who would scream “scum” at a young Asian child have been silenced. Our cherished and hard fought for liberties have not been tarnished because the offspring of Oswald Mosley have been forced to keep their jackboots off the streets of London.

A Conservative Home Secretary is standing in the way of the Nazis, whilst members of the Labour Party try to clear their path. No pasaran?