On Saturday 17 July, 500 members of the English Defence League (EDL) rampaged through Dudley in the West Midlands, attacking Muslim and Hindu residents. The EDL is fast developing in the direction of a new organised and violent fascist street movement, which offers a focal point to sections of the working class who support Britain’s wars in the Middle East and are prepared to physically confront public opposition to those wars.
The EDL represents a popular reflection of government strategy. Its rhetoric focuses on Islam, in a context in which Britain’s wars in the Middle East, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and attacks on Muslims in Britain are all depicted as part of a battle against ‘Islamic extremism’. The EDL first developed out of a violent response to an anti-war demonstration by a small group of Muslims in Luton in March 2009. In the months before this thousands had come out on the streets to protest against the Israeli massacre in Gaza, with sections of Muslim youth playing a leading role. This was not the first time, with predominantly working class Asian youth playing a leading militant role in the anti-war and Palestine demonstrations during the early anti-war movement in 2000-2002.
Particular conditions have shaped the understanding of this section of the working class. In the summer of 2001 Asian youth in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham led uprisings against years of poverty, unemployment and racism, battling the police and organised fascists. Their conditions of life and experiences of the state had given them few illusions in bourgeois democracy, the police or the Labour Party, and they represented then and now a potentially revolutionary force. Recent figures for Newcastle, Sunderland and Glasgow show that amongst Bangladeshi and Pakistani men unemployment rates are double those of white men.
The Labour government responded to these uprisings with a standard combination of funding and co-option for selected Asian ‘community leaders’, particularly religious leaders, on the one hand, and criminalisation on the other. Islam has become a politically defining characteristic. Communities which ten years ago would have been described as ‘Asian’ are now called ‘Muslim’
Following a series of significant national protests, this summer the EDL has begun more localised activity, targeting anti-war and pro-Palestine demonstrations. In the last few months the EDL has supported a Zionist Federation demonstration outside the Israeli embassy in London on 3 June, attacked a Palestine Solidarity Campaign stall in Birmingham on 12 June, opposed anti-war protests against military parades in Cambridge on 14 June and Luton on 15 June, and attempted to attack a Palestine solidarity meeting in Manchester on 26 June. On Saturday 3 July two EDL members turned up to ‘observe’ a Palestine Action Group protest in Newcastle, one of them publicly parading in an ‘EDL Gateshead Division’ hoodie. Interviewed in The Guardian in May an EDL spokeswoman clearly expressed the role they see for themselves: ‘The soldiers are fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Iraq and the EDL are fighting it here … Not all the armed forces support the English Defence League but a majority do.’
The major organisations of the British left deny the fundamental characteristics of imperialism, and this means they must also deny what the EDL represents. And so we read the absurd claim by Martin Smith in Socialist Review that the context for the EDL’s growth was created primarily by the BNP – not a word about Labour’s wars and racism. The majority of the British left is tied utterly to the Labour Party through its left wing – the same Labour Party which in government has been the main agent promoting the political line of aggressive imperialism and racism against Muslims which the EDL gives expression to. The lack of an independent, organised political leadership amongst the mass of the working class, which could provide a basis for real opposition to the EDL, is to a large degree a result of legacy of the actions of the British left in undermining every movement with revolutionary potential and isolating its most progressive elements.
The EDL can only be opposed on the basis of a movement united against imperialism. Today that movement does not exist. We need to continue the difficult task of building an anti-imperialist trend in an imperialist country. The fight against the EDL highlights how anti-racism must be central to building a movement for socialism in Britain. Racism against Muslims needs be understood as racism. The line of the Stop the War Coalition and associated opportunists that ‘Islamophobia’, is ‘the last respectable refuge of racism in Britain’ distracts from the kinds of alliances that need to be developed between Muslims under attack and others facing the same racist enemy – asylum seekers, migrant workers, travellers and other oppressed sections of the working class.
