On 28 August in Bradford the English Defence League (EDL) held another anti-Muslim demonstration. According to the EDL, Bradford was going to be ‘the big one’, a show of strength in a city where working class Muslims had risen up against poverty and racism in 2001, fighting back against police and fascists. But although the EDL claimed that they would mobilise 5,000 people, on the day they had closer to 700. When around 200 EDL members left the area designated by the police, they were physically opposed and contained by a mobilisation of several hundred, the vast majority of whom were working class Muslim youth, including members of the Muslim Defence League. The EDL were harassed until they were bussed out of the city, with reports that some of their coaches were stoned and the tyres slashed. The only reported arrests were of five EDL members.
In the lead-up to the event, the Hope Not Hate organisation called on the state to ban the EDL march, a tactic which in Luton last year led to a three-month ban on ALL demonstrations. Meanwhile, the SWP’s Unite Against Fascism (UAF) urged people to attend a ‘We Are Bradford’ music event, billed as a ‘peaceful celebration of multicultural Bradford’. A Guardiandocumentary on 27 August interviewed assorted youth and community workers involved in organising this event and in trying to persuade local youth not to confront the EDL. This type of ‘community work’ is the other side of the state responses to uprisings such as the one in Bradford and elsewhere in 2001. Alongside violent policing and long prison sentences, a well-paid layer of co-opted community organisers is employed to ‘moderate’ activity, isolate potentially revolutionary elements and, increasingly, to gather intelligence. In this role they find their perfect partners in the opportunists of the British left such as the SWP. The day before the EDL protest, the ‘We Are Bradford’ organisers released a statement emphatically denying that the event was a counter-protest against the EDL. UAF followed this by stating: ‘UAF supports this event and has not called a counter protest, nor did we apply for a march. Media reports that a UAF march was banned are incorrect because a march was never intended or applied for.’
The ‘We Are Bradford’ event began with a speech by UAF Chair Weyman Bennett, who praised the police for enabling the event to go ahead. Following the event, UAF released a statement in which they downplayed the role of those who physically confronted the EDL and implied it was the police who prevented the EDL rioting, claiming the day as ‘a vindication for all those who were determined to peacefully oppose the English Defence League’. The UAF’s craven desire for bourgeois ‘respectability’, which has now led it to avoid even calling a counter-protest, let alone organising or supporting physical opposition, should be contrasted with the determination of working class young Muslims who mobilised to defend the community, some travelling from as far away as Birmingham and staying with local activists overnight.
Events in Bradford demonstrate once again that there is an emerging movement which has shown itself capable of confronting the EDL and which none of the state’s tactics of repression or co-option have succeeded in neutralising, but that the connection of the British left to this movement is very limited. The determined action by working class Muslim youth did not come out of nowhere and it is not simply spontaneous physical confrontation devoid of politics. The role they are playing has been shaped by experiences of racism and the British state and identification with the forces resisting imperialism in Palestine and elsewhere. As in any movement, there are different trends and tendencies, some revolutionary and some conservative. Which wins out will only be determined in the course of struggle. It is up to anti-racist and progressive forces to engage with this emerging movement from a position of respect and to build wider acknowledgement and support for its actions against the EDL.
