The fascist English Defence League (EDL) march planned for 28 August in Bradford is a huge provocation to the local community.

The EDL have now organised around thirty demonstrations in different towns and cities all across the UK, many of which have resulted in racist violence.

Now there is a debate over what to do about the latest planned march in Bradford.

Hope Not Hate (aka Searchlight), Unite Against Fascism (UAF), and a new coalition called the “Stop Racism and Fascism Network” all have different approaches on how to deal with the English Defence League.

None are advocating the tactics which are needed to meet this new threat to our communities in the same way the National Front was defeated in the 1970s.

In the days before the Bradford protest – which the EDL aim to get 5000 violent thugs along to– antifascists need to urgently and radically change their approach, to one which can effectively counter the EDL who on previous demonstrations have attacked Asian areas verbally and physically. They are ominously calling Bradford, “the big one”.

Antifascists now need to organise mass community and working-class resistance with well organised antifascist stewarding to defend the anti-fascist demonstration, defend the city, and engage as many people as possible in process.

**Hope Not Hate campaign for state ban**
Hope Not Hate, are actively campaigning to sabotage any anti-fascist mobilisation against the EDL, calling for the police to ban both EDL and anti-fascist demonstrations on the day. An article written by Searchlight’s Nick Lowles is named “the case against a counter-demo”. Lowles writes, “To some extent the very fact that the EDL has been able to protest at all represents a defeat. That it has been able to do so regardless of counter-protests suggests that perhaps the tactic of counter-protests is not working.”

Much of Lowles’ argument is based upon the “deep scars” of the 2001 “riot” in Bradford which was caused by a provocative National Front demonstration and resulted in mass arrests of young Asians who defended their city from skinhead thugs. He argues that we cannot afford this to happen again.

Yet in 2001, the National Front march was banned.

The fascists turned up anyway, provoking the Asian community with Hitler salutes, attacking people and property.

Lowles’ has the gall to point this out, and also the devastating impact on the lives of 200 people, mostly young Asians, who were sent to prison for a total of 604 years at the hands of the racist police and court system, and often community leaders who informed on them. But ironically, Lowles’ call for a total ban and no anti-fascist demo is repeating the very same mistakes that were made in 2001.

Hope Not Hate’s lobbying of the Home Office nine years on, if successful, would mean that potentially thousands of anti-fascists would stay out of Bradford, leaving the city to fend for itself.

It would in all likelihood mean that the very same police force who condemned so many to prison all those years ago would again flood the city looking for the “troublemakers”, visiting the same homes in the same areas.

And worse of all it would give no guarantee that the EDL, or the BNP who are active in the city and represented on the city council would not turn-up anyway to provoke the community again, baiting young Asians into being the next victims of police racism.

This, after all, is the major problem with relying on, or even lobbying the state to police the fascists, as Workers Power argued in our leaflet to a Bradford meeting. In the final analysis they are no neutral body, and have played a sickeningly violent role in putting down anti-fascist demonstrations, backing the EDL’s “right to march”, be it in Manchester, Leeds, Bolton or elsewhere with batons, arrests and attack-dogs. As the EDL have grown, and demanded to march in more and more towns and cities, the more repression against anti-fascists by the state has grown. Weyman Bennett (UAF National Secretary) and Martin Smith (Love Music Hate Racism National Coordinator) have now both been arrested on serious charges after being snatched on demonstrations. We should campaign for the charges to be immediately dropped.

Time and time again, looking towards state bans has backfired for anti-fascists, and backfired badly. It’s time to look towards, not shy away, from mass mobilisations of communities and anti-racists to stop the fascists, and to stop looking towards the racist police to defend us.

**UAF call for “peaceful celebration”**
Unite Against Fascism is instead calling for a “peaceful celebration” of multiculturalism called “we are Bradford”, which they say is to be held in the city centre, although it may now happen two miles outside. They have been explicit that the event is “not a counter demonstration.”

UAF’s rejection of Hope Not Hate’s potentially disastrous state-ban policy is welcome, and as far as possible, defence of Bradford from the fascists should be conducted peacefully. If they try to march, they should be stopped – by anti-fascists refusing to move away from their march route or rally point, blocking roads and stopping traffic. However this is not what UAF is calling for, and the EDL have different ideas.

Early this year, when the EDL marched round Stoke-on-Trent, they caused havoc in Asian areas, smashing cars and windows, threatening taxi drivers, and painting racist graffiti onto a Mosque. In preparation for Bradford, “the big one”, the EDL have asked that their women’s division does not attend in a chauvinistic promise of violence.

It is for this reason that antifascists need to organise well-prepared self-defence for Bradford, and a counter demonstration is exactly what we need. Demonstration stewards need to be chosen with the role of defending the demonstration, and well-briefed on how to defend participants from EDL thugs. They need to be on the lookout for provocations from both the EDL, and also the police who have used violence against anti-fascists to clear the way for fascist marches in the past. We need as many anti-EDL demonstrators as possible in Bradford, and as far as possible we need to be prepared.

This is something that the Socialist Workers Party, a major component of UAF know full-well, yet they uncritically published the statement from UAF in their newspaper on 7 August which said the “we are Bradford celebration” will not be a counter demonstration.

But now Socialist Worker have changed their minds. In their 14 August issue they say “join the UAF counter-protest in Bradford on 28 August”, and criticise UAF’s support for local groups that call for state-bans of fascist marches.

This is a welcome development, and now we need to demand the same of UAF who should reverse their previous statement, and call for a mass, counter-mobilisation to defend the city and keep the streets of Bradford fascist-free. Otherwise, the SWP’s counter-demo could run the risk of dividing the larger mobilisation into a small squad to confront the EDL, rather than building the mass community force we need.

What UAF needs to do now is aim to get thousands onto the streets, and organise teams of stewards to repel EDL thugs – aiding rather than policing young people on the demonstration who will want to defend the city against the fascists, and those parts of UAF who are not prepared to go this far need to be challenged inside and outside of the organisation by those willing to stop the fascists “by any means necessary.”

**Stop Racism and Fascism Network not the answer**
In response to UAF’s perceived failures to repel previous EDL marches, some left-wing groups broke away to form a new organisation last October.

The Stop Racism and Fascism Network (SRF) is a small group of activists including members of the Socialist Party, Alliance for Workers Liberty and Antifa, and campaigns that were “frustrated at the lack of effectiveness and democratic discussions within existing anti-fascist networks.”

SRF place much of their emphasis on tackling the root causes of racism – “years of declining standards of living and of government policies that neglect working communities around Britain.”

Whilst correct that we do need a mass movement in communities to argue for socialist politics to reverse this trend, and fight the cuts which will deepen the problem, SRF confuse this with the immediate need to unite as many thousands of people as possible to stop the EDL marching.

They have called for an “independent action” against the EDL in Bradford, and are isolating themselves from the very mass of people who need to be organised to stop the EDL from carrying out their racist march. In their statement on Bradford they “seek to unite people of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds under the banner of working class unity, working class politics and secularism.”

But on previous anti-fascist mobilisations, in particular in Harrow and Birmingham, young Muslims have played the key role in chasing EDL fascists out of their cities and towns. Why exactly should they need to be “secular” to do this – and who are SRF to demand communities leave their religion at the doorstep, particularly when the EDL hold most of their fire for Muslims in particular?This is no way to build a serious mass force to defend communities and stop the EDL from marching, particularly given that their meetings in nearby Leeds have numbered only in the single figures.

Far from taking the arguments for socialism and working class politics into the mass Asian communities, SRF is putting extraneous demands like commitment to secularism, in the way of unity around one simple demand: stop the EDL in Bradford.

**For an Antifascist Defence League**
Antifascists in Britain need to respond in the right way to the growing threat of the English Defence League, which has presented a new challenge to the movement.

The EDL signifies the move of British fascism back to the marching and demonstrations, which characterised the National Front’s strategy in the 1970s.

Unlike the British National Party, which focussed on winning votes and council seats in the last ten years, the EDL is not held back by so-called electoral respectability.

Their marches have got larger as time has gone on, and particularly as the Tory coalition government makes life worse for millions of working class people, and unemployment rises they might grow rapidly, unless they are stopped.

The current antifascist movement has yet to meet this new challenge effectively, and the existing organisations are simply unable to do so.

Hope Not Hate’s strategy of relying on the state to ban the EDL, and actively trying to demobilising responses from black and Asian communities will not work.

As Martin Smith points out in the latest Socialist Worker, “Fascism cannot simply be banned out of existence. It needs to be countered politically, ideologically—and physically.”

Unite Against Fascism is also not up to the task. It prides itself on being a “broad church”, uniting everyone against the EDL from Liberal Democrat MPs and councillors, to trade union leaders, to socialist groups, to the leaders of the churches and mosques.

It is precisely because UAF brings together both working, middle class and bourgeois forces into its alliance, that it has no common strategy to defeat the EDL. On occasion, like in Dudley, it stands idly by while the EDL run rampage. On other occasions, like in Bolton, it took the fight to the EDL to stop their pogrom.

The same vacillating between positions is also shown in relation to opposition to state bans and the use of physical force to stop the EDL – there is no agreement indeed in UAF on whether ‘self-defence is no offence’.

Some groups inside UAF like the Socialist Workers Party refer to the days when mass working class action saw the defeat of far-right groups like Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and John Tyndall’s National Front. They acknowledge the need for self-defence to protect and defend our communities from fascist hooligans.

But the truth is that as long as they are tied to UAF, they are dragged to the right, and have to appease capitalist politicians like those in the Liberal Democrats who would otherwise leave. In protecting the “unity” of UAF at all costs, the SWP in the end confuse and muddle their positions, often end up defending the actions of UAF when it fails to deliver, and hold the movement back from forming the militant, working class unity that we need to defeat fascism. Yes, we need unity, but it must be based on the principles of physical no platform, working class independence from the state, that links the struggle to the fight against the cuts, and is unequivocal in its opposition to all forms of racism.

Right now, the EDL threat poses the need for a mass campaign to unite every worker, trade unionist and antifascist to stop them from marching.

We need to form a workers’ united front against fascism capable of fulfilling this role, challenging the media’s racist lies against Muslims and migrants, and operating in working class areas to provide real, not racist answers to the problems facing working class communities.

We must create a national group to steward and defend our protests, creating a street force for anti-fascists that will not let them pass – an Antifascist Defence League.

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