The EDL: The BNP’s Useful Idiots? (Part 2)

In August, the EDL claimed to have forced Ray to leave once they learned of his sympathy for the BNP, but he is still clearly affiliated with them having organised a “St. George Division”. Renton also seems to be still involved, having been photographed at Birmingham in another protest on 5 September. Although this means the EDL made no real effort to remove him he is probably no longer the leader, although press reports still list him as working behind the scenes. Instead, there seems to have been another leader: Ray has publicly accepted the rule of one “Tommy Robinson”, the pseudonym of the alleged new boss of the Casuals, Wayne King. King cut his teeth in Luton, claiming after an arson attack on a mosque that “churches in Luton are regularly being set fire to”. Apparently God is too busy with the BNP contract at the moment. Regardless, it seems the case that the EDL was taken over in something of a coup by a clique around a BNP activist who had previously only run the website, in an alliance with football hooligans whose leadership was originally based in Wales but is now based in Luton, where the worst of the recent violence occurred.

The Luton connection is an interesting one, since it seems that the hooligans who follow Luton Town moved towards the EDL having been snubbed by Griffin. As reported by Searchlight, leaked documents reveal that the “Men in Gear”, a clique among the Luton hooligans that represented “50% of the available workforce” for Luton (meaning BNP activists) were not placed on the guest list when he visited in 2007. This turned the group against him, and it is perhaps these sorts of people that Griffin was thinking about when he claimed on Question Time Nazis loathed him for taking the BNP in a “moderate” direction. One of those men, Davy Cooling, remains a BNP member while being active in the EDL on the managerial level, administering the Luton Division’s Facebook group. He also planned to attend this year’s BNP “Red, White and Blue” festival, although it is not clear whether he did.

A number of things are clear: the BNP know full well that their activists are involved in the EDL, and have been since the beginning. The EDL also know full well that BNP activists form a core part of the organisational capacity. It also seems likely that the BNP did not set up the EDL, since the rather chaotic organisation and the lack of a fuhrerprinzip comparable to the BNP’s suggests that they are something of an organic group. If they were the product of EU funding, as it is tempting to assume, it would surely be better invested. So why do the BNP and the EDL claim to hate one another, to the point of expelling mutual members? The simple answer seems to be that the EDL need experienced activists to keep the momentum of football hooligans and fellow travellers, and the BNP has been the only real organisation offering this experience over the last two decades. The BNP, on the other hand, simply can’t afford an all out war with the EDL, or more specifically the extremists in their own party. As has been clear since Griffin’s Question Time performance, and as he himself admitted, the core of the BNP who prefer fighting to canvassing must be more interested in the EDL’s methods than Griffin’s. A putsch of this element in the year the BNP are fighting hard to make a breakthrough into democratic politics may not be attractive to the leadership, and so they are being publicly criticised while privately tolerated.

Yet this is something of a speculative analysis, because the EDL is so young. The media needs to keep digging and attach the faces at protests to names, and follow the names to other organisations within the Nazi network. But one thing with the EDL is for sure: they’ve more in common with the MEP for the Northwest than Zionism.

 http://themule.info/article/the-edl-the-bnp%E2%80%99s-useful-idiots-part-2