Anti-fascists in Leeds acted to stop the fascist British People's Party (BPP) holding their much publicised demonstration against black music on 18 October. The BPP had called the demo to protest that HMV refuse to stock CDs by fascist groups such as Screwdriver, while selling 'violent' rap music by Ice Cube and others.
The planned demo was a deliberate provocation; probably a testing of the waters for the planned BPP national demonstration later in the autumn.
Anti-fascists needed a co-ordinated and political response. Instead of succumbing to the police demands to be held in a pen 50 metres away from the BPP protest, we marched to the front of HMV and held an orderly demonstration ourselves; denying the BPP any space.
It would have stayed like that for the rest of the day, an orderly protest by 150 anti-fascists with shoppers and members of the public going about their business. The police were so determined that the BPP should be allowed their demo that they decided we had to be moved. And so it was that the main shopping streets in Leeds ended up being closed for hours and our numbers continued to swell.
West Yorkshire Police - as well as being rubbish at catching crooks - have always been hopeless at public order. So 3 hours of pushing shoving, random "snatches", truncheoning young women etc. followed.
In the end the only way that the police could get the fascists to their demo was to close all the streets nearby and escort 17 lonely nationalists to the front of HMV, where they stood bewildered for a couple of minutes before being escorted back out of the area again. Not one leaflet was given out, slogan chanted or arm raised in salute by the fascists.
Behaviour by the various anti-fascist groups and left-wing groups was at times strange and revealing, but best left till later to discuss. Workers' Power and ourselves should take credit for making sure that political level was raised by slogans used and indeed that the counter-demo took place at all.
Text of our leaflet below:
Against the Growth of Fascism, We Need a Workers' Response
In the last 5 years fascists have grown in strength throughout England & Wales. The BNP now has around 58 councillors and a member on the London assembly. Now fascist groups like British People's Party feel emboldened to march through the streets
of Leeds.
It is right and necessary that we have united in physical opposition to the BPP, however if we are to defeat the fascists and their ideas we need a political response.
In 1997 millions of working class people voted New Labour into power with the belief that they would reverse the cuts in services and improve their lives.
Instead the Blair and Brown governments presided over a massive increase in the proportion of insecure low paid temporary & agency employment. In Gordon Brown's Britain older people are forced to work into their seventies to avoid penury in retirement..
Millions on poverty wages cannot afford their own homes or are on endless waiting lists for too few council houses. Public
services have been cut to the bone and/or privatised. In despair hundreds of thousands of working-class people have voted for the BNP.
It will not work just to tell working class people to put their crosses next to one of the three mainstream bosses’ parties who have between them decimated many working class
communities. It is not enough just to be 'anti'-fascist; we need to be 'pro' a positive alternative.
To beat the fascists, the anti-fascist movement must pose working class policies and politics against the policies of the BNP. We need a workers' response to the current crisis and to the despair that the BNP taps into. This response would include amongst other things:
• A living wage for all workers of at least £10 an hour and an end to the anti trade union laws
• No homes repossessed, decent housing for all as right not a privilege
• A reversal of privatisation of public services. Quality services for all to be funded by taxing the rich
• Public ownership and workers control of the electricity, gas, rail & construction companies
We need a workers' movement that not only fights the racism of the BNP, but fights the parties and the system that created the misery the BNP exploit. We need working class politics in the anti-fascist movement.
Comments
Militant anti-fascism wins the day,
This is what I posted up about it:
"On 18 October hundreds of anti-fascists decended on the narrow streets of Leeds city centre to oppose the British People's Party.
The BPP are a small and particularly vile sect of Neo-Nazis whose leader Kate McDermody plans to trigger a "racial holy war" in Leeds. Their first step towards that was to plan to openly demonstrate against "anti-white racism" in hip-hop outside HMV in the town centre.
The anti-fascist mobilisation was called by Antifa and built haphazardly on the internet and belatedly and half heatedly by UAF. There was also no involvement from the labour movement.
So when our comrades turned up before 10am, and the police tried to force us into a pen with a handful of people from UAF, the mobilisation looked doomed to be small and ineffectual.
This happily proved to be a gross miscalculation. Soon a march of 150-200 students, anarchists and socialists, managed to use the element of surprise to force their way down the narrow Lane where HMV stands. Many of the AWL comrades managed to slip through the police lines and join this demo. For two hours we held the space outside HMV so the BPP couldn't march there. However, frequent violent sallies by the police eventually pushed the anti-fascists to the bottom of the street.
Three hours late, the BPP (all 17 of them) finally arrived to march lamely around an empty and shut space surrounded by police and anti-fascists who drowned them out completely. They could not give out one leaflet since the police had forced all the shops to shut and forced everyone out of the street. After around 45 minutes of half hearted fascist salutes and V signs they sloped off.
Despite the chaos and the police's violent actions this was a very significant and encoraging mobilisation. This was organised largely on Facebook and had no central leadership, yet in many ways it was better for it. It meant that the slogans shouted raised class politics, it meant we could talk about the need for a positve political response from the workers' movement to the growth of fascism with all sorts of people. It meant half the busy city centre of Leeds was taken up with anti-fascists who could talk politics with passers-by, many of whom joined the demo.
It was more then encoraging that hundreds of mainly young people stayed blockading the streets and shouting themselves hoarse with anti-fascist, anti-capitalist slogans for 5 hours or more.
However it is who made up this demonstration that is perhaps most significant. UAF, despite (belatedly) coming on board for the demo, may have mobilised fewer people then Workers' Liberty despite their supposed size, wealth and union support. Instead the mobilisation was largely led by the Revolution youth group and anarchists. Anti-capitalist and working-class politics were at the heart of the demo.
It also meant the police negotiations with UAF to pen in our demo proved meaningless. Two weeks ago a comrade from Workers' Power said to our comrades "we need to organise through UAF because despite its many problems it is the umbrella anti-fascist organisation and any mobilisation outside it is doomed to failure".
Yet this mobilisation like several recent anti-fascist mobilisations proved UAF's stifling hold over anti-fascist politics is losening. We must seize this opportunity to create a united working-class anti-fascist movement armed with the class politics needed to smash the fascist threat".
Leeds Anti-fascist protest
As someone who has fought against the fascist threat in its variety of manifestations through the years from the National Front through the BNP to now the BPP. It saddens me to see the continuing petty in-fighting in the anti-fascist movement. I read the article and was initially heartened and then once more reminded that the greatest weapon that the fascists have is our inability to just say that we, the good guys, stood up for democracy and won! The anti-fascism cause transcends boundaries of class. When standing shoulder to shoulder with someone in a demo the last thing on my mind is to ask them whether or not they have the 'correct' political credentials. What was good about the protest was that a large number of people from a variety of backgrounds came together to silence the BPP. A big thank you to all of them, many had never taken part in action before. Do not be disheartened if you read articles like the one posted. We need to all stand together to fight. Unite and we WILL win the war!
Politics matters
The whole history of anti-fascism (as with so many other areas of our work) is a history of bad politics leading to horrendous outcomes. When it mattered - in Germany and Spain, for instance - the politics of the strongest wings of the movement were either insufficient or downright and cynically disastrous. If we cannot be honest about past and present political disagreements now when the BNP is still relatively weak (despite the very real threat they pose in upcoming elections and in our communities day to day), then we will simply re-produce the mistakes of the past if not worse.
Additionally, if an organisation like Searchlight can publish self-criticism (they're still off the mark but good on them for trying to be honest about their mistakes in public) then why should wider political debate in the anti-fascist movement be beyond the pale?
Politics matters and as soon as the left gets to grips with the ideas of comradely debate and unity in action, the better the prospects for effective anti-fascist and, more broadly, socialist activity.
politics vs unity vs in-fighting
ageing-anti-fascist,
I agree with you that dis-unity is a problem. But we have to start from where we are now, not where we think we should be. It's true that no-one on saturday refused to stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone because they had differing political views. However that's not to say that everyone there had the same views, on big politics, how to fight fascism or even on how saturdays demo should be organised.
I think we did a good job in Leeds AWL of being honest and open about our politics, about how we think we should organise the fight against fascism and about how to organise on Saturday. We argued consistently for our position in the run-up meetings and we put out publicity on the day. We tried to get other groups in Leeds to agree to a set of positive slogans with us, no-one agreed, so we put them in our leaflet. They are still there for people to amend, criticise, improve or whatever.
I think the alternative to this sort of open and honest attitude is actually further dis-unity. In the anti-fascist movement we have either consensus decision making -which actually means either the group with the most people, the loudest voices or most money decide everything; decisions being made in secret, behind closed doors; or ever smaller groups doing their own thing.
You and I agree that saturday was a big success; but there were people there who said: "this is a waste of time, let's find the fascists and smash their skulls"; at the other end of the anti-fascist movement were people who wanted to hold a rally with big name speakers well away from the action. If it hadn't been for groups like AWL and Workers Power in Leeds then saturday would not have happened.
Our position is that as well as fighting fascists, we have to fight fascism- that is to ideologically destroy the ideas of fascism and to politically destroy the basis for it -permanently. To do that we need a political programme and a group of people in society that can deliver it. We don't expect everyone to agree with us, but we still want the maximum unity of everyone involved in anti-fascist activity- without giving up our right to argue strongly for what we believe in.
If you think our programme of how and who can defeat fascism is wrong, then please carry on the debate here; you might convince us, we might convince you, or we might meet somewhere in the middle. Whatever way, keeping our positions out in the open and being honest about what we believe is the only way to make the anti-fascist movement better.
debate and unity in action
"Politics matters and as soon as the left gets to grips with the ideas of comradely debate and unity in action" sums it up well.
Though I agree broadly with TomU and Martin Ohr on this I have some sympathy with ageing antifascist's sentiment.
The politics of the movement is important because if for example we follow the road of the UAF we may get biggish demos but no physical self-defence of Black communities and (more importantly now) no arguments against racism.
This may well mean that later these demos get less big, the BNP continues to grow and possibly splinter groups like the BPP as well. Workers in Leeds facing mortgage hikes, unemployment, crap housing, increased rents perhaps, cuts in public spending may fall prey to racist propaganda- after all it's not just the BNP saying it, it's the government blaming immigrants, it's the tabloid media and it does filter down. I know people both in my family and at work who are against immigration because of these establishment arguments.
If the workers' movement- let's be specific trade unions and trades councils in the area- agree to fight on a campaign against council cuts, and the left build strong workplace organisations to take up issues- whether demos, leaflets, arguments and discussions at work then we can actually fairly easily begin to win the arguments that a government that spends billions bailing out the bankers and billions on war in Afghanistan and Iraq is not in trouble because of immigrants.
A united working class response is the answer to workers' problems.
However, part of this must be to call demos- such as that called by the AWL, Workers Power and Revolution in Leeds (was it supported by any unions or was that too short notice?- it would be good to get to a situation where it can be)- and supported by all sorts of people. ANTIFASCIST is right here that we need a united response (and I'm sure Tom and Martin agree). Given the kind of fractious and sometimes petty infighting that does take place on the left it is especially important to make clear that here we do disagree it is not to scupper joint action or to build our own little micro-group (the left is tiny even if some groups- the one I’m in for example is smaller than most!)Actually the opening post was pretty good I think but we have to be aware that many people do see the left as infighters and divided so I always think it is especially important to very much emphasise the need for unity in action and politeness and comradeliness in debate.