Daily Star comes out for the EDL

Submitted by Matthew on 16 February, 2011 - 2:38

You don’t expect to see political news stories on the front page of the Daily Star. More than any other tabloid the Star is mostly a showbiz scandal sheet, leading most days with gossip about the sex lives of soap stars and Premier League footballers. Was it then progress to see this paper, with so many working class readers, turn to politics for its front page?

Not at all. On 9 February the Daily Star’s front page was “English Defence League to become political party” alongside an incendiary photo of an Islamist demonstrator at a military homecoming parade holding a placard reading “British soldiers burn in hell”. Even by the standards of a paper known for exploiting anti-immigrant and asylum seeker feeling, the prejudice on display was stark. Here was an explicit endorsement of a street-fighting racist group by a mainstream newspaper.

Readers were told that “There is a visibly growing support for the EDL. It is attracting people across Britain to its ranks who feel the same way”. To ram home the message that these thugs are people we can all identify with, the Star reported on a phone poll they had carried out which found, so they claimed, that if the EDL became a political party 98% of their readers would vote for it.

The 9 February front page was part of a longer term campaign to boost the EDL by the Star. The previous day they ran a story about two Muslim councilors who allegedly “snubbed a British war hero” who had been awarded the George Cross (by refusing to stand up for him, as far as I can see). Another recent article was about poor helpless EDL leader Tommy Robinson needing a 24-hour guard as he was living under a death threat from “Muslim extremists”. As it is Muslims, the death would have to be by “beheading” apparently.

I mean, they aren’t going to know how to use guns, they are hardly James Bond. Little has changed in yellow journalism since the days of Boer fighters eating babies.

1930s

The parallel here is with the Daily Mail’s support in the 1930s for British fascists, Oswald Mosley’s “brownshirts” and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.

Then the relatively serious papers of the time endorsed fascism mainly on the basis that is was the only force, so they said, capable of defeating communism. In many ways the Star’s open support for the EDL is worse. This is not a lazy love affair with an overseas fascist regime, before the Second World War, but an attempt to mobilize for a UK-based far-right movement based on racism.

The EDL has denied the claim that it plans to run in elections, but EDLers were pleased by the boost from the Star. EDLer Stephen Martin responded to the article with the following:

“TODAY i sat there with my daily star with PRIDE, the pictures and banners were fair, the write up was fair, the Star comment was fair and 98 per cent back us… We have a voice now, 25p a day, if they have 74,000 new readers, we have a BIGGER voice” [sic].

And the Star’s decision to back the EDL comes at an interesting time. The EDL demonstration in Luton on 5 February was supposed to be “the really big one”. Their numbers were a lot lower than they boasted about expecting and there was no confrontation with anti-racists or Muslim youth.

As the left often find out, there is a limit to how much you can go on expecting people to turn out on a Saturday from all over the country for much-hyped events which turn out to be no more than hours of standing inside a police cordon. The EDL are therefore at a crossroads, considering where they go next. The Star appears to be goading them into becoming a political party and standing in elections.

Party politics has usually been a road to disunity and decline for the British far right, and in this case it would mean tackling head-on a problem the EDL has been happier to avoid — the presence of the BNP. It would also test to breaking point their claim to be for lesbian and gay rights and race equality. Instrumental and odd though this part of their identity is, it serves an important function in attracting working-class people who do live in the modern world and think that explicit racism and homophobia make no sense.

Liberal commentators have focused on the argument that the Star is “playing with fire” and should consider what it could unleash. In fact the EDL would only reflect Daily Star politics if it became even more coherently right-wing, ditching the pretence at being anti-Islamic only out of some warped hostility to clerical religious conservatism and adopting explicitly homophobic and racist politics across the board.

The fact is, one of Britain’s best-selling tabloids has for years been even more comprehensively right wing than the EDL!

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