White Roses and the EDL at Brighton Cenotaph

By Jean Calder

I dislike demonstrations and marches. However, I’ve never knowingly missed an anti-fascist demonstration. When I first came to Brighton in 1975, it was the National Front who marched in the city, later the BNP and now it’s March for England or the English Defence League who each year come to ‘celebrate’ St George’s Day.

I march against them because, not long before I was born, fascism plunged the world into a conflict in which 50 to 70 million million people died, 12 million by genocide. I was a child when Adolph Eichmann was tried as a war criminal. I can remember the sense of horror I had when I first saw pictures of naked, emaciated bodies being flung and bulldozed into mass graves. 

I also march because the nazis themselves said that an essential part of their struggle for power was to gain control of the streets by force and by fear. So I accept that fascism cannot be allowed free reign on the nation’s streets and should be met by disciplined and peaceful resistance. 

However, these days I do not march with ease of mind. What troubles me is that that resistance is so often neither disciplined nor peaceful. I fear the violence and verbal aggression of the far right, but I hate to hear its echo from anti-fascist protesters. I dislike hearing affluent graduates mocking working class people in shabby clothes, the chants of “fascist pigs” and “racist scum” and the jokes about someone thinking that Brighton Pavilion is a mosque. The nazis dehumanised their enemies like this, representing Russians, Jews and communists as subhuman or as vermin.  At a march in 2012, I was shocked to hear someone I know shout at a poorly dressed half drunk EDL member “You’re stupid, you’re not human”. 

In the thirties, it was the Labour movement that mobilised against fascism, but this is not now the case. Not only does the movement no longer seem to listen to working class people, it offers little leadership on even this most basic of issues. Many hundreds of people may turn up to protest when the far-right marches, but they lack organisation. The result, in Brighton at least, is that, by default, young anarchists control the demonstrations. There’s no overt planning, no discipline and no stewarding to keep people safe. It’s an invitation to agents provocateurs. Physical resistance and violence by a few demonstrators is met with disproportionate and sometimes indiscriminate force by the police. As a  result, many people who might attend – such as children, faith groups, minority ethnic communities and elderly people who lived through the war –  don’t do so. 

Each time this happens an opportunity to inform the public and especially young people of the danger fascism poses to democracy, is lost forever. All the general public may notice is groups of young people in balaclavas attempting to fight the police. One local vicar told me that foreign students and  asylum seekers in his congregation are terrified of all the demonstrators because they can’t tell one from another.

Troubled as I am by some of the anti-fascist movement’s occasional class arrogance, aggression and lack of discipline, these things pale into insignificance in the face of a far great weakness – which  is that the anti-fascist movement marches against some fascists and ignores or even colludes with others. Just over a week ago, Lee Rigby, an off-duty soldier, was butchered by two jihadists in Woolwich, who attempted to decapitate him. His killers adhere to a coherent islamist ideology which rejects democracy and human rights, is sexist, racist and homophobic and aims by violence or stealth to set up a theocratic islamic state. In fact, they are committed to a world view far more overtly fascist than that of the EDL. Yet anti-fascists in this country do not march against them, even when they have been guilty of intimidatory behaviour, threats or violence. On the contrary several prominent British anti-fascists have shared platforms and offered support to Islamists of the far right, insisting they are not a threat and accusing critics of islamophobia and racism. This has created a political vacuum filled by the EDL.

Following the murder of Lee Rigby, there was wide-spread public outrage at the manner of his death, but the only marches held were those of the EDL. The anti-fascist left opposed these marches, rightly calling for solidarity between communities, but organised none of its own to oppose all forms of fascism.

On Saturday 1st June, the EDL marched again, this time not just in Woolwich, but in cities all over Britain, including Brighton, where they planned to leave a wreath at the Cenotaph. Despite misgivings, I decided to join the anti-fascist marchers and to quietly lay some of my own flowers – in memory of Lee Rigby and also the millions of others who have died by fascist violence. I dreaded the possibility of running battles and police horse charges, both of which characterised the last ‘march for England’, just weeks ago. I knew the EDL had called for silence and restraint. I feared young anti-fascists might lose control.

In fact, I need not have worried. The EDL arrived very early to lay their wreath, long before the published time. Few people saw them and there were no photographs. A much larger number of anti-fascists arrived at the appointed time and stood quietly around the Cenotaph. The atmosphere could not have been more different from previous marches. A woman had brought individual long-stemmed white roses, recalling the White Rose Movement which opposed Hitler in 1930s Germany. This set the tone. It was poignant to see them strewn across the Cenotaph alongside messages celebrating community and rejecting hate. Two women police officers were there, but stood well back. A few individual EDL supporters arrived to lay a flag and flowers. One swore at a woman who tried to give him a leaflet, and for a moment it looked as if the jeering and barracking would begin. But then it stopped. He left and when other EDL supporters stayed, they were engaged in debate which was forceful on both sides, but never abusive. People argued for well over an hour and shook hands at the end. It was an extraordinary scene.

With most anti-fascists focussed on British foreign policy abuses and the EDL on domestic Islamic terrorism, there were few points of agreement. Yet it seemed to me that as people struggled to find common ground, standing on the literally common ground of the Cenotaph, the atmosphere of the place forced us to listen and to treat each other better. As someone said “We should be together. Let’s face it, we’re all getting f…… by the government.”

Maybe that was what it was like during the Great War, when the Germans and the British played football in no man’s land and sang Silent Night across the trenches and dreamed of a better world. 

3rd June 2013