8:31am Tuesday 31st August 2010
By David Barnett
It was supposed to be “the big one”.
For weeks the internet chatter had been getting more and more excitable as members of the English Defence League ratcheted up their expectations for their protest in Bradford on Saturday, August 28. Many of the comments on social networking sites – all about organising lifts from across the country and planning little get-togethers in pubs before the event – seemed to have more to do with planning a Bank Holiday jolly than a major political protest.
And for most of the EDL, that’s exactly what it was.
For the rest of us, travelling up from places like Essex on a coach, stopping off to sink a few pints and then spending three hours confined in a corner of a building site might not exactly be the stuff of great days out. But that, essentially, is what happened. And it is why the EDL’s vaunted “big one” might have cost them whatever credibility they might have briefly enjoyed.
It was, they insisted, going to be a peaceful event.
It was, they said, a measured and intelligent protest against radical Islam.
It was, they claimed, a political rally designed to air the views and concerns of ordinary men and women in Bradford.
It was, they boasted, going to attract thousands and thousands of protesters from across the entire country.
And in the end? In the end a few hundred people, mostly men, shouted the most appalling obscenities imaginable, broke out in small groups from their allotted area, raided the Broadway site for bricks and stones, pelted the police with missiles and left Bradford with their true legacy by urinating and defecating where they stood.
The question now has to be asked what remains of the English Defence League’s reputation and what they intend to do next?
It has always been the EDL’s contention that they are not the trouble-makers. They have always pointed the finger at their opposition, largely embodied by Unite Against Fascism, and said that it is the UAF, not them, who cause the trouble.
That’s one area where the EDL might have gained some sympathy from neutral observers. Previous EDL protests have almost always been counter-demonstrated by the UAF, and in many cases there have been clashes between the UAF and the police, with arrests among the anti-fascist contingent.
In Bradford on Saturday, large numbers of UAF protesters – most of them believed to be from Birmingham or Manchester – did gather near the Urban Garden, where the EDL were enclosed, but the astonishingly well-executed police operation on the day ensured that they exchanged little more than insults.
Which is where the EDL’s promises of a peaceful, political rally fell spectacularly to pieces. With no physical opponents to rage against with fists and boots, the EDL began, strangely, to have internal fracas on the Urban Garden site.
And then, contrary to all their own hype and the expectations of many observers, it was not the UAF who clashed with the police, but the EDL themselves.
In dribs and drabs they climbed over the hoardings keeping them out of the Westfield site, gathered stones and bricks, and the EDL protesters surged forward, pelting the police with missiles.
Any right-thinking member of the public watching that would then have shaken their heads and simply turned away.
Because this was not in any way, shape or form a political rally. It was a bunch of men – most of them old enough to know better – who stood in a mob and hurled abuse at the top of their voices, bringing discord and intimidation to this very city they had claimed to want to save from rampant “Islamification”.
The EDL said they wanted to speak for the common man, they wanted to ask the questions they believed a system too crippled with political correctness would never ask. They said they wanted an open and honest debate on immigration and Islam.
They lied. All they wanted when they came to Bradford was a fight.
And to Bradford’s great credit, they didn’t get one.
For the EDL, Bradford was going to be “the big one”. But Bradford had other ideas, and the EDL has simply shown its true colours and stripped itself of any slight credibility it might have had. There are people in Britain today who do have concerns, who do want discussions.
But those people will today realise that the EDL does not have the answers, does not share their concerns, does not in any way speak for them and, possibly, does not have a future.
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