It isn’t only far-right fanatics and their fascist networks that spread rumours untethered to fact. Last Tuesday, a London WhatsApp ecosystem was urgently informed that a “local group” had been told by a mosque in Stoke Newington that “the Police have asked them to be alert and vigilant that between the hours [of] 5-7pm an EDL group will be protesting outside the Fire Station on the corner of Brooke Road and Leswin Road as it’s a migrant centre”.
The street corner in question is a ten-minute walk from where I live, so shortly before 5pm on Wednesday I nipped up there. A gathering of perhaps 100 people, observed by two pretty relaxed police officers, had just come into view when I bumped into a friend, a veteran of Hackney’s political scene, heading towards me. “Usual suspects?” I asked. “Usual suspects,” he confirmed, hurrying on.
Confirmation took the form of placards advertising the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and its intention to “SMASH FASCISM AND RACISM”. Its concurrent, decades-old, desire to “smash capitalism” didn’t get a mention, but it is helpfully featured on the party’s website. Another SWP placard bore the assertion “REFUGEES WELCOME”, complete with the supplementary demands “open the borders” and “no deportations”. The “refugees welcome” message was also conveyed by the placards of the Stand Up To Racism organisation, which has been described as an SWP front (photo below).
Speeches were made, including one by a rabbi who said the now former Fire Station building, which has long been home to an array of charities and not-for-profit organisations, was “about building a better, kinder world”. A man playing the master of ceremonies role then took the megaphone to tell those present that he and kindred spirits had a proud history of repelling far-right organisations going back to the 1970s, a time when the National Front was prominent in parts London, and, much more recently, when the British National Party established a presence in the chamber of Barking & Dagenham Council.
At that point I left, partly because I had heard those greatest hits before and partly because I needed to be elsewhere. I had only just got going when a statement issued earlier by the Mayor of Hackney, Caroline Woodley, was brought to my notice. It said:
“Today there has been misinformation circulating regarding planned public disorder in Stoke Newington. We have been working with local Police colleagues throughout the day to verify these claims. Hackney Police has confirmed there is no intelligence at this time to suggest far-right protesters plan to be in the borough.”
Woodley added:
“Despite best intentions, there is a danger that circulating unverified information can cause significant distress and potential harm. I therefore encourage residents to please check with the Hackney Police for information.”
I don’t know the origin of the suggestion that a mob from the EDL – the English Defence League, a bunch of violent racists that has expired as a formal entity – was going to turn up at the Old Fire Station, or through whom it had passed before it reached me. Perhaps its alarmism was forgivable, something Mayor Woodley’s statement allowed for. Perhaps it was the product of successive misunderstandings in the tradition of “send reinforcements, we’re going to advance” becoming “send three and fourpence, you’re going to a dance“.
Whatever, there was no far-right presence in the vicinity of the Old Fire Station on Wednesday night and, as far as the Met was concerned, there was never going to be.
***
I caught the Overground to Walthamstow Central and emerged to see a bunch of police officers pre-emptively positioned outside The Goose on the corner of Selborne Road and Hoe Street. At the junction, I looked left and I looked right. To the left, though out of sight, a premises providing immigration advice is located. It had appeared on a list of possible far right targets, though I could see no activity in that direction. But to the right, the Hoe Street pavements were filling up.
After chatting to a woman wearing the best T-shirt I saw on the night, I wandered down past a Met transit and was soon loitering with journalistic intent among clusters of people, mostly brown men, many of them dressed in black. They were particularly concentrated outside cafés and shops. It isn’t hard to imagine that outlets such as the Chaiiwala Indian street food café and Saj’s Designer Wear and Accessories would be thought suitable targets for white supremacist vandals who want Muslim Britons erased. These particular Muslim Britons were standing guard.
Their mood was, to recycle my description in Friday’s On London Extra, resolute and matey, a bit excited, a bit tense. I talked a little and listened a lot to assorted males on the scene, some of them locals, some of them cops. One of the latter persuaded one of the handful of the former who had covered their faces in possible breach of the law, to remove his mask, doing this with adept good humour.
Flags of Palestine appeared, followed by megaphone-led chants. The megaphone was held by a boy who I doubt was more than 11 years-old, supervised by a man who I assume was his father. We got “free, free, Palestine”. And we got “from the river to the sea”, a slogan whose meaning and legality has been the subject of fraught public debate in the context of the series of central London marches held since 7 October.
I recalled the reply of Sadiq Khan when he was asked about “from the river to the sea” at the Jewish community hustings held in April during his campaign for re-election as Mayor of London. A Muslim Londoner, of course, who receives round-the-clock police protection due to far-right threats to his life, he said, “My feeling is this: park for second freedom of speech, park for a second law. If you know that it causes distress, anxiety and upset to your Jewish friends and neighbours, don’t chant it. It’s as simple as that.”
The pavement crowd watched and waited. A guy on a bicycle appeared, rode up to some friends and gestured urgently towards a point further down the street. And suddenly there was a turning of heads, a craning of necks and a mass rush down the road. Had the enemy arrived? Another online rumour had bellowed that the EDL would be mustering at a pub not far away. But the rush dissolved into mirth within seconds of beginning. From the little crowd emerged the banner of another revolutionary socialist outfit, one of a number of miniature variations on the SWP theme in evidence on the night.
Where was this contingent of comrades heading? An answer quickly came. Suddenly, there was a drift up the slope towards the junction. From there could be seen, stretching down what had been earlier been an uneventful highway, the huge demonstration that would dominate media coverage the following day. I looked on for a while, enjoying the feeling of final confirmation that the bad guys would not be making an appearance. But I didn’t stay for long. There would be speeches, but I already knew the messages they would be sending and the version of what had happened the loudest speakers would want the crowd to hear.
***
On Saturday, a daytime rally was held next to St Augustine’s Tower, The Narrow Way, E8, another location near my home. Roughly the same number of people were there as at the Old Fire Station. Also the same were the Socialist Workers’ Party and Stand Up To Racism placards and the master of ceremonies, who introduced a string of speakers, including a Hackney councillor and a teacher from a local secondary school. The MC denounced “the filthy racism” witnessed in other parts of the country, the attacks on Muslim communities and mosques, the throwing of rocks at Filipino nurses in Sunderland, and the wider targeting of “people of colour”.
He went on: “We got 600 at 12 hours’ notice to protect the Old Fire Station from potential racist attack. It didn’t happen. Hackney stood together.” That was the “potential attack” the Met and Mayor Woodley had said there was no intelligence to suggest would take place. The MC added: “Then some of us went on to Walthamstow. Ten thousand people said ‘they shall not pass’. And they did not pass!”
There were cheers from the crowd. The words “they shall not pass” are a translation of the Spanish “no pasarán”, an anti-fascist slogan used during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 and a cry also heard at what became known as The Battle of Cable Street, the much-mythologised 1936 East End event which saw Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists turn back following violent confrontations between the police and members of a remarkable alliance of protesters.
A sign with “no pasarán” written on it was among those held aloft at the Walthamstow demo. The pledge was the more easily redeemed given that “they” never arrived. Was it the demo, trailed in advance, that deterred them, or was it the Met’s preparations and the conspicuous efficiency with which racist rioters elsewhere in Britain have been nabbed and jailed? Perhaps it was some of both.
A little later, Mayor Woodley addressed the crowd beside St Augustine’s Tower. It was an interesting decision from a Labour politician in view of her Old Fire Station intervention and the loud disdain expressed for the Labour government’s response to the riots from far-left campaigners, including at the Walthamstow event. It wasn’t out of keeping with other things Woodley has done of late.
When seeking selection by Hackney Labour members to be their mayoral candidate, she described as an inspiration local MP Diane Abbott, who at that time had had the parliamentary whip suspended as a result of a letter she had written to the The Observer about racism and Jews. In June, Woodley met Gaza campaigners who had been camped outside the Town Hall and pledged her support for “ethical disinvestment” from Israel. One of the campaigners had been Jeremy Corbyn’s liaison officer to the Jewish community when he was Labour leader. She had been expelled from the party in December 2022.
***
For those of us old enough to remember when the National Front had a real and chilling presence in Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Southall, Holborn and even a bit of Islington, last week’s mobilisations against the far right have had a familiar and nostalgic feel.
Back then, in the 1970s, the big counter-initiative was the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) which was set up by the SWP but supported by significant Labour Party figures, trade unionists and well-known figures from sport and culture. That period of London history, vividly recalled in Joe Thomas’s novel White Riot, also saw the creation of Rock Against Racism (RAR), which the ANL was closely involved with. There were two huge RAR carnivals, the first of them held in Victoria Park in 1978. I was there, as were people I wouldn’t meet until many years later. We felt we were part of something urgent, righteous and good. We still do, and we were right.
How might a comparable popular front against far-right sentiment, intimidation and violence be assembled in London and elsewhere for these very different times? Obstacles are already apparent. At Walthamstow, furious rhetoric was directed at Keir Starmer for supposedly not denouncing racism and anti-Muslim hatred explicitly enough, a view also expressed by some of his Labour critics in parliament, even though he has described the violence seen in other parts of the country as “far-right thuggery” in the form of “Muslim communities targeted” and “attacks on mosques”.
Then there is the undoubted antisemitic strand in the campaigns for the suffering people of Gaza. Flags of Palestine were in evidence along with the SWP and SUTR placards at both the large Walthamstow and the small St Augustine’s Tower events. Can a broad-based anti-racism movement accommodate Gaza campaigners when, for some of them, being “pro-Palestine” means being anti the existence of Israel and even anti-Jew?
Another large gathering against the far right on Wednesday took place in North Finchley. In its case a handful of nasties did make themselves known, only to be almost comically outnumbered. But the event was marred by the prior appearance of an online flyer urging not only fascists and Islamophobes out of Finchley, but also “Zionists”.
For newly-elected Finchley & Golders Green MP Sarah Sackman, who is local, Jewish and such an accomplished lawyer that she is already Solicitor General, this was “clearly antisemitic“. She has reported the material to the police. Dave Rich, director of policy with the Community Support Trust, has described its message as “chilling” and a reflection of “just how far parts of the anti-racist movement have lost touch with what the average British Jew thinks about Israel, or what they think of racist thugs that torch refugee hotels”. Will the organisers of future street mobilisations reflect on these points, or will they take the same attitude as Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who turned on Sackman on X/Twitter with characteristic viciousness and sophistry?
Britain is a less racist country than it used to be, and London has led the way. But, as Sunder Katwala has argued, there is much anxiety at present and a need to take the opportunity “to level up approaches to all forms of hatred and prejudice, including mutual solidarity with those working to tackle antisemitism, anti-Muslim prejudice and other forms of racial and religious hatred”.
Large public displays of intolerance of far-right violence and racism can play a part in this, but they have never been the answer on their own. Prominent Labour politicians need to take care with what might be difficult judgements about endorsing their latest manifestations, given the wider agendas and habitual equivocations of some who organise and put their name on them.
A strong case has long been made for taking the battle against racism and the far right out of the hands of the far left and hard left – the SWP, Corbyn and all – for whom recent events have been an opportunity to regain lost limelight, and conducting it instead, with clarity and skill, closer to the mainstream of society, with backing and guidance from the top. Keir Starmer, Prime Minister and MP for Holborn & St Pancras, appears well-equipped for such a job.
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