English Defence League march a watershed

Published: 12 March 2010

• ON Friday afternoon March 5 it seemed that a surreal scenario appeared outside the Houses of Parliament.
A motley crew of some 200 young men had left Tate Britain to march along Millbank to Westminster escorted by  police on both sides.
There were police vehicles parked on each side of the road protecting them from the group of anti-fascists who had earlier blocked their passage by sitting in the road.
When the police had taken away several supporters of Unite Against Fascism and moved others back onto the pavements, the escorted English Defence League marchers came along silently in a scene eerily reminiscent of a picture which showed the Nazis marching down Whitehall if Hitler had won the war.
In fact the EDL march to parliament was a victory of sorts for them. Their ostensible reason for coming to parliament was to greet Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch MP who had been invited to the House of Lords to screen an anti-Muslim film.
For over an hour the two factions remained separated by the police who then led away the EDL marchers to exit 5 of the Westminster Underground.
The EDL appeared highly disciplined, apparently instructed not to display the violent behaviour they showed in Luton in May last year when they attacked Asian shops and shoppers and in Stoke in January this year when they attacked Asians and their white neighbours whom they accused of being race traitors.
Since the BNP leader Nick Griffin became an MEP and was invited to appear on Question Time he has set his sights on becoming the MP for Barking and Dagenham in the forthcoming general election.
The EDL, who appear to be acting as the equivalent of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, are planning to march in Bolton, Dudley, Aylesbury and Sheffield.
Friday’s march to Parliament on the day Gordon Brown gave evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, close by in Westminster, is a watershed in the political history of this country.
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