Birmingham Barney!

On Saturday 8th of August a protest by a group called the English Defence League (EDL) led to a mini-riot in Birmingham, United Kingdom.

When it was started around a year ago the EDL was little more then a small blog obsessed with flying the English national flag, the St George's Cross, and steeped in the so called "Lionheart" culture which dominates the British military and looks on Britain's war in Afghanistan as chance to recreate Richard the Lionheart's Crusades against Islam in the middle ages. I'm not sure who exactly is behind the EDL but I don't think they're directly linked to the British military so much as sad little wannabes who copy the military culture in order to compensate for the fact they can't make the grade themselves. After March's much publicised protest against a parade of British soldiers returning for Afghanistan by the less then credible Al Muhajidroun Islamic group the EDL found itself swamped with interest from new supporters. A large proportion of these are so called "football casuals" who are basically casual football hooligans not affiliated with any major hooligan firm who go to a couple of games a year mainly to drink lots of beer and get into fights. Alongside and probably overlapping with the football casuals the EDL has also attracted support from members of two extreme right political parties the British Peoples Party (BPP) and the British Freedom Fighters who choose to be known by the slightly gay acronym BFF. Ideologically both the BPP and the BFF are very close to the larger British National Party (BNP) but the BNP like to distance themselves from these two groups because the BPP and the BFF are far more interested in violence then they are in politics.

Due to the ultra-nationalist ideology of the EDL and the open racism of some of their supporters the local branch of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) called a counter-demonstration as part of their no platform policy for racist and fascist groups. This forced the EDL to change the cause of the demonstration from simple anti-Islam to anti-Islamic Extremism at the last minute. The UAF are yet another front of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who are well known in British protest circles for being next to useless as it's absolutely riddled with MI5 assets although that infiltration tends to be concentrated at the national level.

Both demonstrations began at 17:00 BST with the EDL protest taking place outside Birmingham's Bullring shopping centre while the UAF assembled further down the pedestrianised News Street at the junction with Stephensons Street. The police, who were out in force, immediately moved to kettle the 500 or so UAF supporters while the 300 or EDL demonstrators were surrounded by a porous cordon made up of a smaller number of officers. The next hour was tense but peaceful as the two groups chanted, waved placards and attracted onlookers while staying out of reach of each other. This changed at around 18:00 when a group of around 100 EDL protesters who had either been allowed the leave the main group or formed up separately began to make their way up New Street towards the UAF demonstration. The police quickly caught the group in a "bubble" which is a containment tactic similar to a moving kettle but seemed to lack the numbers to prevent the EDL continuing up New Street. Once they were in earshot of the UAF demonstration the EDL began chanting things like "We Are England!", "This is our Country!", "Allah was a Christian!". "Stick your Allah up your Arse!" and the totally irrelevant "No Surrender to the IRA!" Given that Birmingham is a very multicultural city with a large Muslim population I would say that the EDL group was doing everything in it's power to start a fight.

At this point the police brought in a line of riot vans to block the street and prevent the two groups getting sight of each other. They then made the crucial mistake, possibly due to a lack of manpower, of removing the bubble around the EDL group. This allowed the EDL to disperse amongst the, by now, very large crowd of onlookers, passers by and late comers. A number of fights began to break out as the English Defence League's brand of racism didn't go down well with the local Birmingham residents. In response the police deployed Nato helmets, short shields, batons and dogs as reassuringly ethnically diverse groups of black, white and asian brummies proceeded to chase small groups of the EDL through the city centre kicking the hell out of them whenever they got the chance. After about two hours the EDL had been run out of town and clashes continued between local residents and the police as the police battled to regain control of the city. By around 22:00 the violence had fizzled out leaving 35 people arrested for violent disorder and 3 people, all members of the EDL, requiring hospital treatment.

All things considered I think Saturday's events were exactly what they appear to be. That is a small group of casual racists with little history of political activity went to Birmingham looking to start a fight. They attracted a larger group of local residents who found their point of view abhorrent and when the police lost control of the situation the racists got their heads kicked in. It is what happens next that will be interesting because it's pretty obvious that the English Defence Leagues behaviour in Birmingham was not a legitimate political protest so much as an attempt to provoke violent disorder or even possibly conspiracy to riot so the police will have little option then to take action against them. After all, as I'm so often being told, rioting is such a heinous crime that the state is obligated to break all sorts of laws and any sort of moral code just to stop it happening. Therefore if the EDL do manage to stage a repeat performance there is little choice other to conclude that the police and therefore the British Establishment are endorsing the group, it's agenda and it's actions. This is reminiscent of the last time Britain was in recession in the late 1980's/early 1990's when riots stemming from a demonstration by the extreme rightwing National Front and a counter-demonstration by the SWP backed Anti-Nazi League were pretty much a weekly fixture. In times of economic hardship this was particularly useful to the establishment because while the poor people wasyed so much time fighting amongst themselves they were far too busy to starting asking why the ruling elite were still getting rich.

Plus the racist blogosphere and I'm sorry to say the BBC have gone to great efforts to portray Saturday's riot as decent, hardworking, patriotic British people being attacked by dangerous Muslim thugs. This is of course not true because if you watch any of the raw footage you can see that the crowds chasing off the EDL are made up of black people, white people and plenty of non-Muslim asian people. A pretty fair representation of British society unlike the all white English Defence League.