the RESPECT party

Saturday was an extremely successful day in Tower Hamlets. That is the overwhelming sentiment among the community forces that were central to making it happen and among those who came from outside; it is also attested to by the chatter among the EDL.

The EDL did not set foot in Tower Hamlets. They were contained in the City of London and got not even as far as Oswald Moseley’s assembly point in October 1936, let alone marching through the area. Their numbers were probably in the region of 800 and appeared to be distinctly lacking in the kind of quality cadre that has been central to the advance of the far right where it has made the furthest sustained gains in Europe. As they walked past empty office blocks from Bishopsgate past Camomile Street to their kettle there were distinct signs of frustration.

Meanwhile, there was a very significant mobilisation from within Tower Hamlets. A small part of this joined the protest at the bottom of Vallance Road on Whitechapel, which was attended by probably 2-3,000 people from outside of the borough. Most, however, gathered in large disciplined groups in areas such as the Chicksand Estate, Brick Lane, Commercial Street and Commercial Road, the Ocean Estate and many other places.

All this was according to the stewarding plan which was rehearsed at a final planning meeting at the London Muslim Centre on Friday night, attended by about 400 people.

The message at the meeting was precisely politically focused. In addition to the obvious (i.e. that the EDL were not welcome, are a fascistic force, etc.) it was a) that the community had come together as a whole (ie Muslim/non-Muslim, black/white…) to demand that the EDL not be given permission to march through Tower Hamlets. There was universal support for the fact that the EDL were not being allowed to march. b) that the pressure had secured assurances from the police that the EDL would not be allowed into Tower Hamlets. c) that although there were some people who were saying that everyone should stay at home on the day, it was important that shops opened, markets functioned, people carried on with their daily lives and that we mobilised both to celebrate the diversity that the EDL hate and also to provide a disciplined, collective response to the EDL. d) that the EDL and other hostile forces would welcome mass arrests of our young people in the borough. So our tactics should be to avoid that while also ensuring community safety. e) that should the police and authorities fail to/renege on their promises to protect the communities of Tower Hamlets, then there would be an organised response to ensure that people were protected.

It is vital for people to understand that this approach was driven by a serious assessment of the politics and the forces at work, and not by dogmatic arguments.

So - it was common ground between all the serious players in Tower Hamlets that the political pressure to deny the EDL permission to march was part and parcel of the campaign to get the biggest possible opposition to them, from people registering by petition through to turning up on the day to say they were not welcome.

Of course, no one in the coalition of forces supports the idea of a blanket ban of the kind imposed by the Home Secretary. Mayor Lutfur Rahman explained that very well in the Guardian last week. But everyone involved in the United East End mobilisation has recognised for months that we need to delegitimise the EDL and that part of that was saying that the authorities should not give them permission to march.

This political campaign has borne fruit. It has forced the state to treat the EDL as the problem and not the local community or the counter mobilisation. This is reflected in the scale of the arrests and further in the media coverage.

This is the second important victory. For six years Tower Hamlets has been targeted as some hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. It began with outrageous smears put out by the Oona King camp as she went down to defeat to George Galloway in 2005 and crescendoed with the Andrew Gilligan campaign against the London Muslim Centre.

Let’s be honest - large numbers of liberal/leftists bought into this, including those in command of the Tower Hamlets Labour Party. The EDL targeted Tower Hamlets two years ago in the wake of Gilligan’s documentary. And various “liberal” journalists have done the same, from the odd squib in the Guardian to the discredited Johann Hari.

Now we have had a major flashpoint in Tower Hamlets in which the media and the state have been forced to recognise the anti-Muslim racists as the problem, rather than sympathising with them as some understandable reaction to the threat of “Islamism”. We faced a wider battle than the EDL in Tower Hamlets today - against Islamophobia. And we won.

This should be a cause for celebration among all those opposed to racism and fascism. Of course, there are differences of assessment when it comes to tactics.

The two local MPs, for example, called for the EDL to be banned on the grounds of the cost of the policing operation, rather than on the grounds of community safety and confronting squarely the false claim of the fascistic right to freedom of speech. That is a mistaken argument which if accepted (it wasn’t) could create a dangerous precedent. They were also mistaken, in my view, in advocating that people stay away from the organised events in the borough today. It is regrettable that neither MP, nor so many of their party colleagues on the council, joined the Mayor, his councillor group and Respect councillors at street level among the residents of Tower Hamlets who staged an exemplary, efficient and dignified counter-protest which maintained the political pressure to keep the EDL out of the borough.

It is very easy to turn important discussions of strategy and tactics into brickbats. I think little is served by that. Here is what I think positively comes out of today:

1) This was a model mobilisation - it should be studied and repeated where necessary.

2) No one on the left should tell lies to themselves - this was the product of dense and politically astute community organisations. The same people who delivered thousands of signatures to oppose the EDL also delivered thousands of signatures to hold a referendum (which was won) on having a directly elected mayor. The Mayor we got was an independent who beat the party machines, all of which deployed Islamophobia and racism in an effort to stop him.

3) The pressure on the state to see the EDL as the problem has been successful. We know that that is not total nor is it the end of the matter. But it should be built on. In particular, the investigations by the Norwegian police into the links between Breivik and the EDL should be widely publicised as should the charges the EDL members arrested today face. I would like to see the MPs in Tower Hamlets leading in parliament on the Breivik-EDL connection and taking publicised steps to engage with the Norwegian authorities. This could involve bringing survivors of the atrocity over to speak at evens in the borough and investigating twinning arrangements. This could involve discussion with schools in the borough with a view to how this might be taken up by them.

4) This is a blow to the wider Islamophobia which the EDL feeds off and, in the case of Tower Hamlets, led them to target our borough. Some people who have gone along with some of that may now be thinking again. We should encourage them to. Others should be challenged. They either publicly or privately have said that while they are opposed to the EDL, there is a legitimate cause for concern in Tower Hamlets about Muslim political engagement. They should be put on the spot now, after the community mobilised in such an exemplary way and showed that they cannot be equated with the EDL.

5) The confidence that is inspired from the victory today should be generalised elsewhere. This is happening already, right now. The Bangladeshi community here is connected with counterparts elsewhere in the country and there are other conduits as well. Every established organisation should have some humility - the people who are in the firing line of the EDL were the people who got the politics of this right and mobilised.

This has been a very good day. It may prove to be a turning point. Whether it does is not completely, or even mainly, in the hands of the left. But the left can make a difference. That, however, requires genuinely learning from the struggles of the oppressed and being prepared to absorb those lessons.