Tag Archives: nottingham labour

2016/07/22

EDL plan day at the seaside in Nottingham

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

The EDL’s “Nottingham Division” has announced a demonstration in Nottingham on Saturday August 6th.

This hasn’t exactly gone down well with city council leader Jon Collins who has called on the police to ban the march.

The city’s Market Square is currently the site of a beach, complete with sand, water and fairground rides. A horde of drunken fascists doesn’t exactly fit with the intended ambiance.

Collins says:

“We’re extremely concerned about the prospect of an event of this kind taking place in the heart of the city centre during the school holidays.

“That can’t be right when families are enjoying the beach, the water feature and everything else Nottingham has to offer during the summer holidays.”

Banning the march is unlikely to be very effective. Under the Public Order Act, it’s only possible to ban marches, not static demos. Whatever the police decide, the EDL will likely turn up anyway.

That said, they aren’t likely to get many people out. The EDL is a drink-addled shadow of the organisation that brought several hundred members to Nottingham in 2009.

On Saturday they held a national demonstration in London. It wasn’t a great success, as EDL News explain: “Only 50 turned up and those that did were staggering around drunk and high on drugs.” The latest EDL split (ironically using the moniker United People of Britain) followed days later.

Recent protests in Nottingham by the Notts Casuals Infidels have hardly been major victories for the far-right and suggest the the inevitable handful of drunken fascists are unlikely to be get a warm welcome.

Comments Off on EDL plan day at the seaside in Nottingham   |  tags: , , , | posted in Nottinghamshire

2012/04/22

Jon Collins can fuck right off

By East Midlands Anti-Fascists

According to a post on Nottingham Indymedia, the anti-mayor campaign currently being run by the Labour Party in Nottingham has sunk to a new low.

A leaflet (found in the street outside a mosque) claims, “The Racist BNP & EDL want a £1M Extra Mayor. That’s the only way they can win in Nottingham.” This is desperate stuff on Labour’s part.

While it is true that the BNP have expressed support for elected mayors and will presumably stand somebody in the unlikely event that the city votes in favour of a mayor in the May 3rd referendum, they are unlikely to win anything more than a handful of votes. As “Weasel Hunter” points out, “They polled at around 3% of the vote in the ward where they stood in Nottingham last year.” The EDL meanwhile are not a political party (despite the aspirations of some members) so their opinion on elected mayors (if they have one) is of no consequence.

That Nottingham Labour is now using the threat of the far-right to further their political agendas is particularly ironic given that when the EDL came to town in December 2009, council leader Jon Collins encouraged people not to join the counter-protest. Fortunately he was widely ignored.

This sort of cynical exploitation of anti-fascism by politicians, seeking to protect their power, can only serve to discredit serious anti-fascism – presenting it as a conservative force, defending the status quo – and needs to be condemned in the strongest terms.

Comments Off on Jon Collins can fuck right off   |  tags: , , , | posted in Nottinghamshire