by New Worker correspondent
AS THE Islamophobic English Defence League splinters into
warring factions and the British National Party is now a shadow of its former
self, it has fallen to the more extremist hard core neo-Nazi fractions to
continue to milk the tragedy of the murder of Lee Rigby for all they can.
And so last Saturday the “English Volunteer Force” (modelled
on the violent Ulster Volunteer Force) organised a rally in Croydon close to
the UK Border Agency’s Lunar House, where immigrants and asylum seekers have to
come for interviews and to sign.
The rally was aimed to harass and intimidate these people
and the civil servants who work in Lunar House.
But local anti-fascists, including members and supporters of
Unite Against Fascism, We are Croydon and the civil service union PCS organised
a counter demonstration. And they outnumbered the fascists by over 200 to 40.
Chaired by a Croydon University and College Union member,
Croydon Trades Council, PCS NEC members, Unison, NUT, UAF, Unite the Union and
Love Music Hate Racism
speakers, all argued that when Nazis target workplaces and
asylum seekers, we need to unite in action.
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The former Mayor of Croydon, said: “We have had our fair
share of fascists here, over the years. They have never succeeded in their vile
aims, and we will stop them, as before.”
Big cheers greeted
his remarks. The sick spectacle of EVF thugs seig heiling, underlined who had
crawled out from the sewers.
Ageing former BNP leader, now National Front goon, Richard
Edmonds attended, as did a few North West Infidels, BNP members and ex Combat
18 drug dealers.
Anti-fascists showed as fully as was possible their
feelings. No one in Croydon backed the EVF, unlike the locally organised
anti-fascist presence. After around an hour, the Nazis slunk off, and
anti-fascists held a short rally.
A large group of them set off to Charlton, where another
fascist splinter known as the South East Alliance had planned a “march from
Woolwich to Parliament Square in honour of Lee Rigby”.
Police did not let them into Woolwich so they made do with
the White Horse pub in Charlton as an assembly point. Their planned departure
was delayed as their organiser had been rioting elsewhere in Croydon.
When he did finally join them for the “nine-and-a-half mile
march” to Westminster they made it just half a mile to the nearest station
where police loaded them on to a train to Waterloo East and they completed
their march from there to Old Palace Yard.
They arrived just as black activists and anti-fascists who
had attended a protest march organised by Black Activists Rising Against the
Cuts at Downing Street were dispersing.
There followed a predictable exchange of epithets as police
did their best to keep them apart until
they could get the fascists on to buses and away from the area.
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