The EDL’s supergrass

Roger Firth can often be seen stewarding English Defence League demonstrations in the South East. What he has not revealed to his friends in the EDL is his past, in particular his imprisonment for his part in attempts to fix a Premier League football match.

In 1999 the floodlights went out at a Premiership match between Charlton Athletic and Liverpool, played at Charlton’s ground in Greenwich, southeast London. The failure was the work of a Malaysian betting syndicate allegedly linked to Chinese Triad gangs, and was part of their plan to rig football fixtures in England.

In August 1999, four men were sentenced for their part in the match fixing scandal. Two were Malaysian nationals – one an electrical expert – who each got four years. The third was a 49-year-old security guard from Eltham, south London, employed by Charlton Athletic. That man was Firth, now the defender of all things English in his pernicious role with the EDL.

Firth turned against the gang and became the chief prosecution witness in return for a reduced sentence. He had been paid £20,000 in cash to allow the Malaysians into the ground in his part of a “highly professional, technical, criminal operation”.

All the men went on to plead guilty to conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. The judge described Firth’s motive for helping the syndicate as plain and simple greed.

The gang was rumbled when Firth tried to bribe a fellow employee at the club with £5,000. Firth received an 18-month sentence, while his accomplices were later deported. One newspaper at the time labelled Firth a “supergrass” and alleged that he was to get a new identity and address to protect him from the Triads’ clutches.

A former Territorial Army soldier, Firth was in charge of daytime security at Charlton Athletic and was a former bodyguard for the football stars Glenn Hoddle and Paul Gascoigne.

When he is not stewarding for the EDL, Firth is one of the leaders of the tiny, radical anti-Muslim English Nationalist Alliance, a ragtag bunch of racists based mainly in outer east London and Essex.

If there is one thing the average EDL member despises it is a police informant, so it is no surprise that Firth has hidden his shady past. He has successfully managed to dodge the Triads; his next hurdle could be his comrades in the EDL.

Searchlight

Far-right groups confront each other in Dagenham

Far-right activists turned against one another as they protested against a mosque in Dagenham on Saturday.

Protesters believed to back the English Defence League (EDL) confronted the English Nationalist Alliance (ENA), which staged its latest protest against the Muslim place and worship and community centre in Green Lane.

Both groups say they want to fund a judicial review in the High Court to try to overturn a council decision which gave the centre the go-ahead despite more than 1,300 objections in January.

Protesters were segregated on either side of Green Lane as police supervised the demonstrations.

The ENA said it had cancelled a meeting about the judicial review, due to take place tonight, because of Saturday’s confrontation.

An EDL spokesman said the counter demonstration was not organised centrally, adding the organisation did not oppose the ENA but merely did not want to be associated with its members.

Barking and Dagenham Post

A plague on both their houses

(left ) Supporters of the Muslims Against Crusades,
and (right) the English Defence League in West London [yesterday] morning

Two sides of hate faced each other [yesterday] in West London. As Britain remembered those who had died in past wars, 30 Islamist extremists, under the banner of Muslims Against Crusades (MAC), hurled abuse, burned poppies and waved their hate-filled placards. A few metres away 60 supporters of the English Nationalist Alliance and the English Defence League pushed their own intolerant message.

Let us be quite clear, both groups are as reprehensible as each other. In fact, such is the symbiotic relationship between the two that they actually need each other to justify their own existence. For the MAC the presence and activities of the EDL prove how white British society is the enemy. For the EDL the Islamist extremists are proof of the violent nature of Islam. They are two sides of the same coin of hate.

We stand opposed to both sides. We oppose the racism and Islamophobia of the EDL just as we oppose the religious bigotry and antisemitism of the MAC. To hear these Islamist extremists publicly deny the Holocaust and call for the formation of a Muslim Waffen SS Division – as they did yesterday – should rightly sicken every anti-fascist just as much as the racist bile spat out by the EDL and ENA.

We think it is important to criticise both groups publicly. Failure to condemn one group but remain silent about another leads – correctly – to charges of hypocrisy and double standards. Only by criticising the actions of tiny extremist groups can we say with any validity that neither speaks for the wider communities and religions they claim to represent.

And in criticising both extremist groups I believe that we are in tune with the majority of British people, who want to live in peace and without the hatred and violence extremists bring.

Hope not hate

English Nationalist Alliance in Brighton

The English Nationalist Alliance or ENA is a tiny right-wing organisation formed by BNP Essex member Bill Baker, to unite members of groups like the BNP, NF and EDL.

The EDL predicted 5,000 people would support their Bradford protest on 28 Aug 2010 - in fact only 700 showed-up. So, where an earlier ENA demo in April had drawn an already low turnout of just 150 supporters to Brighton, 2 days after the Bradford defeat, ENA support shrunk even lower, down to just 40 people, with ENA morons giving Hitler salutes and waving EDL flags in Brighton.

The ENA Brighton demo wasn't the 1st time Bill Baker made a fool of himself. In Aug 2009 Bill Baker cancelled an EDL demo he was trying to organise in Harrow after it turned out he'd been lying about Harrow Mosque. The Harrow protest was rescheduled by Stephen Gash's group SIOE (Stephen Gash is a former EDL spokesman who supports Serbian mass-murderer and war criminal Radovan Karadzic). SIOE staged 2 protests in Harrow - the 1st attended by less than 40 people, the 2nd attended by less than 20, and the 2nd Harrow protest was such a shambles Stephen Gash turned up 90 minutes late for his own demo. Despite this, EDL plan to humiliate themselves again in Harrow in Jan 2011.

The EDL, BNP, ENA, NF and SIOE are all the same people, separated only by the different egos that compete for leadership of their stupid movement. All of them pretend to be patriotic, but the ideology they follow is based on GERMAN nationalism.

The ENA/EDL Brighton picture is available here.

Thanks to FightbackUK for the heads-up