EDL's Vicious Attack on Muslim Bystanders

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK) reports an attack on two Muslim bystanders during an anti-Muslim march in Dagenham by the far-right group, the English Defence League.

The viscous attack occurred on Saturday 18th June, when the two Muslim men, both in their mid 20’s, were walking through their town when they encountered the EDL march. It is estimated that around 250 EDL members were present at the march and were shouting Islamophobic and racist chants.

Surprisingly, there was not a single uniformed policeman in the area and local residents were not warned by the police prior to the march that they must remain vigilant.

The two victims, Aftab Baig and Mohammed Baig crossed over to the other side of the road to avoid the EDL thugs but some of the EDL protesters followed them and started hurling abuse at the two men. Six of the EDL members then launched a violent attack on the two men, throwing them to the ground where they were kicked and punched repeatedly.

Both men sustained multiple injuries and Mohammed Baig was hospitalised suffering head injuries and a broken jaw.

MPACUK would like to know why the problem of the EDL is not being taken seriously by the government or the police despite the EDL having a track record of violence and disorder. A number of EDL members have criminal records for violent offences. The EDL is an extremist group that should be banned.

MPACUK

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

BNP hopes of a breakthrough dashed as party defeated in target seats

Nick Griffin failed dramatically in his bid to gain a Westminster seat this morning when he suffered a resounding defeat in the British National Party’s east London stronghold

Margaret Hodge, the Labour incumbent, won by a majority of more than 16,000 to deflect the BNP leader’s challenge in what she labelled the most important and moral fight of her life. In a humiliating defeat, Mr Griffin was relegated to third place in Barking, trailing behind Conservative candidate Simon Marcus. The BNP’s share of the vote dropped by two per cent, the result of an extensive campaign to mobilise voters against the threat of the far right.

Ms Hodge, the Culture Minister, achieved a seven per cent swing, winning more than 24,000 votes and 55 per cent of the vote. She said: “The message of Barking to the BNP is clear: get out and stay out. You are not wanted here and your vile politics have no place in British democracy. Pack your bags and go.”

She said voters had chosen democratic politics built on fairness over “a fascist politics built on division, prejudice and hatred. We have not just beaten but we have smashed the attempts of extremists.”

The BNP had considered Barking a stronghold after exploiting local concerns about immigration and housing to win twelve seats in the local council in 2006. However, following a disastrous election campaign, Mr Griffin received 6,620 votes – one third as many as Ms Hodge.

There were indications of a national collapse in the BNP vote after it failed to make headway in its other target seat, Stoke Central. It also looked likely to lose seats on the Barking and Dagenham Council, despite beginning the campaign with hopes of gaining a majority. Mr Griffin blamed high voter turnout for his defeat and said that it was the “last chance for Barking”.

His voice drowned out by booing, he said: “This was the last of London. Within the next five years the indigenous people of London will be a minority in our own capital city. This is a wake up call, not just for London. This is a wake up call for the whole of Britain.”

Mr Griffin said he would not resign, despite the crushing defeat, however elements in his party are certain to demand answers about the disastrous performance.

There was a heavy police presence at the count in Goresbrook Leisure Centre, in Dagenham, as large numbers of BNP supporters turned out to support their leader. The BNP’s campaign has been was plagued with trouble and infighting. In the first week, Mr Griffin faced an alleged plot by BNP officials to overthrow him. He also told police that a colleague had threatened to kill him after an investigation into the political “conspiracy”.

On Tuesday, the head of the party’s online operation resigned and took the website down with him. Simon Bennett, 41, directed BNP traffic to his personal site, which contained a lengthy diatribe against Mr Griffin and other senior figures. The next day Robert Bailey, the party’s London organiser and Romford candidate, was videoed assaulting an Asian youth who had spat on him.

UKIP candidate Frank Maloney said he would make a complaint about Ms Hodge to the Electoral Commission, claiming she had spoken to voters inside polling booths.

At the same venue, incumbent Labour MP Jon Cruddas faced an anxious wait with a close run poll with his Tory opponent. However Mr Cruddas, widely tipped as a leadership contender, won his seat in Dagenham with a majority of 2,000 votes.

Times Online

On the front line of the war against the BNP

The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham is at war. The next two weeks will determine whether the area becomes the jewel in the crown for the British National Party – a BNP-controlled council with command of a £200 million-a-year budget. And sometimes, as this week, the warfare becomes physical. Police were called to Barking town centre after a punch-up began during a BNP canvassing session. And there were angry scenes in Dagenham last week when anti-fascist campaigner Billy Bragg had a stand-up row with Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s London Assembly member.

But even Bragg, a Barking man by birth, has not grasped the seriousness of the situation according to one leading campaigner. “They think that a vote for the BNP is a way of lashing out against the local council”, Bragg said last week. Wrong, says Sam Tarry, organiser for the anti-fascist Hope not Hate campaign and a Labour council candidate in Dagenham. “That shame that used to exist about voting BNP is gone. It’s well beyond a protest now. The BNP have been gaining nationally for five or six years. I think the council is going to be very, very tight.”

The 2006 local elections saw 12 BNP councillors elected to Barking and Dagenham council, making them the biggest BNP council group in the country. According to campaign group Searchlight, the organisers behind Hope not Hate, the party only needs to swing six marginal council wards to gain control.

Away from the town hall, Barking Labour candidate and culture minister Margaret Hodge and Jon Cruddas in the new Dagenham and Rainham contituency seem quietly confident of their own electoral success. But a late BNP surge could yet see Cruddas (notional majority 6,581) unseated by his Conservative opponent. And in November, BNP leader Nick Griffin announced he was standing for Parliament in Barking. Griffin vowed to spend more than the party has ever spent on a constituency campaign: no idle threat, with he and his fellow MEP Andrew Brons now on the Brussels payroll. How much of a threat is he to Labour?

“Griffin’s not here to win a parliamentary seat – the council’s the real prize”, Tarry insists. “He’s here to take the heat off the councillors. Obviously our strategy is to bind those things together. Locally he’s seen as an outsider, someone coming to take advantage of the situation.”

When I arrive in Dagenham, Hope not Hate’s footsoldiers have been out in force at the weekend: 548 to be precise, a record number for any election campaign, delivering glossy leaflets and full-colour Hope not Hate tabloid newspapers. “We got the whole borough done. It was fantastic”, says an activist.

Labour’s big guns, too, are out in force, at least for Hodge. On the day I visit her North Street offices, David Blunkett has been and gone, deputy leader Harriet Harman and her predecessor John Prescott are planning a visit, and health minister Baroness Thornton has just dropped in for a cup of tea. The trainers on her feet prove she has been out canvassing.

“If people are going to support us, they are really going to support us,” she says, echoing some of Sam Tarry’s views. “There’s a strong Labour vote and quite a sizeable BNP vote.”

Indeed, she met some BNP voters today. How did she deal with them? “I said, look, these guys are Nazis! – I feel I’m old enough and mature enough – if it’s someone older I say, ‘did your father fight in the war? Do you want people who like Adolf Hitler running the borough?’”

For all the common cause they have, Searchlight and Labour do not always agree on how to fight the BNP. And neither do Hodge and Cruddas’ offices. Hodge’s profile dominates her literature in a “top of the ticket” strategy. Cruddas gets a more equal billing with his council candidates. Some privately think Hodge’s approach is not the best way to protect the council. But there is no doubting the Barking MP’s sheer hard work: she has pounded the pavements regularly every weekend for the past two years and is currently canvassing three times a day.

Darren Rodwell, Hodge’s campaign manager, is proud of what has been achieved. Three years ago, he says, only 7 per cent of the electorate were on Barking’s contacts database, compared to 54 per cent now. Would he stake his home on a Labour victory, I ask. “I’m as confident as I can be; I would never do anything that would risk my family”, he smiles, before admitting that, in any case, he would move out if the BNP won.

How the impressive efforts in Barking and Dagenham compare to the BNP’s own canvassing is hard to say: at the time of writing, my questions to them were unanswered. But the far-right party has not come from nowhere – its voting figures at general elections have grown steadily for nearly 20 years – and with two Brussels seats and the chance of a Westminster seat, it is certainly not going nowhere. Whether that continues depends on Barking and Dagenham.

Tribune

Fear and loathing in Dagenham

On a walkabout in east London, Nick Griffin is a magnet for feelings of grief as well as anger

On Thursday Nick Griffin paid his first official visit to Barking and Dagenham as the newly declared British National party candidate in next year's election. This took the form of "walkabouts" and the one I attached myself to went up and down the slopes on either side of Dagenham Heathway station on the District line, where there are shops and cafes and pubs and more white people than you can easily come across in Barking town centre, at the constituency's western edge.

Walkabouts are of course contrivances: the point is not so much to meet people as to be photographed meeting them. A small media mob followed Griffin and his minders. He shook hands with a couple of men in a white van and sat down at a table of drinkers in the Lord Denman pub. One passerby shouted: "Love ya!" and another: "Good luck!" How much of this had been pre-arranged is hard to say. The two women sitting outside a cafe who told him to piss off were obviously not in the script, but the drinkers and the white van – which passed us more than once, honking cheerily – may well have been. What can be said is that his appearance on Question Time has done him no harm.

A woman wanted to be photographed with him: "I saw you on that chat show." Then three white schoolboys posed with Griffin at their centre. A few other schoolboys – black this time – loitered at the crowd's edge. It wouldn't have been a surprise if they too had asked to be in a shot. Griffin appeared before them as a minor celebrity in a suburban high street. He might have been opening a new Boots. His face is soft-featured and he seemed anxious to please.

A reporter from the Barking and Dagenham Post asked whether, if elected, he'd serve all his constituents, no matter their origins or colour. Griffin said of course – he would work for anyone who had a right to be here and paid their taxes. So who would be excluded? The answer was many of those people who had "poured in" over the last few years, encouraged by a government that wanted to gerrymander its parliamentary constituencies. This is the BNP line: the Labour party has deliberately promoted immigration so that it can build up vote banks, with results that are particularly visible in Barking

His supporters followed him. Several were in their best suits. Richard Barnbrook, who is probably the second most famous member of his party, wore a sand-coloured number that might have been supplied as off-duty wear to the Afrika Korps. Another follower, buttoned up in lilac, turned out to be Lawrence Rustem, a Barking councillor and Elvis fanatic and "the only half-Turkish member of the BNP". He said he was "a refugee from Hackney", where he'd been mugged 18 years before. Consequently, he joined the party and became an activist. "For me, it's been a long form of revenge for what happened to me that night," he said.

Some things about the crowd were no surprise: that it was white, male and mainly about 50 years old. What I hadn't prepared for was the sense of loss and grief. Bob Bailey, who leads the BNP opposition on Barking council, outlined his career: son of a steelworker in Scunthorpe, 12 years in the marines, and now employed by "the security industry". The steelworks had sacked his dad, who never worked again, and now faced an uncertain future under Indian ownership. "We don't make anything any more, we don't own anything any more. It's an absolute disgrace. The country's just knackered. People have given up hope. They don't believe in anything, not in themselves, not in their neighbourhoods, not in their history. "

Bailey's solutions included the nationalisation of key industries, political withdrawal from the EU and military retreat from Afghanistan. He described it as "the politics of old Labour" combined with a "forward-looking nationalism". So far, so sweetly reasonable. Then I mentioned Barking's Labour MP, Margaret Hodge. "Poisonous bitch. Lives in Islington. A multimillionairess and a foreigner to boot."

A foreigner by this definition is a woman born Margaret Oppenheimer of wealthy German Jewish parents in Egypt in 1944, who has lived in the UK for at least 60 years and is minister of state for culture and tourism. That doesn't seem a very forward-looking definition. What chance then that the BNP accepts as full citizens all the Africans, Indians, Pakistanis and eastern Europeans who have so utterly transformed Barking since the 1990s? Their numbers are growing, and the BNP likes to cite their presence in Barking as an example of sneaky government strategy. In fact, they arrived through a much more chaotic agency, the free market.

Throughout most of the last century, the people of Barking and Dagenham depended on two institutions. For work and wages, there was the Ford car plant, which at its postwar peak employed 40,000. For housing, there was the local authority. In the 1920s at Becontree, the London county council built the largest municipal estate in Europe and smaller developments followed. In the words of Darren Rodwell, a Labour activist born and raised in the borough, Barking had "its own social system". You married and got a council flat. Children came along. You moved upscale to a three-bedroom house. When Margaret Thatcher's administration introduced the right-to-buy, this paternal system broke down. Tenants bought at discounts and sold on for a profit or let the houses to inner London authorities that needed to place homeless families. Most of the old housing stock is now owned privately. Relatively cheap property and fast trains into London make Barking an obvious destination for migrants. A borough that was once exceptional for its whiteness and familial connections changed with a bewildering speed that left its Labour rulers divided and broken. The party now accepts that voter alienation and disaffection were "endemic". In 2006, the BNP won a dozen council seats.

Some blame Hodge, who, like one of her Barking predecessors, Tom Driberg, has more of the West End about her than the East End. Others accuse a complacent local council that had never shed "workerist" attitudes born in the old Ford plant. The BNP fright has changed all that. Hodge has moved the centre of her operations to the town, knocked on doors and recruited 150 members, many non-white. In her office I met young men and women from, or with parents from, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Caribbean, as well an 83-year-old former mayor, George Shaw. All of them said much the same thing: the party had to reconnect to the electorate.

My guess is Griffin will lose, and possibly badly if Labour can get its targeted voters to the polls. But can they? Rodwell told me of his reconnecting spiel when he knocks on doors: "I can't do anything about the weather, West Ham or Gordon Brown … but you can try me on anything else."

Guardian

Rappers take anti-racism message into BNP heartland

Urban music crew Roll Deep will visit an East London school in the heart of British National Party territory today as part of an initiative to tackle racism and fascism. The group will perform and talk about race relations with pupils at the Robert Clack School in Dagenham.

The event has been organised by musicians' action group Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR), which accuses far-right organisations such as the British National Party (BNP) of stirring up racial tensions. In Barking and Dagenham, where the BNP has 12 council members, LMHR is working with schools in the borough to arrange events and activities that will bring young people together to fight all forms of racism and fascism.

Speaking ahead of their performance, Roll Deep said: "As a group made up of mixed races and cultures we cannot accept in this day and age racial prejudice in any way, shape or form. We feel strongly that the UK should and will be a place for people of all colours, races, shapes and sizes to live side by side in harmony."

David Moody, head of six form at Robert Clack School, said: "We were the first school to run Black History Month a decade ago and it's fantastic to widen the provision even further with events like these. The students are extremely excited and it will be a day to remember for all of them."

Alison Philcock, of Love Music Hate Racism. said: "We are proud to be working with schools in Barking and Dagenham to send out a positive message of unity and celebration of multiculturalism, in opposition to the BNP's message of division and hate. It's not hard to win the hearts and minds of the young people of Barking and Dagenham to ideas of respect and tolerance. We are very pleased that Roll Deep are continuing to work with LMHR by visiting Robert Clack School."

Weyman Bennett, joint national secretary of Unite Against Fascism, added: "We need to do everything we can to keep the nazi BNP out of Dagenham. Events like this can help us defeat the fascists. They bring together everybody who opposes the fascists. We are proud to be working with Barking and Dagenham Schools and Barking and Dagenham National Union of Teachers."

24dash

Frontrunner For Deputy Leadership Calls For Action Against The BNP

Leading anti BNP campaigner and deputy leadership frontrunner, Jon Cruddas MP, is to meeting with trade unions from tomorrow in a call to arms against the BNP.

In the week following news that the BNP is to field almost 900 candidates in the May elections, Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham, says we have to convert people's feelings of fear and revulsion into immediate and on the ground action.

Jon, together with the anti-fascist organisation, Searchlight, wants to mobilise the trade union movement, including their officers, activists and millions of members against the BNP.

Jon Cruddas, frontrunner for deputy leadership of the Labour Party and MP for Dagenham, said:

"We need the entire labour movement to understand the threat that the BNP represents in the upcoming elections and the need to mobilise it against it.

"We have just over two weeks to convince people that the BNP is dangerous and offers no solutions. We need to implement a strategic, local and very visible campaign to combat the BNP's arguments on the ground and to tell people that they shouldn't be persuaded to vote for them, even to register a protest."

Jon Cruddas has travelled the country over the last two weeks with Searchlight's 'Hope Not Hate' tour which has taken in all of the UK's major cities and many of the towns and communities where the BNP is active. Celebrities such as Billy Bragg, the Sugarbabes, Amir Khan, Coronation Street, Hollyoaks and Emmerdale cast members and Manchester City footballers greeted the 'Hope Not Hate' bus.

The BNP have almost trebled their number of candidates in the upcoming Welsh, Scottish and local elections. They are fielding 876 candidates UK wide this time, over 500 more than the number it stood in last year's local elections.

Jon Cruddas is MP for Dagenham. In his constituency there is one BNP councillor, in neighbouring Barking 11 BNP councillors were elected last year, polling 39% of the vote. Jon is standing as a candidate for deputy leader of the Labour Party. For more information on Jon Cruddas' deputy leadership campaign visit www.joncruddas.org.uk

Jon Cruddas' Deputy Leadership bid has received the support of 100 Labour grassroots activists from every area of the country. They include councillors, local party secretaries and trade union officials. He was overwhelmingly endorsed by 53% of Compass members in March. He has also received the support of Amicus General Secretary Derek Simpson and T&G leader Tony Woodley.

CCNMatthews Press

Anti-fascism Around The Country

Anti-fascists around the country have started campaigning against the threat posed by the British National Party (BNP) at the elections on 3 May.

Activists in the Yorkshire and Humberside region of Unite Against Fascism went leafleting last weekend in Leeds, Barnsley, York and Scarborough calling on people to use their votes against the Nazi BNP.

In the West Midlands, Unite leafleters, including Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors, covered Redditch’s Winyates ward. The BNP’s David Enderby gained a council seat there last year – but has since been convicted of assaulting his wife.

Unite campaigners in Luton will blitz the Farley Estate with anti-BNP leaflets this Saturday. Luton Unite is calling on people to assemble at 10.30am at the Farley Community Centre on Delphine Way.

Meanwhile Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) has kicked off a national tour of universities to build support for the movement against the Nazis.

Full details of the tour are available at http://www.lovemusichateracism.com/

LMHR has also teamed up with the NUT and NASUWT teaching unions to launch a range of anti-fascist educational material for schools. This includes a CD compiled by Drew McConnell of Babyshambles which will be distributed free to schools across Britain.

Activists in the GMB trade union in Barking & Dagenham, east London, turned out last Saturday to campaign against the BNP in nearby Thurrock, Essex, as part of the Daily Mirror’s “Hope Not Hate” tour.

Tom Baillie, branch secretary of Barking GMB, told Socialist Worker, “The majority of people in this borough reject the fascist politics of the BNP – and we’re out to show that.”

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=11036

Socialist Worker