Manchester EDL demo road trip.

Last weeked we decided to take the long trip up north to help out with our northern comrades also for one or two it was their first time seeing the northern opposition. In a way we have had it reletively easy down south with dwindling numbers and numerous splits within the EDL movement has meant low numbers on the side of the opposition. Here in Manchester the situation was actually very different but still not on par with 4 years ago when the EDL could get thousands of boots on the street, on the day it was only about 400. They were a rowdy mob too, once they got in their protest pen!! This was one of the more stranger aspects of the day especially when you consider their violent rep, there were quite a few times during the day when various groups of young EDL kids would walk towards the UAF counter demo dressed as 90’s casuals but when the police told them where to go they didn’t try and mouth off or anything at all, they obliged and walked off. Once in the pen it was the usual display of cage rattling, chucking beer at the cops and shouting across the square towards the UAF. In reality not alot happened and there some even more bizarre moments when a few EDL managed to get a piss in the portaloos of the UAF demo, but i suspect if more people had made it down to the demo and there were less cops they would not have gotten away with that. This leads us onto what we thought of the UAF demo, sure there were a couple hundred people on the demo but that was nowhere near enough!! We the militants need to work on mobilizing more for these big demos all over the country. We think it’s always important to properly outnumber any EDL demo to properly show their politics are bogus. Another criticism was the poor stewarding those EDL people shouldn’t have been able to mingle and Redwatch shouldn’t be able to freely snap people’s faces!! Redwatch camera men only withered away when they got challenged by militants and that their presence there might have been unhealthy for them. However away from the demo there were a few EDL who tried did try some low rent football hooliganesque antics resulting in them getting pimp slapped and ran off the streets in front of thousands of shoppers. The demo showed us a few things there’s alot of work to be done in building a popular front militant antifascist movement, the EDL are not totally dead but on their way out and that when confronted their machismo is as fake as their politics.