5-minute read
Dermot Feenan
LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law FRSA
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Hundreds attended a solidarity rally in London, 11 August 2018, in support of the city’s socialist and radical bookstore Bookmarks which had been attacked the previous weekend by a group of protestors.
The rally revealed a growing recognition among those on the left, some of whom remembered the anti-fascist clashes of the 1970s, of the need to stand together against rising levels of organised hatred by the far right against minorities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
The attack
A week earlier, on Saturday, 4 August, a group of around twelve persons entered the small independent bookstore in the city’s Bloomsbury district just before closing time.
Some wore red baseball caps with the message “Make Britain Great Again”, a group that hosts a Facebook page ‘Redpill Factory’ that states that it is “in response to the BBC’s liberal bias” and is “a rebellious patriotic source of British news and activism”.
One member of the group entering the bookstore wore a rubber Donald Trump mask. As the group entered, members shouted repeatedly “Trump, Trump, Trump” and “Oh Tom-my, Tom-my. Tommy, Tommy, Tommy Robinson” – referring to the former leader of the far-right English Defence League who has become a figurehead to many on the far right.
Senen Mortell, book buyer for Bookmarks, was the only employee on duty. Various members of the group shouted, “F**k communism”, “Traitor”, “Paedophile, Paedophile”, and “F**king Corbynite”. Just over two minutes after they entered, the individual who led the group into the shop raised his finger in Mortell’s face while three other members of the group leaned-in with mobile phone cameras recording Mortell. One of the individuals held up a book, and shouted, “What the f**k is this shit, man.”
The incident was filmed on a mobile phone and posted online. The footage shows the group filling much of the small space of the bookstore. Against a continuous cacophony of shouting, Mortell asks the group repeatedly to leave the shop.
“This is clearly intimidating,” he told them. Adding, “I’m in fear of my own safety”. The group remains, a number continuing to shout. One says, “the stuff you teach is shit.” A member of the group rips up a poster with the sign “Oppose Tommy Robinson. Don’t Let the Racists Divide Us” from the group ‘Stand Up to Racism’, an organisation that campaigns against the far right.
One of the group lifts a copy of the book The Jewish Question and shouts at Mortell, “What’s that about?”, “You f**king Jew-hater”, “You f**king Nazi bast**d.” The same individual can be heard repeatedly calling Mortell a “f**king paedophile” after coming across a book titled Posh Boys, a scholarly examination of the system of independent fee-paid schooling in England that reproduces social class privileges for boys (and girls). As the group leaves, the individual says, “I hope your shop burns down.”
Dave Gilchrist, the manager of the store, told me that books were damaged. The police were called and are pursuing the matter.
Increasing far-right hatred and violence
The attack on Bookmarks takes place within a context of increasingly intense political conflict in Britain which has accelerated since the referendum vote in 2016 for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. In May 2018, the UN special rapporteur on racism said that that the vote had contributed to an increased environment of racial discrimination and intolerance.
There has been a significant increase in hate crime. While this tends to be xenophobic and racist, there has been a marked increase in Islamophobia and homophobia.
Hate crime is also occurring more frequently in public, which suggests growing confidence among perpetrators. British Transport Police data show a fourfold increase in faith-linked attacks between 2013 and 2017, with a tripling in the number of gay, lesbian or bisexual victims. There was a 77% increase in race hate crimes.
Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in the run up to the Brexit referendum by a man with links to right-wing political groups. He reportedly saw Cox as a one of the “collaborators” who would betray “the white race”.
Increasingly, Islam is perceived as a threat that must be met with violence, as evident in a murderous van attack on Muslim worshippers in London in June 2017. Tell Mama, a government-supported organisation monitoring complaints of hatred against Muslims, reported an 26% increase in such incidents in 2017, with most attacks occurring on the street and targeting women.
Older, small far-right white nationalist groups such as British Movement and South East Alliance are stirring. New, larger groups are also emerging and organising. Democratic Football Lads Alliance, which has become associated with far-right activists, drew thousands to a march in London in October 2017.
Generation Identity, originating in France, has a UK and Ireland branch whose members marched in the Free Tommy Robinson and Pro-Trump rally in London in July 2018. They claim that “indigenous” ethno-cultural identity in Europe is under threat from what they call the “Great Replacement”. They demand a “Reconquista”, re-calling the Christian military campaigns that ended several centuries of Islamic rule on the Iberian Peninsula.
This xenophobia and racism feeds off the rise of the right in the United States under Trump. It reverberates across many other countries where authoritarian nationalist politics has taken hold or is re-emergent, such as in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the Philippines. The influence of Trumpism can be seen in the attack on Bookmarks.
Solidarity
Since the attack, Bookmarks has been inundated with messages of support from around the world including from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The numbers attending the solidarity rally at Bookmarks far exceeded expectations. Initially intended to take place in the bookstore, such was the level of support that an overspill venue, Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, was booked. Gilchrist estimates that 500 people attended the rally, which included presentations by almost twenty activists, politicians, and authors.
Dr. Louise Raw, author of Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Watchwomen and their Place in History, referred to the Battle of Cable Street in the East of London in 1936 when thousands of anti-fascist protestors stopped a march by the Blackshirts. “It’s impossible not to be nostalgic about Cable Street,” she said, while adding: “It’s not something that’s in the past anymore. It is here, it is now, and we have to do it again.”
Ruth Levitas, niece of Battle of Cable Street veteran Max Levitas passed on a message from her uncle, who is now 103 years of age: “We have to organise. We have to find some way of organising to fight this rising threat of fascism now because it feels so very much like the 1930s.”
Members of the public who attended the rally shared their reasons for coming.
Diane, 54, a speech and language therapist from London, explained why as a socialist she was there to show solidarity. “The right wing seems to get a lot of publicity. This is to show that there’s a lot of socialist people in this country.”
Of Jamaican parentage, she said that as a black person she was “more concerned” now about the emboldened right. “Once they’ve moved on from shouting at people with burqas, I’m expecting people to start abusing us in the streets again.”
That view was echoed by Harold Wilson, 54, who came from Lewisham in South East London to “show support” with Bookmarks. He remembers, how, as a black teenager, he and his schoolmates felt about a planned far-right National Front march through his neighbourhood that culminated in the Battle of Lewisham in 1977 between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists.
Wilson said, “I’m concerned at the concerted attempts from supporters of fascism, of Nazi ideology, to reclaim the streets and to spread fear. I’ve been through it before, so I know. I’ve experienced it.”
Another visitor, Steve, now retired, who had travelled with his wife from Rochester, a town about 30 miles from London, saw the need for action: “from my early days I was in anti-racist groups when people were being attacked in their homes and there was the old National Front and British Movement. The right are more organised now, more politically coherent. We need to be more politically coherent on the Left.”
A number of people remarked on how the attack in broad daylight and the posting of the mobile phone footage online showed a disturbing confidence among the far right. Indeed, as the solidarity rally proceeded, five individuals were spotted marching towards the church venue in what Wilson called a “strident, aggressive manner”, mobile phone cameras held aloft. They were chased off, with one responding, “we’re going to come back.” Yet, the strength of solidarity for Bookmarks indicates the challenges that the far right faces. Gilchrist said to cheers and applause at the rally that in spite of the attack, “we have emerged from this much, much stronger.”
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© Dermot Feenan 2018