Calling for a ban on the EDL march has its attractions. But there is a question about who is being asked to impose a ban, and what consequences a ban might have beyond the resolution of an immediate situation. It is increasingly clear that the coalition government is doing its best to punish protesters of all stripes. Students who protested against fee rises last year were subjected to kettling and charged by mounted police, while many are still being dragged through the courts on serious counts; 30 UK Uncut protesters are still being "symbolically" prosecuted for peacefully occupying Fortnum & Mason on 26 March; and anyone who attended the 30 June strike would have been aware of police "snatch and grab" tactics used against anyone they had decided were potential troublemakers.
There's only one problem, the headline: Let the EDL racists march. I am aware she may not have written that headline (example whatever you might think of Pulp, they don't matter now more than ever), but it's important because it changes the whole tenor of the argument. Socialists are never abstractly for freedom of speech. We are never abstractly for anything. We deal (or should deal) in concrete matters, actual questions. I would be quite happy if the state banned the EDL (and the EDL alone) from marching in Tower Hamlets. I would be quite happy if the EDL would be prevented from assembling. I would be over the moon if the EDL was forcibly dissolved and any Continuity-EDLs prevented from forming. The trouble is these are completely unrealistic demands to make of a bourgeois state, one that, as the author rightly points out, is working tirelessly to prevent any left-wing challenge emerging to its austerity programme.
We don't call for a ban on fascist marches because, at the very least, there is a history of those calls rebounding on the left. We call for mass opposition on the streets. But, in this context, suggesting we 'let the EDL racists march', whoever wrote it, means letting the Tory trolls out to drool over the CiF site (fweedom of speesh!). The argument is immediately shifted to the right.
[Roobin's note] the assembly point and time for Saturday's UAF demo has changed to the corner of Whitechapel Road and Vallance Road near the East London Mosque at 11am (Nearest tube Whitechapel).
Please spread the word.