Fascists March Past
Socialist Press1978 1978-09-27Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 12 →
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up Bas PHOTO: PHOTO: Mark Rusher, IFL • 50,000 workers and youth joined the massive Anti-Nazi League 'Carnival 2' last week in another vivid display of working-class hostility to racism and But, in a calculated provocation to anti-fascists and to the immigrant community, 1,000 National Front thugs flanked by 5,000 police staged a simultaneous march into the old Mosley stronghold of Hoxton.
ANL leaders, including the ever-talkative Peter Hain, had made no real effort to oppose this mobilisation, and the Front were challenged by no more than 1,500 anti-fascists as they marched through the Brick Lane area from which NF paper sellers had been driven out a few weeks ago.
Immigrant
While the mass forces rallied to the ANL danced to the music of Elvis Costello, on the other side of London immigrant youth and workers were attacked by police SPG thugs, who energetically cleared a path for their fascist friends.
And as coaches pulled out of Brockwell Park after the Carnival, anti-fascists travelling by tube from Brick Lane were savagely attacked by NF supportersand then searched by police.
Nothing could more clearly show that the building of a "mass", largely non-political movement such as the ANL, based on an unhappy compromise between "revolutionary" and bourgeois groupings, is no substitute for the struggle to mobilise the workers' movement in the building of genuine workers defence squads to drive the fascists off the streets wherever they show their heads.
It was conspicuous that both in Brick Lane and in Brockwell Park it was the Workers Socialist League and the Socialist Youth League who, almost alone, fought for this essential policy.