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Tommy Robinson, the court case and (guffaw) 'free speech'

Given that razor sharp quip, can you come up with any piss-taking Tommy Robinson chants? The more belittling and humiliating the better.
Writer's block immediately sets in.

ETA Had a fag and came up with:

He's the peado's best friend,
He's the peado's best friend,
Trial-wrecker Tommy.
He's the peado's best friend.

To the old terrace tune.

Not great, I admit
 
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the tommy botherers are having an impromptu rally in leeds tomorrow. Why they are doing this two weeks before the more widely advertised one on the 7th is unclear. Maybe they hope that there will be less numbers to oppose them as all the mainstream groups - unions,labour party - are focused on the 7th and their is a big joe cox memorial event tomorrow. Seeing as they whistled up few hundred a short notice a few days after our tommy's suicide-by-judge - i think we could see similar numbers - or bigger - tomorrow and only a small anti-fa turn out. High likely hood of trouble - cops seem to think so as they've cancelled all leave and other events.

nice one. bit gutted not to be able to get to this as i had to be somewhere else in town at the same time. I was walking through town at 12.30 expecting to see marauding goblets of knuckle draggers but the only sign of anything was one family where the women was wearing a "Free Tommy" t-shirt.

Relived that they got so few numbers - Im mystified why they called this demo TBH - anyone outside the hard core who turned up will likely be put off future events. Hopefully this might undermine turn out on the 7th. Well done to anti-fa who turned out - pretty decent showing in the circumstances.
 
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...I'm mystified why they called this demo TBH...

Listening to some of them they seemed a bit baffled to why it had been called as well - on top of their general bafflement at the world. There was a fair bit of grumbling about it, hopefully it'll sow some seeds of internal dissent among them as well as like you say making them look weak and bonkers to any casual attendees.

Although with the CPGB-ML micro-gang flying 2 large hammer and sickle flags and a Syrian flag at the antifa demo we had our own bonkers faction. :mad:
 
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Good article here from Paul Mason

Ukip’s turn to the alt-right is a warning sign - we need to fight back

The liberal intelligentsia neither knows or cares; the mass media is oblivious; and their combined indifference provides further proof to the conspiracists that this important story is actually being suppressed by the establishment.

The liberal centre is, as always, clueless about how to defeat far right politics. When I commented that the BBC News bulletin on 9 June had actually failed to report a major far right riot in the centre of London, numerous people said “good”. Better not to give them publicity has been the liberal centre’s excuse for failing to fight fascism since the 1920s.
 
at future demos there should be some bob placards

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Mason’s article is full on, jumped the shark, “don’t care what you think” Popular Frontism. He calls for anti fascist unity with conservatives and security services/state action against the far right. He doesn’t have the excuse of not knowing how popular frontism ended last time. His argument rests on the left allying with, nay, depending upon, the very forces responsible for creating the preconditions for fascism in the first place.
Mason is now a caricature of the “apolitical” ex-SWPer, (or “left wing” US Democrat for that matter) desperately flailing around for an angle, flummoxed as to who has agency, looking for some force with the power to act and coming up with ........the existing neo-liberal establishment and the national security state.
 
Mason’s article is full on, jumped the shark, “don’t care what you think” Popular Frontism. He calls for anti fascist unity with conservatives and security services/state action against the far right. He doesn’t have the excuse of not knowing how popular frontism ended last time. His argument rests on the left allying with, nay, depending upon, the very forces responsible for creating the preconditions for fascism in the first place.
Mason is now a caricature of the “apolitical” ex-SWPer, (or “left wing” US Democrat for that matter) desperately flailing around for an angle, flummoxed as to who has agency, looking for some force with the power to act and coming up with ........the existing neo-liberal establishment and the national security state.
Ex-workers power, technically .
 
Good article here from Paul Mason

Ukip’s turn to the alt-right is a warning sign - we need to fight back

The liberal intelligentsia neither knows or cares; the mass media is oblivious; and their combined indifference provides further proof to the conspiracists that this important story is actually being suppressed by the establishment.

The liberal centre is, as always, clueless about how to defeat far right politics. When I commented that the BBC News bulletin on 9 June had actually failed to report a major far right riot in the centre of London, numerous people said “good”. Better not to give them publicity has been the liberal centre’s excuse for failing to fight fascism since the 1920s.

pay wall jobby for me (only allowed so many articles per year of summit) - could you cut and past it?
 
Some supporters turned up to heckle/disrupt the state of London address with the mayor this evening...lasted about 10 mins...oh, Tommy, Tommy... okay Thanks, byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.... :D
 
pay wall jobby for me (only allowed so many articles per year of summit) - could you cut and past it?

Will do:

I’ve always said that if Brexit is the worst thing that happens to Britain - as centrism and the global order implode - we’ll have got away lightly. What it would mean not to get away lightly is becoming clear, as the forces of the UK far right converge around a single project.

Ukip, under new leader Gerard Batten, has reoriented itself towards street politics and the groups who specialise in it. On 9 June, the party took part in a demonstration to free jailed English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson, which became a drunken rampage across Whitehall, totally outflanking the police deployed to contain it.



On 23 June, Ukip joined the counter-demonstration against the anti-Brexit march, rubbing shoulders once again with an increasingly familiar set of open racists: the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA), the Veterans Against Terrorism group, whose elderly members turned up in service berets, and Generation Identity.

At that march, Ukip MEP Janice Atkinson accused the Jewish financier George Soros of running a “Euro Communist” conspiracy to flood the West with Muslim refugees. Meanwhile, three key video bloggers from the US-inspired alt-right - Paul Joseph Watson, Mark Meechan and Carl Benjamin have been allowed to join Ukip. Each has massive followings on the social media platforms they are still tolerated on. Meechan is famous for getting his pug dog to give Nazi salutes as he says “gas the Jews”.

Veteran far right watchers say the two marches, preceded by a surge of mobilisations in support of Robinson, mark a breakthrough for the far right. It’s been accompanied by a change in Ukip’s rhetoric. Having focused mainly on Europe, immigration and stoking up hostility to Islam, Ukip’s billboard driven around on the side of a van last Saturday advised people to Google “Soros immigration” and “Bilderberg Group” – two classic obsessions of the anti-Semitic right.




Though the far right in Britain remains small, the 9 June demo was its biggest for decades, pulling in a clear demographic of young, white, working class men and women, and drawing on a wide online subculture of racism, Islamophobia and conspiracy theories that goes largely unnoticed by the liberal mainstream.

What we’re seeing is the convergence of three strands of far right activism that, in Britain, have remained distinct until now.

One is the hardcore of violent racists who want to pursue a “street first” project, exerting their rights to “free speech” - for example by picketing kebab shops and supermarkets selling halal meat. The three English football fans charged last week after singing “Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz; Hitler’s gonna gas them again,” while making the Nazi salute in a bar in Volgograd, are emblematic of that tendency.

Another is US-inspired online alt-right activism. Paul Joseph Watson, newly issued with a Ukip membership card, has 800k+ Twitter followers and a huge audience in the USA, where alongside Alex Jones, on the internet channel Infowars, he peddles conspiracy theories and fake news. The point about the online alt-right is that it comes with a heavily theorised (if largely incoherent) conspiracy theory of the world that traditional British fascism lacked the brain cells for.


In their world, mass migration has turned western cities into hellholes of crime, rape and murder. Western civilisation is under threat. Culture war has erupted into real violence and the only question remaining is when does the shooting start.

The point about the alt-right is that it’s international. It has serious money and organisational expertise – which anti-fascist monitoring groups believe is now being used to mobilise around Tommy Robinson in the UK. And its agenda is international. A murder in Sweden, which would never make the news in Britain, becomes a lurid headline on Breitbart and is spread among grass roots Ukippers and politicised football fans to the point where it becomes folklore in the pubs and clubs of Britain.

The liberal intelligentsia neither knows or cares; the mass media is oblivious; and their combined indifference provides further proof to the conspiracists that this important story is actually being suppressed by the establishment.

The third element in the mix is Ukip. And where it’s all going is clear.

Over the summer, Theresa May will have to level with the hard-right Brexiteers in her cabinet and parliamentary party, that Britain is going to end up in a customs union, a single market for goods, most likely permanently aligned with the EU on services and committed to something very close to free movement. It will be paying money to Brussels and it will be subject to judgments by the European Court of Justice.


As these facts become clear to the Tory right they will stage a tantrum but not a walkout. That opens the political space, not just for a Ukip 2.0 party, but for it to re-emerge with two new “wings” – its street wing, largely middle-aged football “lads” and a few ex-servicemen; and its online wing, fuelled by the international alt-right, egged on by the ruling Lega party in Italy and the coalition of xenophobes that governs Hungary, Austria and Poland.

The liberal centre is, as always, clueless about how to defeat far right politics. When I commented that the BBC News bulletin on 9 June had actually failed to report a major far right riot in the centre of London, numerous people said “good”. Better not to give them publicity has been the liberal centre’s excuse for failing to fight fascism since the 1920s.

Unfortunately, they don’t need publicity anymore. The combined following of the big three online activists who just joined Ukip runs into millions. Money, expertise and energy will be poured into overlapping networks to resist the “betrayal” of Brexit. That is the far right’s script from now until March 2019.

And after that, as global businesses flee Britain, as growth stagnates, will come the search for scapegoats. On this, if on nothing else, Tony Blair is right: it leads in a 1930s direction.

What should be done

By the Tory government? Stop pandering to the agenda of the racist right; be honest with the British people that hard Brexit was a chimera; deploy the full panoply of security measures to deter and monitor the violent projects of the racists. For clarity, unlike many on the left, that means I am in favour of state suppression of fascist groups.

By the liberal centre? By all means protest against Brexit and demand a “second vote”. But understand that decent, Labour voting working class people now have to live in communities and in an online space polluted with the “stab in the back” narrative. If there is a second referendum, the concessions already made by Theresa May mean that a hard, no-deal Brexit is already off the ballot paper. The choice would effectively be between accepting what May negotiates and staying in. The political forces of xenophobia and racism in Britain will at this point be supercharged.

If Britain’s multi-ethnic cities then become targets for a campaign of racist marches against the Brexit “betrayal” it is incumbent on every democrat to turn up and confront – yes, confront – the kind of people who marched on 23 June changing “Whose streets? Our streets?”

As for the broadcasters, they now face serious dilemmas. The BBC in the run up to Brexit booked Nigel Farage an almost permanent seat on its primetime outlets. With Ukip’s turn to outright extremism, flirting with anti-Semitic rhetoric and openly backing Robinson, there should no place for them on the broadcast media, other than what is required by electoral law.

By the labour movement? Mobilise. On 14 July, the far right will picket Downing Street calling for Tommy Robinson to be freed. We should oppose them in large numbers.

This won’t be a re-run of the battles in the 1970s against the National Front and the Powellite wing of the Tories. Ukip comes with the veneer of a party that gained 3.8 million votes in 2015. There was no internet, no troll farms, no American alt-right money to spread fake news, and no Russian hybrid warfare stoking up the tensions.

Above all, the far right will have a real cause celebre, to underpin all its obsessions, prejudices and conspiracies: Brexit will fail.

It will fail in the very terms the Mail and Sun have stoked up among the plebeian base of right-wing conservatism: Britain will remain aligned to the EU regulatory superpower only with reduced influence on it. It will not be “free” of Europe; it will have been subjected to a stinging diplomatic and reputational defeat.

If you then add in a Corbyn-led government, with a black home secretary and an immigration policy based on tolerance, not hostility, the far right’s script writes itself.

The progressive half of Britain needs a narrative to overcome this threat: a narrative based on shared, historic values of democracy and tolerance, backed by the return of growth and prosperity to left behind towns and cities that breed groups like the DFLA. For the purposes of argument I include Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid in the progressive half of Britain and ask them: faced with the developments outlined above - stop pandering to right-wing nationalism and xenophobia and start fighting it.
 
Some supporters turned up to heckle/disrupt the state of London address with the mayor this evening...lasted about 10 mins...oh, Tommy, Tommy... okay Thanks, byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.... :D

Some background on one attendee of that protest:

So far, so tedious: one cannot object to free dissenting speech. But it was the backstory that should cause disquiet among all those who do not yet take the far right seriously. The protests, it seems, were connected to an incident where a drunk driver ran over and killed three teenage boys. Jaynesh Chudasama had entered a guilty plea; in the event, as he had fled the scene, this counted for little, and he was jailed for 13 years.

The maximum jail sentence at present for death by dangerous driving is 14 years. But what does this have to do with Sadiq Khan, and indeed Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson? Ah well. Rather than keep out of the matter, Lennon has been egging on at least one of the bereaved parents into believing that this was a terrorist attack. It wasn’t. The driver was drunk. And he wasn’t a Scary Muslim™.

That has not reassured Tracy Blackwell, whose son John McGuinness was one of those killed. She has been to speak at Lennon’s events, she Retweets those claiming George Soros was behind last weekend’s Peoples Vote march, as well as Geert Wilders. She appeals to Donald Trump for attention. She wants to see Lennon freed. And she was, it seems, one of those protesting at the State of London debate yesterday.

Stephen Lennon, rather than telling Tracy Blackwell that her son was killed by a drunk driver, has backed the view that is summed up by the claim “they were mowed down and murdered by terrorists. Ever since that day the Establishment, Met Police and the CPS have conspired to keep the truth away from all of us”.

No-one can bring Josh McGuinness and his two pals back. The grief experienced by Tracy Blackwell and those other parents cannot be imagined. And that just makes it worse that the likes of Stephen Lennon have exploited that grief in order to fuel the pretence that this was a terrorist attack. The Met know a bit about terrorist attacks. And they have tried their best to tell Ms Blackwell and the other parents that it really wasn’t.

The more that Stephen Lennon manipulates people in this way, the more likely it will end very badly. Pretending the Police are the enemy is not clever. Claiming the Mayor is in on the non-existent conspiracy is worse. This stoking of resentment has got to stop.
 
Some supporters turned up to heckle/disrupt the state of London address with the mayor this evening...lasted about 10 mins...oh, Tommy, Tommy... okay Thanks, byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.... :D

Bit like the ones who turned up at the moggy one last yr , Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeee :D
 
Post liked but not really liked. Iykwim.

That's so awful that her loss is being exploited and woven into a bigotry and conspiracy theories. It's so fucked up :(

Indeed. When you hear her speak you can almost see the dividing line between her pain and grievance (the bloke got concurrent sentences rather than consecutive ones, so in effect he will only get six years for killing three people - which is outrageous) and the bits where other people have woven in their own issues into her narrative. Obviously that is how they operate, but even for them this is an especially vile example.
 
If you go on the TR FB page, there is an increasing amount of people, most over 60, , including many women, who say it will be their first ever march on the 14th, they see Robinson as some sort of cipher for the old england that has gone, it won't be a good look if they are attacked on the day whatever their views. analysing those who are going it also seems to have graduates, inc Cambridge ones, going, as well as East/Central Europeans, it looks like it will be very different than past ones. Though also plenty of WC Tories/Kippers, etc.
 
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If you go on the TR FB page, there is an increasing amount of people, most over 60, , including many women, who say it will be their first ever march on the 14th, they see Robinson as some sort of cipher for the old england that has gone, it won't be a good look if they are attacked on the day whatever their views. analysing those who are going it also seems to have graduates, inc cambridge ones, going, it looks like it will be very different than past ones. Though also plenty of WC Tories/Kippers, etc.

How about if they're attacked by their own side?
 
I think the primary force energising this whole thing is a very real & deep-seated anger against "the Establishment" & "the Elite" - I have seen a few - admittedly not very many - non-white faces at some of these demos. To that extent I think you can ( & should ) distinguish "populism" & the support it garners amongst relatively ordinary benign members of the public from "the Far Right" who only represent a sub-set within this "movement"s supporters.
 
Can't see 19th C left/SWP fronted orgs like UAF making that distinction, nuance isn't in their vocabulary.

Yes, this is what i gauge from the FB/social media,, antipathy to elites, the PTB, even increasingly the police, but also visceral hostility to 'paedo's' and now frequently the Left.
 
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