Guess who started the Tottenham riots? And guess who is attempting to cover it up?
full text of the post in The Westminster Journal below the break.
By Dominic Wightman
Last night on Clarence Road in North London – at the epicentre of recent rioting – a group of Socialist Worker Party protesters gathered. Soon they were chanting about how the police were agents of a capitalist state incapable of providing jobs and money to this poor part of London. They were generally engaged in rabble rousing.
The hooded youths around them were peaceful at first and chatting with the police – enjoying tins of beer and having a smoke. The police were relaxed and chatting with the youths and with a mass of assembled journalists. There was no sign of violence.
Then the Socialist Worker Party protesters started getting louder and nastier. Some of them started swearing at the police and invoking the name of Mark Duggan (the man who is the centre of an IPCC investigation and was killed last week). They called the police racist. One woman amongst them was so agitated she was literally spitting at the police as she chanted – her face full of hate.
The youths present began to walk away and then returned in masks. Things were soon turning ugly.
Within ten minutes of the mention of Duggan’s name by the Socialist Worker Party activists, one of the youths – whipped up into a frenzy by the Socialist Worker Party protesters – had grabbed an expensive-looking TV camera from one of the gathered journalists and smashed it into smithereens on the street floor.
The youths started to look menacing. They brandished sticks. They too began to shout. They joined in with the Socialist Worker Party chants and taunted the police. The mood had turned toxic.
The police started issuing public order warnings across a loudspeaker.
Still the Socialist Worker Party protesters swore and chanted – urging the youths on.
Only when the scene actually turned violent did the Socialist Worker Party members disperse – their banners and SWP paraphernalia bagged up for another place or another day.
Their policy seems to be to start a fight between others – in this case the youths and the police – then run off and hide.
If this was not incitement to violence then what was it?
The Socialist Worker Party should be billed by the police for what they kicked off. They poured petrol on the flames of the violence last night. As one local person mentioned to the BBC yesterday night, “the Socialist Worker Party hijacked what was – until they intervened – a peaceful event.”
There is plenty of footage of the Socialist Worker Party protesters which was collected by the journalists present. They should all hand this to the police today.
The Socialist Workers’ Party, Britain’s biggest “Trotskyist” group, has a small following of cranks and dropouts. Their actions last night are symptomatic of a party so far out on the fringes that it has become a national joke.
Yet the Socialist Worker Party is surprisingly relevant, at least in London, in less than a month’s time. Why?
The English Defence League plans to march through Tower Hamlets in East London (an area with a large Asian, mostly Muslim, population) on the 3rd of September.
The campaign to build the “No Place for Hate” demonstration (a “celebration of diversity” planned for the day of the EDL’s march), led by Unite Against Fascism (which is controlled by the Socialist Worker Party) is underway.
How can a group of self-proclaimed anti fascists be led and organised by a group involved in blatantly inciting violence? Could it be that the anti fascists seek to portray the EDL as violent and racist by egging them on so the headlines that get associated with the EDL are ones associated with violence? Are the EDL fascists at all? If the EDL are not fascists – which they claim not to be (in spite of some oiks raising their arms in Nazi salutes at EDL past marches) – why are the anti fascists called anti fascists?
A more pertinent question may be – has someone let all the lunatics out of the asylum?
I have written in the past about how I see the EDL as an utterly pointless grouping. My views have not changed. I have written about how they are better off disbanding and shutting up shop.
The broad-brush, anti-Islamist views of the EDL are views which will only cause conflict when what is needed in Britain today is constant surveillance of, and investigation into, the crazies (the extremist Islamists who genuinely seek world domination) – which is happening anyway – alongside an embracing of the peaceful Muslims (which even includes some Islamists) in Britain who have made a real effort to integrate and are not simply in Britain to use, abuse and splinter. The EDL’s broad stroke is dangerous when what is needed is exactly the multi-faceted, intelligent approach being adopted by the British authorities.
Now I tell the police to follow up last night’s events with a robust prosecution of those Socialist Worker Party inciters on the streets of London last night. Hit them where it hurts – bill them for what they caused in terms of injuries and damage. Chase up their online comrades who are also engaged in incitement – particularly on Twitter – during these volatile days and nights. Crack down on this small, irrelevant rabble who deserve prosecution and deserve to be billed; if necessary, so they are forced to disband too.
Unions should look at their SWP ties. If Unions are going to continue further into this century they really need to look at the apparatchiks they employ and run down and expel the SWP members so as to gain some kind of genuine worker political representation. Boris Johnson has almost cleaned them out of the London Administration but needs to finish the job of erasing them after Livingstone let them in. (Yes, some of them were celebrating alongside extremist Islamists inside Livingstone’s office on the eleventh of September 2001.)
The march planned for the 3rd of September should be banned. Let’s face it – both sides are as bad as each other and neither side is representative of the British people either as a whole or in terms of any kind of critical mass. These days are too volatile for a march of this kind in the heart of London which is suffering enough.
The SWP campaign is attempting to invoke the spirit of Cable Street in its publicity. Let it be known that the winners that day would have laughed their heads off at the tadpole Socialist Worker Party of today – a party whose growth is not only stunted by clinging to passé ideas; a party whose functionaries and followers are as extreme and unwanted as Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were back in 1936.’
