You'll notice I've been a bit quiet lately. Not to worry, I'm okay but just busy with uni work and other commitments. More great posts soon to come.
Yesterday I went to London with my Portsmouth comrades to what was the largest anti-far right counter-demo in UK history which amassed half a million anti-racists marching together from Park Lane to Trafalgar square with the aim of uniting the people to demonstrate pride in the diverse cultural landscape of the country we live in and celebrate all who call it home. Unlike the pathetically small group of right-wing counterparts failing to provoke us, we were not establishing a mobilisation fuelled by fear and hatred, but collective hope for a peaceful future in which we could all live as one without the fear of conflict or persecution that comes against us for merely being who we are. Seeing the multitude of causes, signs shown and political groups represented, this felt like a true mobilisation to bring together and establish links between all means of mobilisation, and truly bring to light all forms of collective action we all as citizens of this world united in struggle can take, with these naturally not including anger and hate. Ultimately, this showed how there were truly many more of us anti-fascists combined with our common aim to overrule hate with love and fear with strength, than any sad racists with fragile bruised egos wishing to sabotage us with their displays of superficial so-called power. We now felt stronger than we imagined, and collectively a clear force to be reckoned with. Collectively united against the constant persecution and abuse of many, we all felt truly like cogs in a machine all here in our small individual forms to bring about varying degrees of change.
And this wasn't just down to observation within our bloc. The press (even the BBC, who are far from progressive and in support of our causes usually) was saying this too. We had five coaches organised by Stand Up to Racism coming from Portsmouth for this event, including one specific student coach with 30 people on it, and our SWSS group was the largest there. This was the largest mobilisation coming from Portsmouth since the Iraq war. I also, on a much smaller scale, managed to make a paper selling record for our SWSS and SWP, in that I was able to sell twelve copies of the Socialist Worker in the space of less than half an hour.
Unlike with many other protests against the far right in which I have left feeling demoralised, trampled on and drowned out by oppression and abuse, I got on the coach back to Portsmouth feeling stronger and with greater hope for the future. I felt that our collective efforts in crushing hate and making racism unwelcome in society, had really succeeded. We truly felt we were winning and our constant activism (even when reception was poor) had never failed. When travelling to and from many anti far right demos, I usually aim to keep a fairly low profile and make myself difficult to individually identify and arrest, or get recognised by the racists (wearing limited pin badges, fairly neutral clothing, less obvious makeup). But this time I didn't feel the need to worry about this so much, an obvious positive. The small far-right group waving Union Jacks, Shah Iranian flags, US flags and Israeli flags (how does one even support all of those at the same time?) were too small to be of any threat. You luckily couldn't even hear their chants. I hope that demos such as this continue to inspire others to bring about positive change and realise that, however small their actions, they are not irrelevant and they shouldn't feel afraid of the oppression and to lose hope because of this.
