The English Defence League; 'Real' immigrants

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, The English Defence League; 'Real' immigrants

"‘The English Defence League, the EDL, characterized in that commentary as a far right group. Well, it's a label which readily conjures up such other terms as racist and fascist. It's a label which almost seems to preempt the need for any further inquiry into the precise nature of such a movement. But it was exactly that kind of foreclosure that led my next guest to undertake a major ethnographic study of the EDL study, which in the words of one reviewer breaks apart stereotypes of rightist activists as simply dupes, thugs, and racists. Well, that study which is now published as Loud and proud: passion and politics in the English Defence League, is the work of Hilary Pilkington, who's professor of sociology at the University of Manchester’...

‘The electoral results, looking here 1980-2012 show that support for far right parties such as the British National Party didn't really rise above 1% until 2012, then rose to 1.8%. And that level of support has remained below countries such as France and the Netherlands’...

‘One way you can look at this is to think about why, what are the reasons there might be for those parties not having made it through into national parliament, for example. And one of those reasons is quite simply we have a political system which makes it very difficult for them to do that. So if you look at BNP, but also UKIP, they've had electoral successes, and rather paradoxically, in the European Parliament. So I think if you look perhaps at other measures, like for example, the ongoing European surveys on values and attitudes, so if you look at base levels of xenophobia, for example, you find that the UK has around 20%, which is typical of other Western European societies where there have been major breakthroughs by populist radical right parties into national Parliaments’...

‘The English Defence League initially rose in defense of British troops coming home from Afghanistan’...

‘Interestingly, the mission statement of the English Defence League didn't change for the entire period that I was in the field. And it's only recently that there's been, I would say a significant shift in the way that it expresses its aim. So the new mission statement issued in January 2016, for example, for the first time has any statement on immigration. Prior to that there was no official statement on immigration’

‘Now, I've got here, these are the words of one of the speakers at a sort of a national demonstration, which expands upon who is being targeted by the EDL. This goes back to, this is Luton, 2014’

‘I’m not talking about the guy you carpool with. I’m not talking about the guy you see at the school gates, picking up the children. I’m talking about the extremists, the loons the clerics and the imans who want to preach a seventh century ideology in a 21st century world.’

‘That's interesting because your respondents, reading what they had to say, they're keen to stress. That they were only opposed, this is that time, they were only exposed to extremism, not to individual Muslim people. In addition, many of them also claimed not to be racist. I mean, I know it's an ethnography, you're not going to be judge and jury on this. But how consistent and convincing did you find those sort of claims? Not racist, you know, not anti muslim?’

‘I think there are a number of different differentiations that they make, actually. So one of them is, some people would make a differentiation between militant - what they called militant or extremist Muslims - and Muslims. Most of the respondents I talked to extensively, though, made an even more important distinction between Islam and Muslims. So for example, they would make a point of saying, we are not protesting against Muslims, we have nothing against Muslims. We think there is a, an inherent problem in Islam or in certain readings of Islam. So they would make that, that that distinction. That's not to say that, especially in the heat of demonstrations, on the coach, in the banter, in the run up to demonstrations, there wouldn't be a slippage between those positions’…

‘My response to that is to imagine if somebody told you that they were very hostile to Judaism, but not to Jews. Now, history and convention would immediately probably set the alarm bells ringing because while it might be possible in some respect to hold the things separately, in practice, they quickly come together. For example, how would an EDL member identify a practitioner of Islam? They’d look for a Muslim. And to do that they'd use social signs, dress, appearance, name or skin color, perhaps all of those in a way, which means we're talking here about how groups are made into a race rather than religion, per se. And I think Hillary brings it out really well in the description of Kane and Tina at least in that section on seeing Islam, which brings us back I think, to many of the mechanics of how Islam is racialized. And insofar as it becomes this kind of explanatory variable for all that’s alien in these young people's political imagination’...

‘Their grievances are quite widespread, but they're usually expressed in terms of a sense that people like us, have become second class citizens. So it would be expressed on one level in relation to what they perceived as competition over resources, especially social housing. And the second main articulation of it would be around a sense that there was a two tier justice system as I called it. So things which were understood as racist when they were perpetrated against others in inverted commas, were not perceived as being racist when perpetrated against us.’...

‘Since you've completed your research, they've got a new mission statement, which is, it references the first time the need to control immigration, unlike their previous statement, what do you make of this development?’

‘It's an interesting development. I think it's not surprising given you know, in 2015, it was a rather bizarre situation where every mainstream party had a policy on immigration and was talking about how they would control immigration and what benefits they would reduce for certain types of immigrants and so on. And the EDL had no statement on immigration’...

‘They did expressively disassociate themselves from the British National Party didn’t they?’

‘Oh, yes, there's a grassroots level, almost all respondents are adamant that they would have nothing to do with with the BMP. That only two respondents out of my whole group were, had been former members of the BMP. And both had very strong reasons for why they'd left.’


Good to show to people who claim the BBC is entirely and irrevocably biased and 'leftist'

Presumably according to Nasar Meer (who conflates criticism of extremist Islam with criticism of Islam, and then with anti-Muslim sentiment), we can't criticise fundamentalist Christianity

Curiously other episodes don't have second interviewees who critique the first. But I'll take what I can get...