EDL: overdosing on the oxygen of publicity

Almost as soon as the news broke about the gruesome murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, left-wing groups took to Twitter to warn of a potential backlash from far-right, so-called Islamophobic groups like the English Defence league (EDL) and the British National Party (BNP). Numerous articles have since been published warning of a resurgence in racism and other nightmare scenarios. Certainly, the EDL has held some loud if small protests following the killing of Rigby. But an explosion in far-right hate? That remains squarely in the heads of scaremongering commentators.

There would need to be a very big resurgence for either the EDL or BNP to make new inroads. After all, the BNP has in recent years been all but ousted from local councils around Britain. It only ever managed to gain a tiny fraction of local-council seats anyway. The number of protesters the EDL has been able to mobilise has dropped off massively in recent times – it now rarely gets together more than a couple of hundred people. Only last month it was reported that an EDL gathering in Dewsbury narrowly avoided being attacked by Islamists because there were so few people at the gathering that it fizzled out and everyone went home. To the dismay of commentators and anti-fascist organisations, who have long made hay from far-right antics, both the EDL and BNP look close to being defunct…

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