Our Changing Kingdom; Time For REAL Change from the Shuttle

The Shuttle has closed off comments on this entry so I'll open this entry for any who wish to continue, particularly as Jon D suggested he might come back after some rumination.

Anyway the last comment was from Rob pointing to a Guardian investigation of the EDL I'll highlight a couple of points from the video.

An early opening bar and a bunch of men, all it takes is one to start shouting out slogans and everyone joins in. Displays tendencies, but hardly incriminating.

Provocation. Yeah shouting "Nazis, Go to Hell, Get off our streets" is in no way provocative.

The editor of Searchlight the anti-fascist magazine states outright that right-wing groups are "latching on" to the EDL to use as a political platform. As I've stated before this doesn't make the EDL racist, but that it might just be being used by racists.

Threatening telephone messages? Do we get to listen to the EDL's messages as well. Yeah I'm sure there are no members of the UAF calling them up to telling them to stay out of areas if they know what's good for them.

73 arrests at one 'protest' 54 of them being the anti-fascists protesting against the protest. Well that sends a good message.

Journalists getting punched, yeah because that never normally happens.

Gosh an organisation against 'Islamification' heading out to predominantly Muslim areas, I'm so surprised - next you'll be suggesting political activists head to Westminster.

On a final note as I've said elsewhere why is this such a growing organisation, why are people joining the EDL rather than mainstream political groups? Rob might answer that it's because they're racist and the mainstream parties aren't, but that's a broad sweep to pull every member into. Even one of the talking heads (Matther Goodwin) posits "does it show that there are sections of this population that are concerned about Islam beyond the core constituency of the far-right? Yeah"