EDL and UAF: Two Sides of the Same Stupid Coin

Despite wandering around Nottingham city centre for most of the day, I managed to miss this:

Police have clashed with members of the English Defence League during a protest in Nottingham, with 11 people arrested.

And you know what? I am pretty pleased not to have got involved with either side of this pointless bloody protest. Let's start with having a pop at the Evil Dangerous Loonies English Defence League:

Some 300 demonstrators from the EDL marched through the city centre shouting: "We want our country back."

I'm sorry, but have you actually lost your country? Because walking around Nottingham is not a particularly cosmopolitan experience. The town is overwhelmingly British; and white British at that. Demanding your country back is pretty hysterical and ignorant at the best of times; demanding your country back when you haven't lost it seems to be downright stupid.

Let's take a look as some words of "wisdom" from one chinless, EDL-supporting wonder:

"I think it's disgusting. I look at their protest and there's a Pakistani flag flying with a Muslim symbol. Their protest isn't against the EDL, they're protesting against the troops and it's anti-British."

That's a big leap, isn't it? From seeing a Pakistani flag (that probably would have a Muslim symbol on it for obvious reasons) to seeing a protest is disloyal to troops (we aren't fighting in Pakistan, you poor ignorant fool) and anti-British. Sometimes a foreign flag is just that, rather than a call for an Islamic revolution in Britain.

But it isn't just the EDL who have displayed their moronic tendencies today. We also have had the Union of Accidental Fascists Unite Against Fascism lot out and about today:

Michael Vickery, from the UAF, said: "It's not good enough not to have any kind of a response (to the EDL presence) because basically, if we don't have a protest then it's letting them come into town and say 'this is our place for the day', which it isn't, it belongs to everyone in Nottingham."

It is possible to have respond to the EDL without having an antagonistic protest. This blogpost would be a good example. I'm calling the EDL a bunch of hysterical, bigoted morons without leaving my front room. And just because the EDL chose to have a protest in Nottingham doesn't mean that they own the place for the day. Just as the anti-war protestors camped outside of Parliament definitely do not own Westminster. The danger with the UAF is that they are trying to strangle the EDL's right to spout their terrible shite. And in doing so are showing themselves to be just as ignorant as the EDL, albeit in a very different way.

See, this is democracy. Both the EDL and the UAF have a right to protest; just as I have a democratic right to say that I wish that both groups would learn to get over themselves and find something better to do with their time than wasting police resources on a Saturday afternoon.