Fashwatch is Back

Posted on 18. Dec, 2009 by fashwatch in Anti Fascists

When we closed this site for business a little over 2 years ago the internal rifts within the BNP were threatening to tear the party in two. Since then those particular rifts have been unceremoniously ironed out, the BNP have two MEPs and their leader Nick Griffin has appeared amongst other hapless bureaucrats on the BBC’s Question Time.

We’ve also witnessed the return of nationalists to our streets with the BNP influenced English Defence League taking their crusade against Muslims to cities around England, Scotland and Wales.

The recession has seen a right shift in politics with race, religion and immigration taking an all too prominent place in political discourse. We’ve had religious fundamentalists appearing on GMTV and right wing football hooligans roaming our streets, looking for confrontation with Asian youth and increasingly any anti-fascist who opposes them.

It is in this climate of rising jingoism and the continuing normalisation of the divisive politics of the BNP that Fashwatch has been re-launched but the purpose this time is subtly different.

The Original Fashwatch

When we first appeared we were distributing stickers asking for information on fascist activity and saying this was to be passed onto Antifa and other militant antifascist groups. This wasn’t the entire truth about our activities.
When information we received concerned a specific area it was passed on to a relevant group and we published the email addresses of various groups at their request so information could be passed directly. It was clear to us though that any information given to us anonymously by email was virtually impossible to verify and probably less than worthless.   The BNP and other groups of course could not be sure what was being passed to us and what resources we had to analyse it. What we aimed to create and did so quite successfully was a time sponge for the BNP during local elections. The resources of the first incarnation of Fashwatch were entirely focused on producing and distributing stickers. More than 10,000 were sent all over the UK. This gave the impression we were a much larger and well-resourced organisation than we really were.

During the 2007 local elections we were at our most active. In Birmingham over 1000 thousand stickers went up around the city between March and May. The BNP instead of concentrating on their election effort were organising patrols to find us and worrying themselves about what information we had been passed. In streets where we knew a BNP activist lived we made sure a large number of stickers were displayed. That we already knew they were there didn’t seem to occur to them, we diverted them from winning elections with scary looking bits of plastic.

With the emergence of the leaked BNP membership lists the personal details of BNP activists are now more widely available than ever before and anyone can, if so inclined, use those details.

The New Fashwatch.

It is clear now at the end of 2009 that traditional forms of antifascism have failed. Tactics such as distributing propaganda and organising mass protests employed by the UAF have had no discernable effect on the trajectory of the BNP and while the militant form advocated by Antifa has achieved small victories in some areas this approach clearly has it’s limits and obvious drawbacks.
What is required is a new approach, or maybe an old approach depending on how you look at it. An article in Red Pepper recently titled  Antifascism isn’t Working laid out a realistic assessment of the current situation and more importantly how best to proceed. In a nutshell the model of exposing the BNP and it’s leaders past should be replaced by exposing the ineffectiveness of their policies in tackling social problems and building alternatives. Paul Stott in a speech Giving up No Platform to the Anarchist Book Fair this year argued for the same approach.

It is as part of this current of thought that Fashwatch has been re-launched. Again we’re asking for details of fascist activity in your area but this time we don’t want names or phone numbers. We want details of their political activity, what they’re doing to win votes and the arguments they’re using.

In our section on antifascists we want to detail grass roots organisations that are working in their areas to improve conditions and that have an antifascist stance such as Haringey Solidarity and the IWCA and less well known groups such as the Pits n Pots a radical news site in Stoke on Trent and the Hereford Heckler.

The aim is to use Fashwatch as a resource for analysing the BNP and other far right groups and opposition to them. To look at the initiatives that have been employed by local groups who are opposed to the BNP.  What has been successful and what has been less than successful.