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DRAFT – NOT TO BE CITED WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION

The Implications of Being a ‘Single Issue Protest Group’: The EDL and the evolution of the UK’s Anti-Minority Protest Scene

Joel Busher Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University Joel.busher@coventry.ac.uk

Since its launch in 2009, the English Defence League set itself out as a ‘single issue protest group’, campaigning against what movement spokespersons usually referred to as ‘militant Islam’ and the ‘Islamification’ of England (or Britain/Europe/The West, depending on whom one speaks to). Such strategies were in part adopted in an attempt to create distance between themselves and Britain’s conventional far right, in particular the British National Party and the National Front and their reputation for racism and thuggery. Yet this framing of their cause was not only a strategic ploy. Drawing primarily on 16 months of ethnographic research on EDL activism, in this paper I discuss how their positioning of themselves as part of a ‘single issue protest group’ was operationalised by activists, how it shaped the emergent movement culture, collective identities and tactical repertoires and had a profound effect on intra-movement relations. I describe how activists’ positioning of themselves as a single issue protest group helped them to draw in support and manage intra-movement ideological tensions; but I also describe how such framing of their cause and their movement identity generated their own points of ideological and strategic tension that eventually contributed to the fraying of the group’s social fabric.

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When I first started attending events organised by a group called the English Defence League

(EDL), a group that since 2009 has organised regular demonstrations ostensibly against the

‘Islamification of Britain’ or ‘Islamic extremism’, I made the same ‘mistake’ several times.

Not surprisingly, the activists I met were often keen to know who I was and what my research

was about. I would tell them that I was a sociologist with an interest in different forms of

political activism, and that what I wanted to understand about the EDL was how the group

had managed to sustain itself for more than two years in spite of considerable opposition.

Broadly speaking, this way of presenting myself seemed to work. During the year and a half

that I spent attending events organised by the EDL there were only two occasions on which

activists told me they would rather not speak to me, and one of those was early on in my

fieldwork before I became a recognised face. Several activists did pick me up on one point,

however. They would tell me, ‘that’s ok, but you need to understand, we’re not a political

movement, we’re a single issue group’ (my paraphrasing, based on field-notes), before going

on to explain what their ‘single issue’.

On one level this paper is about how this identification as a single issue movement, as well as

being an important part of the way activists presented themselves to the public (Copsey 2010;

Jackson 2011; Taylor 2010), also became central to many activists’ self-image and to the

group’s emergent movement culture. It is, in other words, about how EDL activists’

identification as part of a single issue group shaped the evolution of this wave of anti-

minority activism activism at macro-, meso- and micro-levels, shaping patterns of

recruitment, individuals’ ideological trajectories, emergent issue frames and tactical

repertoires and the more general ‘ebb and flow of organisational viability’ (Zald and Ash

Gardner 1987, 123).

In exploring how these identifications shaped this wave of anti-Muslim activism I also

develop a wider theoretical point about the value of phenomenological or ‘experience-near’

(Geertz 1974) analytical perspectives in understanding movement groups such as the EDL.

Most scholars of what might broadly be considered the far right, the radical right or those

groups somewhere near the fringes of these popular analytical categories, are by and large

wary of, even sceptical about, the idea of ‘single issue groups’. In part this is because such a

conceptualisation risks gross oversimplification of the issue frames around which such

groups mobilise and the causal and motivational pathways through which such groups

mobilise support (Mudde 1999). In the case of the EDL and the UK’s wider anti-Muslim

protest scene, for example, several analyses have found that participation in contemporary

anti-Muslim activism (Bartlett & Littler 2011; Busher 2015; Garland & Treadwell 2012; Pai

2016; Pilkington 2016; Treadwell & Garland 2011) and sympathy for groups such as the

EDL (Goodwin et al 2016; Pai 2016) is usually grounded in deep-rooted grievances,

frustrations and anxieties associated with perceptions that ‘ordinary English people’ are

suffering ever greater political and cultural marginalisation, with participants and

sympathisers often at least if not more concerned about a wider suite of issues including

immigration, a lack of jobs and concerns that ‘people like them’ lack both political voice and

access to justice. Indeed, Goodwin et al (2016) explicitly challenge the conceptualisation of

the EDL as a ‘single issue group’ on the grounds that that the strongest predictor of (tacit)

support for the EDL is ‘xenophobic hostility toward Muslims’ (p4). Furthermore, when

claims to be a single issue group emanate from a group such as the EDL, there are also

grounds to suspect that such claims are at least in part motivated by strategic interests, such

as attempting to distance themselves from the established extreme right and its toxic

association with racism, violence and anti-democratic positions (Jackson 2011; Mudde 2000).

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While acknowledging these grounds for scepticism about the concept of single issue groups

and recognising the need for a critical reading of the ways in which groups such as the EDL

present themselves, in this paper I argue: 1) that we should not dismiss these identifications

as simply a strategic attempt to detoxify their image, and 2) that by treating these analytically

as if they were straightforward truth claims to be evaluated by political science we overlook

an important point: regardless of whether or not we consider the description of a group such

as the EDL as a ‘single issue group’ to be ‘objectively’ accurate, the fact that activists

identify in this way is causally significant.

The discussion and arguments developed in this paper are grounded in the basic idea that

movement cultures – their tactical repertoires and tastes (Jasper 2007; Tilly 1986; Tilly

2008), issue frames (Benford & Snow 2000; Snow & Benford 1988), emotions repertoires,

‘rules’ and ‘rhythms’ (Goodwin et al 2001; Hochschild 1979; Summers-Effler 2010),

normative orders (Eliasoph 1999), aesthetics (Miller-Idriss 2014), and even activists’

interpretation of their own motives (Snow et al 1980; Wright Mills 1940) – are emergent.

They are developed, negotiated and policed over time through activists’ interactions with one

another and an array of allies, opponents, rivals and publics (Billig 1995; Busher 2015;

Swidler 1995). Changes in one element of the emergent movement culture by and large entail

adjustments in other elements of the culture – if activists’ interpretation of ‘the problem’

expands, it is likely that the targeting of the actions will change to reflect this, and new

strategies of action may be required, which in turn may lead activists to rethink their ideas

about what counts as legitimate strategies of action and so forth (Blee 2012). Activists’

identities are an integral part of emergent movement cultures (Hunt & Benford 2004; Polletta

& Jasper 2001). As such, providing that identity claims are enacted by a sufficient proportion

of the activist community or by activists of sufficient standing within the activist community,

such enacted identity claims will nonetheless have a bearing on how the group evolves,

regardless of the extent to which they are motivated by strategic interests and regardless of

the extent to which they might (willingly) simplify the causal drivers of support (della Porta

& Diani 2006, 181-5).

The paper is grounded primarily in data generated during the course of sixteen months of

overt ethnographic research undertaken with EDL activists in and around the London area

during 2011-2. This comprised observation at EDL demonstrations, meetings, memorials,

charity fundraisers and social events; activist life history interviews with 18 individuals; and

observation of public and private social media conversations involving EDL activists.

Contact with several of the activists continued until the autumn of 2013, and occasional email

or telephone contact with some activists continues to the present day. While the research had

a fairly narrow geographic focus, ethnographic research in other parts of the country are

broadly supportive of these findings (Garland & Treadwell 2012; Pilkington 2016; Treadwell

& Garland 2011)

An overview of the EDL and the UK’s anti-Muslim protest scene, 2009-2015

The EDL came to prominence in the summer of 2009 with a series of street protests, several

of which were characterised by significant levels of public disorder and clashes between EDL

activists and an assortment of anti-fascist campaigners and groups of local ethnic minority

youths, predominantly from Muslim communities (Blake 2011; Copsey 2010; Jackson 2011;

Robinson 2016). The group initially drew much of its support from established football

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violence networks (Copsey 2010) or from among those who had ‘retired’ from football

violence for one reason or another (Busher 2015), but soon attracted support from a number

of other constituencies, including the established far right, people already engaging with the

so-called counter-jihad movement, as well as a significant number of people who had not

been involved with any of these protest or football scenes but found themselves drawn to the

EDL, usually through a combination of sympathy for the cause, personal contacts with people

already involved in the movement and the allure of a rambunctious day out (Busher 2015;

Casciani 2009; Copsey 2010). By the end of 2009 and for much of 2010 and 2011 the group

was regularly able to muster in excess of 1000 supporters to participate in demonstrations

around the country, events that local authorities often spent hundreds of thousands of pounds

to police, as well as building a substantial online following. Bartlett & Littler (2011) estimate

that as many as 25,000 people participated in an EDL demonstration at one point or another,

and the group’s social media following exceeded 100,000 at several points.

The EDL operated primarily through a fairly loose network of local divisions, most of which

had their own Facebook page – and several of which comprised little more than a Facebook

page (Busher 2015). There were in addition several youth divisions, a women’s division and

‘special interest’ divisions such as an LGBT division, a Jewish division and a division for

‘persecuted Christians’. As these local divisions proliferated through the course of 2009 and

2010 a system of regional coordinators was introduced in order to try to provide some form

of organisational structure, but these structures remained ‘loose and chaotic’ (Copsey 2010,

6; Robinson 2015). It was not, for example, uncommon to find considerable uncertainty

among activists about who the regional organiser was for their area, or sometimes even which

region their local division happened to fall within (Pilkington 2016). External (movement)

and internal (divisional) boundaries tended to be highly porous, with people able to join and

leave divisions and the movement with relative ease (Busher 2015; Pilkington 2016),

something not in keeping with accounts of more conventional far right movements (e.g.

Bjørgo 1998)

Until October 2013, the national structures were centred on Luton, a town about half an hour

by train north of London, and the town that had been the scene of a series of demonstrations

earlier in the year that had initially generated the momentum for the formation of the EDL

(Copsey 2010). Accordingly, the Luton-based national leadership quickly became the main

focus of media attention on the group. Initially an activist called Kevin Carroll became the de

facto face of the EDL after he featured prominently in a BBC documentary, Young, British

and Angry, about the movement. In the months that followed, the media spotlight shifted

increasingly onto his cousin, Tommy Robinson (aka Stephen Lennon), a high-energy, fast-

talking, all-action character whose combination of swagger, self-deprecation and derring-do

helped to make him a popular figurehead among much of the grassroots support. However,

the local divisions operated with considerable autonomy, identifying their own local issues

around which they wanted to mobilise and often developing quite different local

organisational cultures from divisions elsewhere in the country – something that would

eventually contribute to the fragmentation of the movement (Busher 2015).

From the outset EDL activists found themselves embroiled in a protracted framing contest

with an assortment of commentators and critics. Anti-fascist groups and media commentators

quickly came to describe the EDL as some form of ‘far right’ or ‘extreme right’ group: albeit

there were some differences of opinion concerning the degree of organisational and

ideological continuity with older forms of far right activism (see Alessio 2014; Copsey 2010;

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Jackson 2011; Kassimeris & Jackson 2015). EDL activists responded by pointing out that

their group included participants from black and minority ethnic backgrounds; that there were

banners on EDL demonstrations with slogans such as ‘black and white unite’ or ‘not racist,

not violent, just not longer silent’; that speakers at EDL demonstrations repeatedly denounced

established far right groups; and that EDL organisers had even made and distributed a video

of themselves burning a swastika flag. They would argue repeatedly that ‘Islam is not a race’

(Busher 2015, 100; Pilkington 2016) and, insisting that they were a ‘single issue group’

protesting only about the advance of ‘militant Islam’ or ‘Islamic extremism’, would assert

that it therefore simply didn’t make sense to call them race-ist. The extent to which such

arguments ever gained credence beyond the EDL itself and a fairly small coterie of

supporters is difficult to gauge, but there is considerable evidence that at least some of the

activist community were persuaded by their own arguments (Busher 2015, 97-122; Pilkington

2016)

The EDL initially began to lose momentum during the course of 2011 as friction within the

movement increasingly came to the surface. A full discussion of the evolution of this intra-

group friction goes beyond the scope of this paper. Here it suffices to say that as well as

ideological and identity-based tensions, there were also regional divisions, tactical

disagreements, a resurgence of old football and sectarian rivalries, and a proliferation of

personal squabbles and resentments (Busher 2015; Lowles 2012). Groups that had largely

been allies of the EDL, such as Casuals United and March for England, began to reassert their

differences, and factions started to crystallise into splinter groups: the North-West Infidels,

North-East Infidels, South-East Alliance, Combined Ex-Forces. This resulted in a far more

fragmented scene, characterised by smaller demonstrations and seemingly endless

recriminations and in-fighting, often played out social media to the undisguised glee of their

various opponents. A resurgence of the group’s fortunes during the early summer of 2013,

following the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby by two Islamist extremists in Woolwich, London

(Pilkington 2016; Innes et al 2016), was short-lived. This was due at least in part to the fact

that in October of that year Robinson and Carrol resigned from the EDL’s leadership team, a

move that they attributed at least in part to concerns that the EDL was being taken over by

groups from the extreme right. This wave of anti-minority activism did not peter out

altogether, however. The EDL and various cognate groups continue to organise

demonstrations, albeit smaller ones, as well as a range of other protest activities, such as

Britain First’s ‘Christian Patrols’ and various social media campaigns designed to expand

their online support base (Allen 2014).

Enacting their ‘single issue protest group’ identity

All of the activists I met were acutely aware of the strategic benefits of identifying as a

‘single issue protest group’: hardly surprising given that since the emergence of the EDL they

had found themselves involved in a high-stakes framing contest with their various opponents

in which EDL activists had sought to resist the use of terms such as far right or racist to

describe the group. They were aware that defining themselves as a single issue group could

help them to differentiate themselves organisationally and ideologically from reputationally

toxic established far right political parties such as the BNP and the NF by ensuring limited

issue overlap and limited similarity of modus operandi with such groups; they were aware

that their focus on Islam, ‘Islamisation’ and a clearly articulated cultural threat could help to

insulate them from accusations of racism, at least in the minds of some parts of the general

public; and they were aware that their claims to be ‘not political’ also played on an anti-

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politics zeitgeist that reaches well beyond the social and political fringe deep into the social

mainstream (see Bailey 2009; Hay 2007; Weltman and Billig 2015) – several activists I met

explained how part of what had attracted them to the EDL was a desire to ‘actually do

something’ i.e. to get out on the street and make themselves heard (see also Pilkington 2016).

What is important in the context of this paper however is not so much the motivation behind

the initial development of such identifications, but rather whether and how these

identifications were enacted, in which contexts and under what conditions.

As is often the case with social movement groups, EDL activism has taken place across a

range of more or less public and more or less managed spaces. These have included large and

small official street demonstrations, unofficial or ‘flash’ demonstrations, petitions against

mosques, leafleting campaigns, attempted boycotts of restaurants selling halal food, EDL-

controlled social media pages, the personal social media pages of EDL activists, memorials

for symbolically significant events, and even various charity fundraisers (Busher 2015). Each

of these spaces have been characterised by subtly different and sometimes shifting

configurations of actors, audiences, opponents and symbols, whose interactions in turn

generated a set of emergent behavioural norms and social rules concerning what comprised

‘normal’, appropriate or lauded behaviour (Busher & Morrison forthcoming). What I argue

that activists’ identification as part of a single issue protest group permeated all of these

spaces in one way or another.

As might be expected given the acknowledged strategic benefits of presenting themselves as

a single issue protest group, the enactment of their single-issue-protest-group identity was

particularly prominent and closely adhered to in many of the more public facing and managed

spaces of activism. In the case of their official marches and demonstrations, for example, the

enactment of their single-issue-protest-group identity would begin during the build up to the

event, with national and regional leaders usually circulating information about the motivation

for this particular march e.g. plans to ‘build a mega-mosque’, highlighting the abuses of

‘Muslim grooming gangs’, the supposedly unfettered activities of so-called ‘extremist

preachers’ and so forth. In the overwhelming majority of cases the protest narratives

accompanying these events emphasised the single-issue-protest-group identity. The

enactment of this single issue focus would also continue during the course of the events

themselves. Speeches reiterated claims about the single issue focus of the EDL, and there

would almost invariably be placards reiterating claims not to be racist or urging that ‘black

and white unite’. There were often racist chants – usually about ‘pakis’ – and occasional

displays of far right symbols in the form of pin-badges, insignia on clothing, tattoos and even

on occasion straight-arm salutes. However, in most instances such obvious ‘breaches’

(Garfinkel 1967) of the performance of their single-issue-protest-group identity were usually

policed by event stewards who would intervene, sometimes violently, to curtail such actions.

It is a similar story with the EDL’s website and official social media pages and accounts.

When the EDL first posted up a full mission statement early in 2011, they did so under the

headline banner ‘Peacefully protesting Militant Islam’, and each of their five primary points

(‘Human Rights’, ‘Democracy and the Rule of Law’, ‘Public Education’, ‘Respecting

Tradition’ and ‘International Outlook’) were articulated with reference to the supposed threat

of the global diffusion of ‘militant Islam’ and ‘sharia’. Furthermore, administrators on the

group’s various online forums also sought to inculcate a culture that reflected the group’s

single issue protest group identity. Administrators on local and regional Facebook pages in

London and the Southeast described spending hours each week reviewing discussions on

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their group’s discussion walls in order to delete inappropriate comments, and also described

how they would try to guide discussions onto relevant topics. One administrator from

London, for example, recalled,

I’d get up in the morning and I’d man the Facebook wall for the day. I’d search around for

EDL-related stories and if you ever looked at the London page it was fairly sharp and it was

just EDL stuff, I mean nothing else, and I tried to find educational pieces for people: things

that, you know, explain to you about different kinds of, the different Islamic sects and

explained about Muslims Against Crusades [a now proscribed Islamist group led by Anjem

Choudhury], and I tried to find stuff that new members could read and understand a bit more

about what we were doing and our aims. (Andy)

After the transition from the leadership of Robinson and Carroll to a new national leadership

committee, there were some indications that this single issue focus might broaden. On 19th

July 2014 an EDL demonstration in was held in South Yorkshire organised around theme of

Roma immigration, and in February 2014 it was announced on the EDL website that the

EDL’s mission statement would be adjusted to include reference to the issue of mass

immigration. At the time of writing, however, in the summer of 2016, the demonstration in

Hexthorpe remains an outlier and the EDL mission statement has in fact retained its focus on

‘militant Islam’.

Significantly, this identification as a single issue group also permeated into what might be

considered the ‘backstage’ (see Mudde 2000) spaces of the group – those spaces where

activists were less exposed to, or at least thought themselves to be less exposed to, the

scrutiny of the public, the media and their various opponents. During private meetings

activists sometimes used language and expressed opinions that they were usually reluctant to

express in more public spaces – such as ‘off the record’ comments about not liking ‘pakis’, or

comments about how they would like the EDL to start mobilising around other issues, such as

‘mass immigration’ and ‘anti-white racism’. Yet this did not mean that the enactment of the

single-issue-protest-group identity dissolved altogether in such spaces. During more

formalised discussions within the contexts of divisional or regional meetings, such as

presentations or speeches by a group member or a chaired discussion, those leading the

discussions would reiterate the focus on ‘militant Islam’ or ‘Islam’: discussions by and large

centred on the latest developments with regard to specific mosque planning applications, the

latest carryings-on of Anjem Choudary (a high profile Islamist activist in the UK) and tales of

confrontations with ‘Muslim extremists’; the exception being discussions about left-wing

groups and encounters with left-wing groups, but these were conceived of as part of the cause

as the liberal left was identified as being largely to blame for failing to challenge processes of

‘Islamisation’. When activists made references to materials that would not by and large be

considered part of the societal ‘mainstream’, these were almost invariably to those associated

with the so-called counter-jihad movement rather than, for example, those associated with

established far or extreme right groups. In London, for example, the online forums, lectures

and debates organised by Four Freedoms were particularly popular, and in the spring and

early summer of 2011 when EDL activists believed that their movement was on the up and up

divisional and regional leaders in the area were even making plans to provide some training

for divisional leaders about (militant) Islam.

Significantly in the context of this paper, these emergent behavioural norms were reinforced

and policed through activists’ interactions with one another and particularly through their

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interactions with local, regional and national leaders, at least within the EDL divisions that I

observed. When activists did stray into other topics they often incurred some form of social

sanction – this was particularly the case when it was one of the younger activists. On

occasion, and where this involved adopting explicitly racist or homophobic positions or

advocating alliances with established extreme right groups these social sanctions could be

quite aggressive and severe – including being told that such positions were not welcome in

the movement, or even physical violence. More often though, social sanctions were more

subtle: a closing down of their contribution by moving onto another topic, or just rather look-

warm or rather ambivalent emotional feedback from fellow activists. In contrast, it was

usually the comments about ‘militant Islam’ and ‘Islamification’ that by and large drew the

richest emotional feedback from fellow activists – pats on the back, likes on Facebook, hearty

applause etc – and therefore offered the richest emotional rewards for participants.

Similarly, during informal conversations some activists, particularly once they hit their

rhetorical stride, would segue from the stock repertoire of complaints ostensibly focused on

(militant) Islam to a far more general lament ranging across themes that could include issues

such as immigration, overcrowded social housing, benefit fraud (perhaps by Muslims, but

also by other perceived serial offenders such as Romanians, Bulgarians and ‘chavs’),

Africans bringing their ‘primitive cultures and AIDS’ to the United Kingdom, how ‘black

culture’ supposedly lay at the heart of the rioting and looting that broke out in London and

elsewhere across the country in August 2011, local government corruption and a perceived

general collapse of law and order. Yet they would usually work their way back to the core

EDL themes, and as they did so would make clear that where they had strayed from the core

EDL themes ‘those are just my opinions, that is not the position of the EDL’.

As such, while from a critical analytical perspective there might good reason to remain

sceptical about claims by EDL activists that theirs’ really is a single issue group, once we get

up close to the practices that constituted EDL activism we are able to see quite clearly how in

fact the movement culture being spun out by activists through actions and interactions was

deeply influenced by activists’ identification as part of a single issue protest group, an how

this in turn shaped activists’ practices.

The implications of EDL activists’ identification as a single issue protest group

In order to fully appreciate the causal significance of EDL activists’ identification as part of

single issue group, it is helpful to explore in more detail how it has shaped the evolution of

this wave of anti-outsider activism at micro-, meso- and macro-levels i.e. the implications

that such identifications have had in terms of individuals’ journeys through anti-minority

activism, the evolving intra-group dynamics and the group’s positioning in relation to other

groups, as well as in terms of the more general ebb and flow of the EDL’s viability as a

movement. I would propose that these implications can be traced across at least five aspects

of EDL activism.

Patterns of recruitment

There can be little doubt that the identification as a single issue protest group shaped patterns

of recruitment to the EDL. While critics of the EDL have drawn attention to the fact that the

group has consistently attracted the support of people who have long been involved in far

right parties and extreme right movements, ethnographic (Busher 2015; Pilkington 2016) and

survey data (Bartlett & Littler 2011) indicate that such individuals comprised a minority of

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the groups support both offline and online. In other words, the EDL was successful in

attracting people who did not identify with the far or extreme right, and indeed was

successful in attracting some people who identified as being explicitly anti such groups

(Busher 2015; Pai 2016). Had activists within the group not made a clear show of trying to

sustain their single issue protest group identity, it is unlikely that many of these individuals

would have been recruited.

This capacity of the EDL to attract people from beyond the far right and indeed from beyond

the fringes of the football violence scene through which the EDL initially gained momentum,

was fundamental to the initial and largely unexpected growth of the group, and to its ability

to sustain itself as long as it did at the level that it did. The sheer numbers of participants on

EDL demonstrations is a recurring theme in activists’ accounts of what it was that initially

attracted them to the group (Busher 2015; Pilkington 2016), often linked to comments about

how this made the EDL feel like a group that was ‘going somewhere’ or was going to

‘actually do something’. Importantly, particularly among activists who neither identified as

football hooligans or with the established far right, so too is the fact that they often met

‘ordinary people’ when they first attended an email demonstration, ‘Really, you know, not

like the hooligans and racists you read in the newspapers’ (Bev).

The capacity of the EDL to recruit people from beyond existing far right milieux may also

turn out to be one of the more significant legacies of the group. The EDL has drawn people

into high-profile anti-minority activism who previously had little or no interest in such issues.

This has prompted some observers to note that whatever the failings of the EDL as a

movement – it only ever really gained traction for a period of about three years at the most

before gradually fragmenting – it is quite possible that its legacy will be the socialisation of a

cohort of people into anti-minority politics who otherwise would have been unlikely to be

involved with such activities (Lowles 2012).

Activists’ ideological trajectories

The prevailing identification as a single issue protest group also shaped the ideological

trajectories of those who became involved with the group, particularly those who did not

come to the EDL from a background in the established far or extreme right. While

participation in the EDL did draw people into an increasingly binary interpretation of the

world in which they saw themselves and ‘people like us’ to be involved in an millennial

struggle between good and evil, the interpretation had a quite specific ideological texture. As

described above, within the EDL activist community it was rare to encounter materials

promoting old-fashioned biological racism or exalting the ideas and ideology of the old

extreme right. Rather, most of the materials that circulated encouraged a focus on (militant)

Islam or (extremist) Muslims as the primary threat or danger. It should not be surprising that

this did have an impact on the some activists’ ideological trajectories. Indeed some activists

even described journeys in which they described how their involved in the EDL had in fact

helped them to move away from the extreme right.

I wasn’t completely racist before I started, but I had a lot more right-wing views. I grew up

with mixed in school, I had loads of trouble from black kids and bits and pieces and I ended

up hating some of them . . . But then once I started with EDL, I turned that all around and to

this day like I’ve got black friends that I talk to in work and get on with and have a laugh with

and that, and I’ve actually completely turned things around and now I’m just standing against

one thing, and that’s the one thing that we see as a problem. (Phil)

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It is easy for those oppose groups such as the EDL to sneer at such accounts of EDL activism

– the idea of somebody turning away from racism by joining a group like the EDL might

seem preposterous to some people. Yet once one gets up close to the everyday interactions

that comprised grassroots EDL activism such accounts soon acquire an air of plausibility.

When a person becomes a participant in a new social space it may initially take quite an

effort on their part to adapt the ‘ground rules for interaction’ (Eliasoph 1999) within that

space, but usually they adapt. As they do so, not only do the actions that previously required

some effort quickly come to feel increasingly natural or normal, but those interactions in turn

start to shape how that person behaves, thinks and emotes. There is no reason to believe that

such processes should not have been playing out among at least some EDL activists. As

activists circulated information about the supposed threat (militant) Islam many became

increasingly focused cognitively and emotionally on this issue, and it is quite possible that in

some cases this entailed a shift in the focus of their fear, anger and hostility from a quite

general focus on, essentially, non-white people, to a more specific and articulated focus on

Muslims.

Insert paragraph on the implications of this: i.e. does it make it more difficult to challenge –

they consider themselves to be non-racist – so criticising them for being ‘racists’ doesn’t

wash with them or their sympathisers. See Lentin (2014, 1273) for discussion of the idea that

groups such as the EDL are increasingly able to argue that opposition to (aspects of)

‘multiculturalism’ isn’t racist because of the mainstreaming of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric.

FROM THIS POINT ON THE PAPER IS IN NOTE FORM

The acquisition of intra-group status positions

A third area concerns the evolution of intra-group status positions. Those activists who

learned and were most comfortable enacting the identity of the group rose to prominence This

emergent movement culture in turn shaped how the distribution of emotional energy,

admiration and opprobrium. There were many different ways of achieving status within the

movement – indeed, part of the attraction of EDL activism appeared to be that everybody was

somebody (insert detail). However, at least during 2010-2013, almost all of those who came

to the forefront of the EDL in London and the Southeast were people who were able to focus

on these particular frames – were people who became relatively articulate in putting forward

arguments about Islamification etc.

This further consolidated the emphasis on the single-issue-protest-group identity, at least

within this geographical area.

The EDL’s unlikely but unsustainable alliances

As already indicated above, one of the most striking characteristics of the EDL, particularly

during its initial demonstrations, were some of the apparently rather surprising alliances that

the group seemed to be engendering. There were long-term football hooligans with banning

orders marching alongside people waving gay pride flags, and people who had until recently

been part of the UK’s far right scene attending demonstrations with Israeli flags flying being

addressed by a Rabbi. And the ideological heterogeneity did not stop there. While, when

asked, most activists would provide a similar initial explanation of what the EDL was about

as a movement – a single issue protest group challenging the spread of (militant) Islam – a

little more probing soon revealed quite different framings. Steve, one of the older members of

11

the group with a long-standing interest in local and national history, framed the EDL very

much in terms of the importance of celebrating and preserving his national culture and

identity. John, by contrast, claimed that nationalism, England and Englishness had little to do

with his involvement. He did not even consider himself particularly ‘patriotic’ and never

joined in the ‘Ing-er-land!’ chants during demonstrations. His connection with the EDL cause

was primarily via an interest he had developed in the precarious social and political position

of Christians in a number of Muslim-majority countries; an interest that he had partly

developed through online contact with the counter-jihad networks. Terry, meanwhile, was a

staunch atheist. While he described a deep sense of personal national attachment – the

entrance to his home was dominated by an English flag, and he explained how he always

liked to have a flag with him, even if it was only as a pin-badge – he framed his nationalism

not only as a celebration of his own nation but also as a more abstract commitment to nations

as a bulwark against the supra-national diffusion of Islam.

Activists’ identification as part of a single issue group helped to paper over these obvious

points of potential ideological tension. In part, they did this by ensuring that activists only

ever had to identify a very limited area of common ground in terms of what they believed to

be the problem to which they were responding. In part, the fact that the EDL was so clear

about the parameters of its mission, at least in the minds of activists, meant that it was

relatively easy for activists to compartmentalise their own beliefs and those of fellow activists

in ways that enabled them to preserve their moral selves. EDL activists who did not identify

with the far right, or even identified as anti-racists, were able justify marching alongside

known far right activists on the grounds that they had one shared cause in common. Indeed,

they turned it into an example of their supposed inclusivity.

Even as the EDL began to fall apart, even when there were personal tensions and intra-

movement rivalries, this common ground still facilitated collaboration – whether this was

simply forwarding on one another’s Facebook messages or tweets, or whether supporting one

another’s demonstrations. Perhaps the most obvious instance of the latter came in the summer

of 2013 in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Lee Rigby, as described above. In other

words, the single issue focus may in some ways have helped to have acted as a break on the

group’s fragmentation.

Yet the single issue focus also put a strain on intra-group relations. Issue frames shift over

time in any movement (Benford 1997), usually as activists go undertake key tasks such as

deciding which specific events/issues they should focus their energies on (Blee 2012). This

also happened within the EDL. Activists started to pull the movement in a series of

competing directions, e.g. to incorporate or not issues such as ‘mass immigration’, ‘anti-white

racism’ or debates about whether they should oppose the construction of any large mosque or

only mosques associated with particular Muslim religious communities (Busher 2015). These

emergent points of disagreement were thrown into increasingly sharp relief by realisation

about the limited resources of the group and growing perception of opportunity costs –

mainly time and personal financial costs but also sometimes legal costs – associated with

protest activities (see Gould 2009 for discussion of similar process in context of the AIDS

movement in the USA).

Tactical repertoires and alliances

Finally, the single-issue-protest-group identification also shaped the evolution of the EDL’s

tactical repertoire and alliances. This was most notably the case in 2011. Faced with the

12

beginning of a decline in support for street demonstrations and growing murmuring of

dissatisfaction within some parts of the activist community about the fact that by and large it

seemed that policymakers were by and large simply ignoring them, Robinson and Carroll

announced that the EDL would be forming a loose alliance with the British Freedom Party

(BFP). The response from the grassroots movement cannot have been what they expected, or

at least what they hoped for, with all but a handful of EDL supporters expressing reticence or

even outright opposition and even anger about the proposed move. For the purposes of this

paper, two of the motives articulated by activists for this opposition to the move are

particularly relevant. First, there were concerns that their alliance with the BFP would make it

harder for them to reject claims that the EDL was not itself a far right group because the

BFP’s non-far-right credentials were far from clear, and as one activist pointed out, BFP

sounds too much like BNP, who undoubtedly are a far right party. Second, activists argued

that they had joined up with a street movement, not with a political party, and that therefore

the EDL should continue to be a street movement. In other words, one of the major sources of

opposition was not that activists did not like the BFP per se, but that an alliance with the

group simply did not fit with who they were.

Since this debate around whether or not to forge an alliance with the BFP, the willingness or

otherwise to identify with and as the far right became an increasingly important point of

tension within the EDL activist community, with some of the factions that fragmented off

from the EDL openly forging alliances with established extreme right wing groups, while

others continued to resist and oppose such alliances.

Conclusions

EDL activists’ identification as part of a single issue protest group cut across and shaped the

group’s emergent culture in multiple ways that played out at micro-, meso- and macro-levels.

This identification is part of what initially enabled the group to build momentum and has, it

might be argued, enabled the EDL and cognate groups to make a rather effective transition

into a period of abeyance i.e. while the main group has lost momentum, the personal

networks that criss-crossed this scene have to a large extent persisted. Yet, the single issue

identification also contributed to emergent intra-group tensions, particularly once the

ideological disagreements associated with the single issue group identification became

aligned with other sources of intra-group friction.

This, I argue, has important implications for how we think about groups such as the EDL.

Specifically, it indicates that even if we might have good cause to be sceptical about how

activists in groups such as the EDL describe themselves, we ought to be cautious about

dismissing such identifications as simply some form of strategic ploy. Such identifications are

in fact causally significant. If we choose to be dismissive of such claims, we choose in effect

to diminish our ability understand and anticipate how such groups (are likely to) evolve.

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