Wednesday, 11 June 2008

The Challenges of next summer





Over the weekend, there seemed to be part campaigning, part attending a Searchlight seminar in London. After putting out the best part of 2000 Labour leaflets in Kings Heath with colleagues from Northampton South CLP and a neighbouring one, it was a bit strange going to the Searchlight seminar.

When it comes to anti-fascist campaigning, for quite some time it has seemed to me that there are those people who go to meetings and talk about anti-fascist campaigning and those people that do it. For those people that go and talk about it, it does seem to be significant time and effort in discussing why we are where we are.

For those of us involved in local anti-fascist work, often it feels quite a lonely place to be, with fairly minimal support nationally and people often looking for someone to blame when things go wrong and people wanting to take the credit when things go right.

Next summer with County and Euro-elections with a guaranteed BNP presence in both, a group of us are trying to pull together a meeting on our approach to this. Up to date our activity has been very localised, however the euro-elections present us with a far different challenge. With the last combined UKIP and BNP vote at the last Euros of 26% and the BNP polling in the mid-20ies to 30%, it's a factor that needs to be treated even more seriously than before.

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