'Republican friends of AFA '
June 6: Of all the regions contested by the BNP in Euro elections in June, Scotland showed the poorest returns. Partly as a result of being driven underground in the early 1990's the organisation thereby surrendered any public profile whatsoever. So despite the Euro-Nationalist strategy being implemented with considerable success elsewhere the Scottish BNP are still betwixt and between terrorism (talking about it anyway) and electoralism. In an effort to remedy the situation, considerable graft was put into decorating lamp posts with BNP placards stretching for miles through central Glasgow, only for equally dedicated Republican 'friends of AFA' making sure they literally never saw the light of day. The last placard ripped down at exactly 8am. In an unrelated incident a gentleman wearing a KKK t-shirt coming badly unstuck on a city centre bus in Edinburgh was a further reminder to all concerned 'we haven 't gone away you know '.
July 1: A 1,000 strong audience to hear Stuart Hall, former Marxism Today columnist, lecture on nation and race in the millennium was leafleted by AFA. Hall, a firm proponent of 'race first style anti-racism, ' spoke for an hour. Later questions were answered with aplomb, until it came to questions posed by an AFA activist and strangely, former NF leader Martin Webster. Both questions were quite straight forward. Webster asking whether Hall 'really believed the indigenous population could be kept down by the use of further legislation ' while the AFA representative asked if he agreed the 'very the obvious dangers of racialising social issues that pitched working class communities against each other could in the end only benefit the Far Right '. Hall 's response was to clumsily conflate the two questions clearly assuming fascism and the working class were peas in the pod. But in admitting discourses other than his own had validity he fatally undermined his earlier hour long lecture in which class was mentioned only once in passing. Instructive.
July 10 & 11: At a two day event in High Wycombe, six bands publicly endorsed the AFA message. Merchandise and Fighting Talk 's were sold. At a fund-raiser elsewhere over £200 was surrendered to the AFA coffers.
July 18: In a genuinely bizarre encounter in Worcester, the ANL, having had a planned internal BNP meeting at a local leisure centre cancelled on Searchlight instruction, still held a seven strong silent picket outside 'in solidarity with the local community '. On the appearance of some AFA scouts their resolve crumbled, with over half their party making a break for it leaving the remainder to face what they evidently imagined was the music. Predictably local headlines read 'Celebrations as BNP foiled '. In reality all the intervention achieved was to disrupt AFA's monitoring of the situation. Motive enough from a Searchlight perspective.
July 28: An AFA representative addressed a central London branch of the MSF, giving AFA's analysis of the political situation. Originally scheduled for 30 minutes the discussion lasted over an hour with the branch itself offering to propose a speaking slot at regional level.
Reproduced from RA Vol 4, Issue 2, Aug/Sept '99
July 1: A 1,000 strong audience to hear Stuart Hall, former Marxism Today columnist, lecture on nation and race in the millennium was leafleted by AFA. Hall, a firm proponent of 'race first style anti-racism, ' spoke for an hour. Later questions were answered with aplomb, until it came to questions posed by an AFA activist and strangely, former NF leader Martin Webster. Both questions were quite straight forward. Webster asking whether Hall 'really believed the indigenous population could be kept down by the use of further legislation ' while the AFA representative asked if he agreed the 'very the obvious dangers of racialising social issues that pitched working class communities against each other could in the end only benefit the Far Right '. Hall 's response was to clumsily conflate the two questions clearly assuming fascism and the working class were peas in the pod. But in admitting discourses other than his own had validity he fatally undermined his earlier hour long lecture in which class was mentioned only once in passing. Instructive.
July 10 & 11: At a two day event in High Wycombe, six bands publicly endorsed the AFA message. Merchandise and Fighting Talk 's were sold. At a fund-raiser elsewhere over £200 was surrendered to the AFA coffers.
July 18: In a genuinely bizarre encounter in Worcester, the ANL, having had a planned internal BNP meeting at a local leisure centre cancelled on Searchlight instruction, still held a seven strong silent picket outside 'in solidarity with the local community '. On the appearance of some AFA scouts their resolve crumbled, with over half their party making a break for it leaving the remainder to face what they evidently imagined was the music. Predictably local headlines read 'Celebrations as BNP foiled '. In reality all the intervention achieved was to disrupt AFA's monitoring of the situation. Motive enough from a Searchlight perspective.
July 28: An AFA representative addressed a central London branch of the MSF, giving AFA's analysis of the political situation. Originally scheduled for 30 minutes the discussion lasted over an hour with the branch itself offering to propose a speaking slot at regional level.
Reproduced from RA Vol 4, Issue 2, Aug/Sept '99
