Campaign Against Fees & Cuts Cymru
Four hundred anti-fascists faced down fewer than sixty supporters of the neo-fascist, extreme-right National Front on Saturday March 10th as the NF gathered in the cosmopolitan port city to celebrate “White Pride World Wide”, in a demonstration and counter-demonstration both contained by a strongly-biased South Wales Police.
While Swansea Council had originally planned to let the NF demonstrate in a remote car park where they would be surrounded on all sides by counter-protestors, the promise of an “invisible” fascist demonstration vanished at the last minute as the demonstration was shifted to the green at Swansea Waterfront Museum. Police intentions to soft-kettle both sides, as they did to counter-protestors against the English Defence League in Cardiff in 2010, became clear on the evening of the 9th, when local residents spotted two metal pens with porta-loos being erected on the green. The ostenisble reason for the shift was that police had received word of a “national mobilisation” of the National Front, but the facilities provided didn’t match this story, which seems to have been complete fiction.
National Front assemble at Swansea Rail Station
The number of demonstrators on the fascist side was in fact below police estimates, but in contrast to the demonstrations at the EDL’s height, which brought in unconscious workers and unemployed, the far-right demonstrators in Swansea were unabashed white supremacists flying neo-Nazi Celtic Cross flags.
NF show their true colours – Neo-Nazi flags on display
In light of the NF’s poor mobilisation, the whole demonstration could have been stopped before it started. Anti-fascists learned that South Wales Police intended to assemble the NF at Swansea Rail Station at 12:30pm and load them onto publicly-provided coaches* to carry them to the Museum. About 20 anti-fascists organised a group to confront the NF at the station. Unite Against Fascism, though, discouraged activists from leaving the soft kettle; non-UAF anti-fascists, meanwhile, did not have a strong communications network so could not gather their forces. Thus when the group of 20 arrived at Swansea Rail Station without sufficient numbers, they were pushed back by police officers protecting the National Front, with one anti-fascist only saved from arrest by the swift intervention of his comrades.
Police with covered badge numbers harrass an anti-fascist activist
Inside the kettle UAF’s demonstration carried on as standard: the SWP uncritically cheered pro-cuts politicians like Neath MP Peter Hain and Swansea Council leader David Phillips, ignoring that these politicians could create jobs, improve public services & build homes and thereby cut the far right off at their knees. Slogans were kept apolitical and were shouted at the National Front from hundreds of feet away. There was even a drum circle.
Differing levels of support for the counter-demonstration by students’ unions shows the importance of militant SU leaderships in helping defend the community. Swansea University SU, with a centre-left executive, actively built for the demonstration and coordinated with both UAF and Antifa; Swansea Metropolitan SU, led by a New Labour leadership, did as much as Gower College Swansea, where the students’ union is undeveloped – that is, nothing.
Looking forward, we take on board a few lessons, some forgotten from the wave of EDL demonstrations in 2009/10: South Wales Police are not neutral but rather effectively take the side of the far right. Unite Against Fascism are capable of a mass mobilisation but actively oppose doing anything politically useful with that mobilisation. The soft layers of the far right in Wales have been worn away, leaving a neo-fascist hard core. This hard core was effectively opposed but it was not smashed. From now until the next time the National Front assemble in Swansea – and there will be a next time – workers and students have the task of re-building a robust and proudly politically conscious network independent of UAF and willing and able to mobilise hundreds to do whatever it takes to repel the National Front threat from our city.
* We understand the coach company, Cymru Coaches, had been told by South Wales Police the coaches would be used for carrying children, not the National Front, and that Cymru Coaches intend to put in an IPCC complaint against South Wales Police for the deception and the damage to the company’s reputation.
