It’s great to feel proud of your town, your country, your people and right now, that’s exactly what I feel.
I was confused yesterday. As just about everyone knows, some twit put out a list of dates and places where, I suppose, they were hoping to instigate race-riots or, as some said, to misdirect anti-racists to get them into trouble, or so rioters could gather unencumbered elsewhere.
Whatever. The local anti-racist groups did a call out to defend refugee centres and, in Hastings, MP Helena Dollimore and council leader Julia Hilton put out a counter-letter apparently trying to put people off gathering as anti-racists.
That worried me a lot because if you tell people ‘no’ after a call-out, there’s a danger that just a few will turn up because they don’t see the message and then they would be vulnerable so I went along – somewhat nervously. I need not have worried. The people of Hastings gathered in their hundreds, made the effort to keep off the roads (as one of the marshals said, the most likely cause of harm would be someone getting hit by a car) and were very obviously not violent.
As to the danger of misdirection, we had people scouting around other potential trouble-spots, and they texted back to report a police presence and a complete absence of fascists.
The gathering was more like a party sing-song than anything. The favourite was (sung to the tune of coming round the mountain)
We are black, white, Muslims and we’re Jews…
Along with regular outbreaks of
Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here!
We weren’t particularly organized. People turned up from all directions, gathering over the course of an hour or so, until there were several hundreds of us. Some of us thought we might have seen a small group of would-be rioters up the street, on the edge of the event but, as the song changed to
There are many many more of us than you…
they disappeared in short order.
I don’t think the police said we shouldn’t go, they just said be careful.
I have to say that in my personal experience, the police around Hastings are far, far better at this sort of thing than many of the police I’ve seen at events in the cities. Judging by their response to the occasional shouty person we’ve seen on the edges of previous demos, I think Hastings police really do get the concept of de-escalation.
Obviously, Labour MPs will say don’t go, because they still think anti-racism is antisemitic – well I suppose that’s what they think, unless something really weird happened in Finchley…
If you saw what happened there, please do comment, or message me — I’d like to know — but otherwise I’ll have to assume it’s the usual Labour right-winger’s “everything I disagree with is antisemitic.”
Addendum – a comment here from someone who was at that event…
Anyway, as far as I can see, despite my doubts and worries yesterday, just about all the towns on that list responded with a hearty anti-racist gathering and whatever Helena Dollimore says, it’s fantastically inspiring to see a our community making such an enthusiastic statement against racism.
Don’t worry, politicians, despite your best efforts, violent racists are an extremely small minority – and as we all know, bullies are not a problem if the rest of us come out. They slink away and disappear when they see they are out-numbered.
And then on Saturday, this happened.
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Kay Green 