EDL leader steps down.
Bradford councillors rejected a bid to ban the English Defence League (EDL) last week in the aftermath of the anti-Islamist group’s protest there, its first demonstration since leader and founder Tommy Robinson stepped down in October.
Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, attributed his decision to the realisation that the EDL’s street protest tactics are “no longer productive”, but said he was still committed to fighting what he calls Islamist ideology “not with violence but with better, democratic ideals”. Quilliam, an anti-Islamist think tank, facilitated the resignations of both Robinson and EDL co-founder Kevin Carroll, who now join the several high-ranking members who have quit the group.
The four-year-old protest group, recently described by Prime Minister David Cameron as a “hateful organisation”, will now be led by Tim Ablitt, who was once arrested for allegedly plotting to plant a bomb in a mosque, though no charges were ever filed.
Despite Robinson’s warning of “the dangers of far-right extremism”, the EDL’s 25,000 active members moved on to stage a protest in Bradford without their leader. The demonstration – which likely drew about 600 participants, though estimates run as low as 200 and as high as 700 – was countered by a much smaller rally by Unite Against Fascism. If the highest figure is correct, then the EDL’s first protest without Robinson drew around the same number of participants as its last rally in Bradford in August 2010.
Two days after West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Mark Burns-Williamson requested more power for the police to ban demonstrations like the one in Bradford, which cost £1 million to police and led to eleven arrests, Bradford councillors Alyas Karmani and Ishtiaq Ahmed put forward a motion to petition Home Secretary Theresa May to make the EDL illegal. The bid failed amid scepticism of outright proscription as the appropriate response.
Stacey Nieves