We're missing a trick, I think. Look at the way THEY organise, it's quite clever. There was a recent march in Birmingham ("not organised by the twatzies") against "Muslim fundamentalism". Who could be against that? When violence breaks out, how easy to throw up your hands in horror? Nuffin to do wiv us guv.

Codnor is just down the road from Pentrich, where there was an attempt to take on an unjust state almost 200 years ago. Their image of how to make a protest led them to take up arms and march, military style, towards Nottingham. Their march took them through Codnor, to their alnmost inevitable dispersion by a handful of militiamen. A few were hanged, a number more transported. Bill Prince wrote a good song about them.

What I'm trying to say is that direct confrontation may not be the best way of combatting the lethal junction of determined pathological hatred and wounded resentful ignorance that is the hatemongers' recruiting ground. Their prey- in Codnor, Langley Mill, Eastwood, Ripley- are the abandoned ordinary folk of this benighted country. They were communities badly wounded by the Miners' Strike- the area was on the border of the Nottinghamshire coalfield which were Thatcher's patsies. The "immigrant" population is vanishingly low- neither West Indians, Asians nor Eastern Europeans settled there in any numbers. They were solid Labour heartland- until the likes of Blair and Mandelson showed them they weren't needed anymore. The slide to the BNP (they have elected several BNP local councillors) is a move of simple desperation.

The road to the defeat of the BNP is going to be a long one, and isn't going to be greatly helped by quixotism. Those who are doing the hard work of trying to organise a real opposition in Britain, who are trying to show that the interests of ordinary people, whether Ancient British, Saxon, Celt, Asian, African, Eastern European, or whatever, are identical compared with the interests of the bonus guzzlers, the Lords of the Universe, the armsmongers, the oil barons,
and their toyboys and celob (stet) arselickers.

So I'm a bit unsure about the value of a demo. If we could get an Afro- Asian Morris side along now....