There was another Anti-Fascist protest outside uni today

This afternoon there was a stand off between the Racial Volunteer Force and a counter-protest group outside the gates to Founders. The protest started at around 1pm and the crowds had begun to disperse by around 3:30pm.

RVF had again gathered a small group outside the gates to protest the sacking of two RHUL cleaners. The protest group was around triple the size of the RVF group, and were chanting things such as, “Who’s streets? Our streets!” at the “racist scum” throughout the afternoon.

We interviewed a key organiser of the RVF group, one of the former cleaners at RHUL who was allegedly sacked based on his particpation in a previous political rally:

What are you protesting about today?

He said, “Two of us got sacked because we were protesting at a demonstration in London against Shomrim, a secret police force in Whitehall. It was a legal demo and it was in support of the metropolitan police, it wasn’t anti-semitic but that’s what it was branded as straight away.” (The university said that the cleaners had been moved onto new jobs at a different university.)

“Right now we’re calling for the dismissal of Principal Paul Layzell for using students, for encouraging that show they put on the last time we were here, it was disgraceful. We worked hard in here. You can’t be sacked for this! Yes, you’re not allowed to bring political ideas into the work place, but we haven’t done that. We worked at night to just do our job and then to go home. We weren’t here to interact with or influence anyone.”

Why is there such a small number of you here today?

“There’s only a small amount of us because we’re trying to prove our point without bringing a rabble down here, although there are a lot in the far right wing who would love a bit of this… I could’ve brought some horrible people with me here today, but why? We’re not here for violence. We want to cause as little disruption to students in the college as possible… We’ve had two peaceful demonstrations now.”

So are you here as members of the far right?

“We’re not even here in a right wing capacity. We’re here stating that you need equal rights for everybody. You cannot use political ideologies or even beliefs as grounds for dismissal. I don’t class myself as extreme right.”

“The speeches earlier weren’t political, they were just to reiterate why we’re here, and to say that Paul Layzell should lose his job.”

What do you think about the protestors?

“They’re just rabble, they’re not even students. We were planning a demonstration outside the university, but nothing like this. If we’re the ‘nasty nazis’ they say we are, then why are they here, giving us an audience? We’re not speaking about anything to do with race or politics, we’re here as men who have been unfairly sacked.”

Although angry and indignant at the situation with the university, the RVF group seemed more concerned with the large group of protestors,”I say to them: ‘Thank you for coming along to support our demo and to support our cause, without you we’d be nothing.'”

He gestured to the bottle neck of cars forming on Egham Hill, “See all those cars stopping to read these signs? They’re only doing that because there’s a protest group of about 30 on the other side of that fence. The 10 of us here wouldn’t cause much notice on our own. So that group are actually drawing more attention to us, which is great.”

As we left the protest the police were trying to calm things down by telling everyone to go home. While the RVF protestors jeered at the protest group a little, they left soon afterwards. The anti-facist group started pushing against the police barriers and spilling out into the road, and began chanting, “The Police protect the Nazis!” amongst other things. It all started to get a little hairy, so we left them to it.