It is now almost a week since the planned Far Right Demonstration in Crawley which attracted a grand total of three people.
In many ways this lack of attendance isn’t surprising, social media means that a vocal minority can spread a message vastly more effectively than at any time before in the past giving the impression that an opinion is far more popular than it really is. Anyone following local Facebook comments during the General Election would have assumed that Reform were on course for a massive victory rather than coming a distant third, all the illusion took was a couple dozen accounts commenting on every relevant post.
Instead, we saw in practice that the overwhelming majority stand in opposition to those seeking to sow hatred in our community. Not only were the Far Right dwarfed by those who attended the counter-protest, but by those celebrating the town’s diversity at the Mela the weekend before, as they will also be this weekend at Crawley Pride, with the town again celebrating diversity and inclusivity within our community.
Immigration policy is a perfectly valid area for political debate, reasonable disagreement can exist and we have legitimate democratic means for expressing different views. Burning down a hospital and assaulting people of colour in the street is not valid debate, it is a retreat into the violent racial politics of Nazism and has no place in and decent society.
Time moves on and while Antisemitism was once the traditional focus of attention of the Far Right—although no doubt still present in the background, as patterns of migration have broadened so too have the targets of their hatred with Islamophobia now running through almost everything they do and credence to their conspiracy theories unfortunately being provided on occasion by a few notable members of the last Conservative Government.
This is a town where the people we go to school with, work with, live next to and celebrate with come from a range of ethnicities, religions and identities. The attempts of extremists to separate us and persecute our friends, colleagues and neighbours will never win.