Confronting "White pride" in Swansea

On Saturday 9th March an extreme right wing National Front (NF) held a 'White pride Worldwide' demonstration in Swansea. This won't be "what's wrong with White pride worldwide" that's another article which its intended audience wouldn't bother reading.

Members of the NF consider it an achievement to be born with white skin, which says more about them and what they have achieved than it does about political theory. Unlike the English Defence League (EDL) or British National Party (BNP) they have no qualms about being seen as overtly fascist and directly racist.

On the day of the counter demo I arrived in Swansea early; I went to meet with others and walked around town. 400 Unite Against Fascism (UAF) protesters were in a steel pen opposite another empty police pen reserved for the fascists a few hundred yards away. The Antifa group I met had very different tactics to those of the UAF, as a movement Antifa believe inconfronting fascists directly. This was quite a task as Swansea was absolutely crawling with police that day. There were tens of riot vans, police on horses, hundreds of police patrolling the city and a few plainclothes police were spotted too.

The road to freedom

It was in mid 1971 that I purchased my still-possessed copy of Bertrand Russell’s “Roads to Freedom” for the princely sum of 60p, helpfully also priced at 12/- for those who had not yet fully adapted to decimal currency.  It was one of a number of books which influenced my political development.

Russell set out (in the terms of the age; he wrote it in 1918, and I doubt that anyone would use some of his words and phrases in more modern times) his analysis of three alternative roads to freedom, and then concluded with some highly idealistic views of his own as a synthesis of sorts. Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism – three alternative ways of building a utopia.

The relationship between Marx and Bakunin had its moments, of course, but whilst the routes to achieve freedom and the structures of the desired free society might look very different, the essential nature of the freedom which underpins them does have some broad similarities.  Freedom from the tyranny of capital, and the replacement of competition with co-operation as a means of sharing resources are two of the essential pillars of my own political philosophy.