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.

Community squatting comes to Swansea

In the space of a month, Swansea saw three subsequent squats taken by a community squatting group. With a generally supportive public, surprised authorities and an angry local press, the project has now stopped to rest and refresh. In a short but busy time it hosted a free shop, open-mic nights, constant music sessions, art, crochet, hitchhiking and squatting workshops, film nights, a library, exhibitions and countless cups of tea – all free of charge. Its aim was to be community space for the people of Swansea. Attended by Swansea’s workers, unemployed, homeless, refugees, ex-drug addicts, young people and pensioners, all enjoying a free cuppa, I believe it served it's purpose.

Like so many of Wales’ post-industrial towns, Swansea’s city centre is full of empty and unused buildings, whilst areas for community projects are lacking. After several open meetings in a local pub following the Christmas period, the ad-hoc 'Cwtch' group (Cwtch being Welsh both for cuddle and a safe-place) challenged this. In the early hours of Monday 30th January, CCTV would have seen several individuals enter via a ladder and some awkward scrambling through an open window and into the disused Dolphin Hotel. With this comic Mission Impossible act, some new locks and Section 6 notices, Swansea had its first open squat for a decade. The documented open window meant we had not broken an entry, and had legitimate squatters’ rights. Some peeved city rangers arrived with the morning and later on some police officers and officials from the fire brigade. Group members went around informing the local shops as they opened, who were on the whole positive - and warn them about the police’s response time for the street.

The media and the cuts: Dirty tricks in Swansea

No one expects the commercial press to be sympathetic towards the anti-cuts movement. Most British newspapers take it for granted that cuts are necessary and that working people have to suffer in the name of fiscal rectitude. Nevertheless, it is becoming clear that coverage of the anti-cuts movement is more distorted in some publications than in others.

Although national newspapers such as the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail are never less than scornful in their attitude towards the resistance, they usually report the facts about strikes, marches and demonstrations with at least a modicum of objectivity.The same cannot be said about many local newspapers. Aware that their work is rarely exposed to rigorous political scrutiny, regional journalists have done more than anyone else to mislead the public about the struggle against the cuts.

An especially shocking example of political bias has just appeared in the South Wales Evening Post. On Thursday 30th June the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) organised a well-attended rally in Castle Square in Swansea in support of the co-ordinated strikes in the public sector. In his front-page coverage of the rally on 1st July, Rob Goodman of the Post employed every trick in the book to convey the impression that it had been a miserable failure. His article is worth examining because it typifies the work of regional journalists across the country.