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Something to really celebrate on Hope Not Hate’s birthday

MATTHEW COLLINS explains how months of hard work by anti-fascist activists helped to bring about the electoral demise of the BNP

HOPE Not Hate’s Sack Nick Griffin campaign has by far been the largest and most ambitious ever organised in the campaign’s 10-year history. The cause simply demanded that the anti-fascist movement upped its game from irregular street protests, marches and rallies.

The 2010 Barking & Dagenham community campaign routed the BNP and wiped it from the council where, 12 months before, it was actually on course to win control. After this stunning victory Hope Not Hate took the tactics that had proved so successful and replicated them on a regional scale.

Over the past decade the BNP gained support largely in deindustrialised areas where people felt that they had been left behind by the prosperity of pre-crash Britain. 

The economic crisis then gave the fascists major opportunities to further advance. Yet Hope Not Hate, together with many other anti-fascist and anti-racist organisations and activists, has driven it back under the rock whence it came, defeating all its councillors around the country and finally removing its abhorrent leader as an MEP for North West England, as, at the time of writing, seems almost certain.

The Sack Nick Griffin North West campaign was simple — we needed to publicly counter and demolish the arguments of the fascist far-right, offer a competing, hopeful and positive narrative that would address the concerns of BNP voters and build a progressive coalition to mobilise a massive, North West-wide anti-racist voter turnout. 

The coalition had to be as grass-roots as possible for the campaign to succeed — what would work in Chester mightn’t work in Carlisle. 

So, starting in February last year, we spent the spring and summer establishing local Hope Not Hate campaign groups, or supported already existing anti-racist community groups in towns and cities across the region, bringing together and working with trade union branches, students, activists, church and community groups, local councillors and political parties of all colours.

In these groups we then discussed with local campaigners the best strategy for their community and the best areas to target — either challenging the BNP presence and vote in some communities, or simply working to increase the anti-racist turnout in others.

Over the autumn and winter we produced and distributed tens of thousands of direct and hard-hitting leaflets, targeting the one million trade union members in the region, exposing the BNP as no friend of the working class and a huge threat to workers’ hard-won rights.

In spring this year we ran campus call-out events at universities across the region, engaging as many as possible of the 250,000 North West students in anti-fascist activism and signing thousands up to vote — many for the first time — in the region, using the Hope Not Hate student-friendly voter registration forms, thereby increasing the anti-fascist vote.

We produced special “Souls to the Polls’ packs containing information on the BNP and materials tailored for imams, chaplains, priests, vicars, rabbis and ministers to use to persuade their congregation of the importance of voting at the Euros.

Through just these initiatives, over the six months leading up to May 22, our message went out to a potential audience of almost two million.

Then, at the beginning of May, we produced and delivered nearly 270,000 anti-fascist and anti-racist newspapers, for door-to-door delivery in target areas across the region by our activists and local groups. 

We produced almost a dozen different editions, each tailored to target areas, as well as a general North West edition for use across the region. 

Each localised newspaper featured positive community stories that were happening on people’s doorstep, researched and written in partnership between local activists and Hope Not Hate journalists.

The papers also challenged the lies of the far-right, exploded immigration myths, tackled the reason why people might vote for the far and extreme-right, exposed the BNP and their European allies as the violent thugs that they are and posed the reader the question: whose community is it — theirs or ours?

Hope Not Hate also created a “digital rebuttal unit,” challenging and discrediting the lies of the far-right day by day, minute by minute and disseminating our exposes across the internet before their lies took root and began to grow.

And last Tuesday we made one final effort before the polls. Led exclusively by local union branches, we handed out 20,000 anti-BNP leaflets at train stations and transport hubs across the North West during morning and afternoon rush hour, two days before people went to their polling station.

The strategy of Sack Nick Griffin was two-fold — we needed to expose the nastiness of the BNP’s politics of hate and the threat it poses to us all. 

But we also need to offer people hope that someone was fighting for them. Trade union representatives, local community activists and faith groups all provide the glue that hold our society together in the face of harsh neoliberal  capitalism. 

Hope Not Hate exposed the ineffectiveness and extremism of Griffin and BNP councillors, but it also gave people an alternative way to get involved to make their workplaces and communities better. 

We showed that the BNP had no answers and were not real “insurgents” but bigoted opponents of all that could make modern Britain a better place.

Griffin may be gone, and the BNP on its knees, but our campaign to make Britain a place free from the politics of hate will continue.  

The problems the fascists exploited have not gone away and remain for others to exploit again. 

We need to focus on the real issues facing people in Britain today and steadfastly oppose the unacceptable and divisive tactics of those who want to rip our communities apart  by blaming those who cannot speak up for themselves.

Eternal vigilance is our obligation and hope must be our mandate.

As US LGBT rights activist Harvey Milk said, “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living. And you… And you… And you… gotta give ’em hope.”

Happy birthday, Hope Not Hate.

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