OUGD505 - Product Range Distribution - British Politics - Angry, White and Proud (Channel 4)

After seeing the BBC 3 Documentary last night about young peoples lack of involvement in politics, this morning I watched a Channel 4 documentary about far right political groups that have stemmed from the EDL to see how "politics" works when people get involved in the extreme ends of it. 

The program and the points it raised were very controversial, with it ending up trending on Twitter because of peoples disgust at it, as can be seen in articles from The Mirror and The Guardians websites.

Key Points

I thought it probably necessary to hide the points the program made because of their controversial nature. They can be seen by clicking below.

Key Points

There's a natural progression that goes from misbehaving as a child, to going into football based violence, and then developing far-right attitudes. People can be sacked from their jobs for being seen it the protests.

"we're going for a stroll down the beech and celebrating our heritage, we're not looking for violence, but believe me, if we are attacked we will defend ourselves"
They see their activism as the same as any other political activism, but because of the topic and the stereotype of person that does this sort of activism, it is looked upon differently and is seen as non-political.

A group of police follow a specific group of people around the country. This is necessary though, as some of the protesters only go for the buzz of protesting, which is evidence of the progression from football violence.

Since the EDL has dispersed, sub groups have formed and our now harder to control by the police. Some of the sub-groups want to reform into a larger singular political movement like the EDL again.

The activism is taken to a much more personal level, with some of the demonstrations they want to do being the sort of thing that the BBC3 documentary did ironically, with regular people trying to talk to the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the same way as the presenter tried to contact David Cameron.

They claim to specifically target those that spread messages of hatred and violence.

They say that getting people to listen to their right wing messages is no worse than the way extremist Muslim preachers get people to listen to theirs.

The war on terror and the treatment of British soldiers is often cited as reasons for the demonstrations. "You find it offensive that I'm wearing badges like that, well unfortunately I find it quite offensive when you're cutting British soldiers heads off in Southeast London"

The sort of extremist messages and preachers/preachings that they campaign against are things that the majority of Muslims also disagree with and try to distance themselves from.

In an interview with one of the activists, he said that his son had lost his life in Afghanistan providing cover fire for an injured colleague. He says he campaigns to try and avoid a situation where religious extremism causes deaths in England like it does in Afghanistan and other countries. He says he's not racist, and feels that all the people who are involved in far right demonstrations are tarnished with the same brush.

Incidents such as the exposed paedophile ring in Rotherham help numbers grow for the protests, but the people that join after publicity such as this tend not to be protesting against extremism, and are generally just promoting anti-Islam in an ill-informed and fascist manner by throwing the extremists and any wrong doers in with regular Muslims.

With shouts like "Muslim paedo's off our streets" getting support in Rotherham, it's easy to see why this sort of activism is looked down on, and why it never achieves any change.

Stills

Conclusion

Somewhere buried deep in this sort of activism, their is a somewhat valid point about the spreading of hatred. The problem is that it's camouflaged by all the other negative messages, racist connotations, and hooliganistic stereotyping.

The intolerance-based hypocrisy of this sort of activism and the lack of integrity the activists show is a massive contrast to the examples shown in the BBC3 documentary last night, and I think this goes a long way to explaining why it's so looked down upon socially.

I think the contrast between this documentary and the BBC one shows that any political campaign, in order to have any sort of impact or influence, has to be clear in what the campaign is for, and needs to show integrity and dignity as well as just bare-faced passion, regardless of how ill-informed the passion is.