Why did ‘anti-fascists’ go after football fans at a Wetherspoons?

Scratch a self-styled ‘anti-racist’ and behold the class hatred beneath. If you don’t believe me, then look at what happened during one of the many Stand Up To Racism protests at the weekend, organised in response to Britain’s recent spate of race riots.

In Manchester on Saturday, a huge crowd of marchers were en route to Piccadilly Gardens when they made an unscheduled stop outside a Wetherspoons pub. They thought that they had chanced upon a gathering of the hard-right English Defence League (EDL). As one among the crowd wrote in a since-deleted tweet: ‘Shame on Wetherspoons allowing the EDL to set up… during a peaceful stand-up to racism protest.’ The marchers turned to face the pub and began drumming loudly.

As the video footage makes clear, the men at the Wetherspoons were not in Manchester to riot on behalf of the EDL, but to support their League Two football team, Port Vale, in an away match against Salford City. ‘We’re just here today to watch the football’, said one baffled fan to an independent journalist, ‘we’ve come to Wetherspoons for a beer en route to the game’. ‘Being called EDL was not on my 2024 bingo card’, tweeted another Port Vale fan from inside the pub. ‘[You] can’t even have a pre-match pint without being called a racist.’ Some of the fans responded to the protesters’ drumming by singing football chants.

It’s pretty obvious what happened here. The bourgeois anti-racists saw a group of working-class football fans and immediately jumped to the conclusion they were racist and fascist, perhaps spoiling for a riot. It seems that working-class Brits do not even need to open their mouths anymore before they are tarred with the r-word.

This is one of the ways that class hatred expresses itself in modern Britain. You can now pose as progressive, enlightened and caring while harbouring nothing but contempt for the underprivileged – so long as you remember to dismiss the lower orders as racist. As we saw repeatedly in the years after the Brexit vote, vast swathes of the middle-class left consider the working classes to be unworthy of a democratic voice.

The race riots we have seen in recent weeks have certainly been shocking. But rather than seek to condemn and oppose this violence on its own terms – as despicable acts of racism, perpetrated by a few hundred scumbags, thrill-seekers and far-rightists – the activist middle classes have instinctively treated it as emblematic of broader working-class sentiments. The deep prejudice of today’s anti-racist left – that every working-class person is just one pint away from committing a hate crime – is plain for all to see.

In the absence of any serious fascist movement in Britain, anti-fascists have had to constantly expand the definition – cynically going after conservative or populist politicians for supposedly fuelling racial animus or ‘dog whistling’ to the far right. This is why thousands protested outside the London HQ of Reform UK at the weekend, despite the party condemning the riots and not being far right by any reasonable definition. In truth, it’s not Nigel Farage these people hate but the supposedly idiotic plebs they imagine voting for him.

In fact, any deviation from woke orthodoxy can now be branded ‘fascistic’. Just look at another ‘anti-fascist’ demo, this one attended by Labour MP Clive Lewis, in Norwich at the weekend. Lewis told a large crowd to ‘fight the fascists’, even though the target of the counter-protest was a group of gender-critical students from the nearby University of East Anglia. A small gathering of young women were holding signs in the town centre saying ‘Keep female spaces female’ and ‘Women’s spaces matter’. They were protesting against a naked man being allowed into the women’s changing rooms at the university sports facilities. Yet, it seems that in the eyes of the likes of Lewis, feminists who reject trans orthodoxy are on a ‘far right’ continuum with those rioters who threw rocks at a mosque or tried to set fire to a hotel for asylum seekers in recent weeks.

We might also ask where all these anti-fascists have been since 7 October last year, when anti-Semitism began to explode on Britain’s streets. All too often, these self-styled anti-racists were actually marching side-by-side with those carrying anti-Semitic placards, performing Hitler salutes or making apologies for Hamas, at those near-weekly ‘pro-Palestine’ marches.

Is it really racism that these ‘anti-racists’ are so opposed to? Or has ‘anti-racism’ become an acceptable pretext for giving vent to their own prejudices?

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.