When Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West) announced it was launching a UK franchise, many waited with baited breath to see whether the German-born movement could muster the same show of strength in the UK which had provided its namesake’s notoriety. Specifically, it has been the German Pegida’s ability to draw crowds numbering in the tens of thousands which placed the movement squarely in the spotlight, combined with a new form of far right activism which saw a shift from thuggish gangs to the presence of families and women coming together to oppose the so-called “Islamicisation of Europe”.
British punditry was quick to deride the small show of a few hundred people marching through the rain by Birmingham train station on a cold February morning. There has long been a sense of British exceptionalism when it comes to the far right, particularly when compared with other European countries. The French National Front won record numbers of votes and historic firsts in local and regional elections last year and is set to make the second round of the 2017 presidential election. In Greece, one of Europe’s most violent far-right parties, Golden Dawn, came third in the September’s general election, while even more traditionally resilient to fascism Nordic countries, including Finland and Denmark, have seen the growth of the political representation of far-right parties at the polls.
In Britain, the BNP is a largely redundant party, while efforts by other far-right parties, such as Britain First, have failed to garner much public support. Meanwhile UKIP’s Nigel Farage has played on the very same register which has seen the far-right rise to prominence elsewhere, notably a fear of immigrants and a disdain for the EU.
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Pegida UK: Mainstreaming the far right with mums and prams