LAFA is a grassroots autonomous and non-hierarchichal collection of individuals committed to building a mass anti-fascist movement in London that is accessible and militant.
Regional groups:
@LAFANorth
@LondonAFA_South
@London_AFA_East
@afa_west
+info:
English fascists turned up to the Palestinian solidarity demo with provocative flags. They lost all three. Anti-fascists and pro Palestinian demonstrators embarrassed them. Look for the write up in a few days
It's high time we did a thread introducing people to the deep ideological, financial, and practical links between TERFs and the American far right.
Essentially there is a wide array of evidence showing that anti trans rhetoric is being used to further the far right cause
We made a small guide to some of the most regularly used far right symbols so that anyone can spot fascists and their pals easier. We chose a number that we have seen in person or in active online spaces, as well as some that are rare but worth remembering. 1/
(CW for symbols)
We had a long but important day out in Bexley on Saturday opposing the coalition of Neo Nazis and Cranks who showed up to oppose Drag Queen Story Hour. All 3 events successfully took place and loads of locals showed up to support as the day went on. Drag Queens are for everyone!
The White Rose, previously known for being the name of Sophie Scholls antinazi group, executed by the Nazi government, has had its name hijacked by a large decentralised group of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists.
Read our writeup on this group here:
In response to far-right violence, we must come together as anti-fascists. Neither fear nor death can undo our bonds. From London we sent our solidarity with the people of Portland with this banner drop in front of the Cable Street mural.
Today we mourn, tomorrow we fight on!
ALERTA ALERTA!
ANTI FASCIST DEMO IN LONDON!On 24th September anti-fascists will march in central London in solidarity with refugees, in opposition to an anti-refugee protest organised by far-right group the 'DFLA'. We will also stand in opposition to creeping Government fascism
@jewdas
Not a racist march just a march just casually calling for the murder of haredi jews while holding a stop antisemitism sign, is this irony? Do we need to ask Morriset?
In case anyone was in any doubt:
There are currently several hundred far right hooligans congregating in pubs & streets around parliament, singing racist songs getting drunk and being shunted around by riot police
Some groups are not monitored by cops though & are moving freely
At a demo organised by
@TransActionBloc
Antifas arrived early, and secured a place in front of Tate Britain before PA arrived. They did not expect us there. We confronted them as soon as they arrived, spilling out into the road. The British Blackshirts did not last long in direct
The working class will need to work together to resist what's coming.
Anti traveller policies. Brutal crackdowns on the homeless. Racist assaults. The marginalization of LGBT people.
They will try and attack on every front.
We have to be ready to defend ourselves collectively
Happy (London) Pride to all the traitors happy to march with cops who last week further injured a trans comrade and happily stood by while the people actually keeping your community safe were homophobically and transphobically abused. Hope the Soho party is worth it!
Just an update on this:Calvin got literally laughed out of town by people chanting "you're not a real vicar" at him, and TPUK's organising effort collapsed completely. The fash were outnumbered by a ratio of more than 10 to 1, and their protest has pretty much utterly failed.
So Turning Point UK are holding an anti-drag Queen event outside the Honor Oak pub in South East London on Saturday. Calvin Robinson is coming and so are.... er 6 other people
Here's a classic case study: the bathroom access debate in the USA.
It's a known tactic of segregationists: deny the target group access to bathrooms and you deny them access to public life. That's why they used it against black people in the 60s
1: cannot stress enough how much we don't give a fuck about this statue.
2: the cops definitely know this, and a big part of why they do this is in order to showboat for right wingers watching at home. It's theater.
Yesterday, a pitiful display of less than 30 far-right activists, deprived of their self-appointed leader, Nick Tenconi, who left them at a petrol station & didn't attend his own demonstration, were confronted by hundreds of locals in support of queer culture in South London
PSA FOR ALL GOING TO TOMMORROWS PALESTINE SOLIDARITY MARCH.
The police, far right agitators and streamers, and the press are all very likely to film faces of attendees, which can lead to harassment campaigns after the demo
MASK UP
Instructions below. Share widely!
TO ALL OUR FANS EXPRESSING DISAPPOINTMENT ABOUT OUR ABSENCE FROM THE POLICE MEGA-TERROR DOOM LIST.
We apologise. We are trying. Please sympathise with us in this trying time.
This should be considered misinformation. The flag in the photograph depicts the Islamic Shahada.
Al Nusras flag does contain this but also contains, uh, their actual organisational name.
Compare and contrast: the actual Al Nusra flag, and the (harmless), flag of the Tawheed
This is why we referred to the police as a political faction in their own right in our statement at the start of the Kill the Bill protests
The police are a coherent & highly unified political body, with a strict ideology, a love of state power, & a vast popular base
Metropolitan Police Federation calls on government and force leaders to tackle social media firms that enable footage of officers dealing with incidents to be shared.
We are going to issue a round-up statement about today shortly but for now we will leave it at this:
Despite arrests& vicious, aggressive fascist violence against the Honor Oak pub in the early hours of the morning, the fascists failed to stop today's event.
Well done EVERYONE
THIS IS WHY YOU NEED TO MASK UP FOR DEMOS.
The police are going to spend months kicking in doors over this.
They will hit you with reprisals long after the fact if you don't take precautions.
WEAR A MASK.
The political situation in the UK is on the verge of the early stages of Fascism.
The London Anti-Fascist Assembly (LAFA) urges the formation of a leaderless, intersectional anti-fascist front, across the UK, to fight this new power.
Good news! Far right scared off by anti-fascists
London Anti-Fascist Assembly (LAFA) has just received news that the main far-right “Free Tommy” rally planned for August 24th has been cancelled by its organisers.
(More details of our demo on 24th will be announced soon)
On Saturday 24th of June, antifascists had an early start defending a queer pub against Neo-Nazis who had made clear they had planned to blockade or gain entry to the building by arriving before 6am.
ALERTA ANTIFASCISTA
We callout to all Antifascists who can get to London for the Palestine Solidarity demonstration on Saturday to come down and join the mass march for a free Palestine.
Support Black Lives Matter protests on saturday!
This is a callout for antifascists to show up in real solidarity for the protests
We know the far right wants to disrupt the BLM protests & sow division and scare people off of the streets. Dont let them.
Chris Kaba is the one we should mourn today. The police state will never be satisfied and will always want more power to do racist violence. The queens death means nothing next to the murder of the oppressed by the cops
Trans & queer antifascists organised themselves and opposed & disrupted a transphobic conference held in London today.
The effort to show up for trans liberation was met with a police response which included pepper spraying attendees in what can be described as a flustered...
The whole point of this campaign is to set up and police ever tighter and tighter boundaries of what counts as a "real woman".
Their idea of a "real women" eventually reaches logical absurdities, and is boiled down to being "white fertile feminine child bearer".
IT'S MYSOGYNY.
Hey everyone: a number of posts are going around claiming to identify undercover cops.
Please be very careful when doing this. It's actually very hard to solidly ID undercover police. Making false IDs of random people is extremely dangerous & corrupts the information environment
Probably wise to avoid central London today: if you didn't know already, there's going to be a large anti lockdown rally, and there's significant involvement from a variety of far right groups
We expect it to get messy fast and be heavily policed. Also it'll be total covid party
If you read those threads and the articles linked it should become clear that the TERF agenda has nothing to do with defending women.
It's purpose is its effect: weakening the LGBT+ movement, attacking feminism and women, and attacking bodily autonomy and reproductive rights
Anti-fascists attended a huge working-class multi-racial demonstration in Central London on the 14th of October in solidarity with the Palestinian people. During the demo, fascists tried to disrupt it and lost all their flags, took an arrest and had a hospital visit.
The NYT subsequently did a major piece on this phenomenon: Britain has become a world leader in anti trans public campaigning.
As this article notes there is a huge "split between the American and British centre-left on this issue"
Anarchists covered a Barclays with paint in North London in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Barclays Bank holds over £1 billion in shares, and provides over £3 billion in loans and to companies whose military technology...
ALERTA ALERTA!
London callout for antifascists in solidarity with LGBT causes!
Far right transphobic agitator and livestreamer Kelly Jay Keen is gonna be in Hyde park on Sunday 30th!
Trans Action Bloc & LAFA are countering her hate speech!
Bring the noise and bring a friend!
Where does this come from? Well as
@CaseyExplosion
points out in her wonderful thread, it's about the Christian far right in the USA targeting the LGBT community in revenge for losing the battle over marriage equality.
The same thing also turns up in the UK, in relation to a pond in hampstead heath: a group of segregationists decided to target women who wanted to use the womens-only swimming pond. It then became a major news item.
Most of the articles in major publications were not pro trans
Also noted in the NYT piece is the dogwhistle campaign based on stoking fears about trans women in women's prisons. In reality trans women do not pose a threat out of the statistical norm to the other inmates. Nevertheless the far right & TERFs depict them as potential rapists
ALERTA ALERTA!
London callout to oppose the fascist/transphobe alliance.
While Kelly Jay Keen is marching with sieg-heiling Nazis in Australia, the rest of her lot is rallying in Hyde park on Sunday 26th!
@TransActionBloc
& LAFA are organising a counterdemo: Be there!
Theres a general state of chaos in whitehall as far right groups are clashing with fully armoured riot cops with batons and helmets near scotland yard, breaching metal barriers.
This area is basically becoming a mess. Avoid this zone as cop vs fash & fash v fash brawls occurring
The case the TERFs wanted to make to the media with that particular incident was that the person in question did what she did * because she was trans*.
But in reality the trans prison population is actually one of the most vulnerable groups in Britain's jails.
Today was a wild ride.
Congratulations and solidarity to everyone on the streets today, both in central and in local demos- at time of writing, it appears that the far right have had a disastrous day.
Stay safe, stay focused.
It's not over.
Funnily enough, though TERFs accuse trans people of violating women's bodily autonomy just by existing, they don't care much when abortion comes into the picture. In fact there's a history of TERFS taking money and help from the anti-choice lobby
Thread:
In light of the completely revisionist take from Glinner crediting anti-trans extremists in the UK of helping with the
#RepealThe8th
campaign, let's take a moment to acknowledge what actually happened:
An attempt by US evangelical-linked activists to sabotage the repeal effort.
That's a pattern of shared tactics: focus on segregating public spaces based on a smear campaign depicting trans people as inherently sexually threatening
This has 2 similarities to far right campaigns: it's similar to Jim Crow era segregation policies & the anti-choice movement
ALERTA ALERTA!
London callout for antifascists in solidarity with LGBT causes!
Far right transphobic agitator and livestreamer Kelly Jay Keen is gonna be in Hyde park on Sunday 26th!
Trans Action Bloc & LAFA are countering her hate speech!
Bring the noise and bring a friend!
CALLOUT - COUNTER KJK/POSIE PARKER, 26 FEB! She platforms fascists who quote Mein Kampf, hosts a range of neo-nazi & anti-abortion groups, and revels in the deaths of trans people. We will not let her go unopposed.
#NoTerfsOnOurTurf
What was the government solution? To pass the buck, dodge a scandal, & segregate all trans women within 1 of their prisons. Never mind the fact that the women in question had wildly different case histories & that the policy was inherently transphobic
It's also eerily similar to antisemitic blood-libel in some ways.
Both have a mythos based around an invading inherently evil force, which is sexually dangerous & threatening to traditonal gender roles, posing a risk to children & women that are seen as society's property
What does that mean? It means someone is trying to funnel money into the TERF & anti choice movement via a method that cant easily be traced, & that looks superficially like a grassroots crowdfund.
But lets get serious: it's not a real crowdfund. It's a coordinated funding drive
TERFs have also seized on a recent case of a transgender woman sexually assaulting someone in prison. But what actually was the defining feature of the case? That the person in question was known to have a history of abuse, not that she just assaulted someone due to being trans.
Yesterday LAFA, together with other antifascists and our friends from
@AfedLondon
, attended a demonstration outside the Russian embassy following an international call by Ukrainian anarchists. We also wrote the following statement:
FULL LONDON CALLOUT.
Evening antifascist rally in London!
Meet at 7:30pm SHARP, thursday 31st October, at the International Brigade Memorial in Lambeth. Plans may be subject to some changes so keep an eye out for subsequent posts about this.
LAFA members hit the streets today for solidarity actions today, performing this banner drop as well as other activities.
Leave or Remain, we all gotta stand up to the rise of the far right. To get involved email londonafa
@riseup
.net
#londonisantifascist
Solidarity with everyone who got stuck in that kettle. Hearing some very nasty reports of cop bullying. Late night kettles are always a siege and they fucking suck. Notable that they're now regularly arresting legal observers.
To pull that off they've made alliances with the right wing of the feminist movement and have attempted to split the LGBT+ movement.
And the TERFS fell for it. And now they do the far rights work for them
Fuck Wiley's views, we stand in solidary with our Jewish comrades against this bigoted bullshit.
Its sad that at a time when we should be united we have people trying to cause divisions. In our fight against fascism we are stronger together
Anyway, it then turned out that there's pretty good evidence that similar groups have been funnelling cash into the UK TERF movement via a series of anonymised "crowdfunding" campaigns.
A lot of the donations were suspiciously large numbers
Thread:
Hey folks, I want to show you something interesting.
Remember when TERFs crowdfunded money to challenge Labour over trans-inclusion? Well, did you know that lot of these US evangelical affiliated groups that cropped up recently have all been running crowdfunding campaigns also?
BREAKING: hundreds of workers shut down the Department for Business and Trade in central London for international workers day, in an action called by Workers for a Free Palestine
@workers4pal
- the department is responsible for licensing arms export contracts to Israel.
The fash have left! MASSIVE well done to everyone who came out today. Together we protected refugees in the hotel from the far right. They were totally humiliated and outnumbered
This is what solidarity looks like!
Onan hag oll, Cornwall is antifascist ✊✊✊
There's also strong indications of financial ties. In Ireland the
#repealThe8th
campaign soon discovered signs their opponents, who wanted to maintain the ban against abortion, were getting money from a variety of big international donors, amongst them, the US evangelical right
A person, or persons, claiming to be with a National Action group in London has sent a death threat letter. This should be closely noted by all antifascists, as it highlights the very real danger of lone wolf & clandestine Nazi attacks
Content warning for the letter of course
I have received “a serious threat from National Action London” notifying me of their “intention to kill” me & my family. They name my husband & home address.They don’t consider killing me ‘murder’ they call it an ‘execution’. This letter was through my front door
This is Britain
In celebration of the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners, LAFA together with the Dalston Solidarity Cafe is organising a Anarchist Prisoner Solidarity Day on the 27th to benefit the Dalston Arrestees from the recent anti-immigration raid resistance.
🖤🖤🖤
Look at the results: political campaigns against members of oppressed minorities, star athletes like Caster Semenya being expelled from events for not being blonde and white enough, infighting in major UK political parties over whether or not trans women count as people...
Already seeing police vans circling the suburbs etc and area around Clapham Common. Area has been crawling all day. Keep your eyes open for dark blue TSG vans as that likely means they intend to make arrests or be aggressive.
Today LAFA was out at trans pride alongside other antifascists. Only one transphobe made themselves known and was escorted away from the demo.
NO ASSIMILATION! TRANS LIBERATION!
The TERF program is ultimately directed against anyone who cant fit that definition.
Anyone involved in anti trans rhetoric is complicit- even if they dont consciously agree with that definition, their actions still end up upholding it!
Lol at this point they are literally just doing this as an agitational tactic. No one gives a shit about that thing. This is theater for right wing telegram channels, daily mail columnists, and the news cameras
On Sunday 26th of February, Trans and Cis Antifascists came together to counter Far Right transphobe Posie Parker AKA Kellie Jay-Keen in Hyde Park.
The demo was a success, with the transphobes leaving frustrated and venting their anger on Twitter for days on end after.
Antifascists came together on Saturday to demonstrate against the far-right and block their route to the Home Office, and take a clear stand against the equally fascist Tory Home Office itself
📣📣📣ALERTA ALERTA!📣📣📣
In one weeks time there will be back-to-back antifascist protests in South and Central London!
Honor Oak on Saturday and Hyde Park on Sunday.
ALL OUT TO RESIST THE FASH AND THE TRANSPHOBES!