A campaign gets going

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Wednesday, 22 September 2010, 18:20

I'm just on my way back from Leicester where I've had almost four hours of really constructive meetings with people in the council, community and faith leaders and trade unionists. We have been able to explain the lessons of the Bradford campaign, particularly how it turned the threat of the EDL into a positive community cohesion campaign. There really seems an appetite from local people and organisations to do something similar here.

Leicester is one of the most mixed cities in Britain and is often held up as a model of community cohesion. While of course it has its tensions people generally live together quite peacefully. None of this has happened by accident but rather is the product of years of hard and determined work. This is now under threat from the EDL who yesterday put in an application for a march.

While there have been encouraging sounds from the council leadership it is by no means certain that any application to ban the EDL march will be accepted by the Home Secretary. I know from my experiences of Bradford the criteria that need to be met over public order and public safety. There are the usual obvious concerns over the EDL coming to Leicester in targeting the Muslim community but there are other dangers too. One of the people I met today was from one of the main Hindu organisations who told me how EDL emails were already circulating within their community saying that the EDL's fight was only against Muslim extremists and they should join together. A representative from the Sikh community organisation also expressed his fear of how the EDL were trying to spread an anti-Muslim message within their community.

While the police and the city council will be looking at the public order issues, and deciding whether to apply for a ban, we are stepping up our campaign to demonstrate the strength of feeling there is in the city against the EDL march. Sam's been working on the ground here for a couple of weeks now and the results are beginning to show. A number of organisations I met had already met Sam and today they have promised to circulate our Leicester Together petition which we have just launched. Our HOPE not hate group at Leicester University is planning daily actions as students begin to return and several key unions are promising to use their local branches to get the message out. We are also finalising plans for a number of community events to take place across the city.

We've got just two weeks to build the petition so my initial target is for 5,000 signatures. Will we get it ... I guess only time will tell.