Or WTF was the Beach Bloc? – Razorsmile, Plan C Brighton
Brighton has a long history of militant anti-fascism and in recent years Brighton Anti Fascists (BAF) have carried out sustained and vital work in maintaining this history. They have managed to combine that militancy with a clear understanding of the need for mass mobilisation that brings whole communities into action. Their previous work around the March For England (roughly 2011 – 2014) showed them to be capable of connecting and mobilising the local community in active blocking and resistance. When they initiated a coalition to call the recent Carnival Against Fascism in Brighton part of the reason people were willing to get involved was the trust that had been built by these actions. Plan C Brighton signed up to the coalition and we got stuck in.
Members of Plan C were involved in the organising of what soon turned out to be a huge wave of leafletting, outreach, artwork and cultural intervention. If you went to a punk gig in Brighton you were told about the Carnival. If you were in a community organisation someone was coming to talk about what was happening. The migrant and refugee groups across the city were engaged in making banners and planning how to safely be involved. Local street WhatsApp and Facebook groups began to ask questions about what was happening and plan attendance. Left groups mobilised, trade union branches passed motions, fundraising events took place across the city. The whole city was plastered with the beautiful artwork of the Carnival and everywhere you went in town you’d see the call-outs for the action. People stepped up and sunk huge amounts of their time into an event that was, at all times, posed very clearly – we’re not here to complain or shout at the racists and fascists, we’re here to stop them. They will not pass, by all means necessary.
And they did not pass.
As the mobilisation developed Plan C decided to try out a new tactic we’ve been discussing. Some Italian comrades had recently begun using large inflatables as crowd defensive measures and we were inspired by this. It looked fun and potentially practical, both a visual intervention and capable of acting as a defensive shield. Such tactics come and go in the movement and all of them have limitations but this looked like it might enable a crowd to defend itself from police violence and, potentially, add enough to the mix to let us push back when in a stand-off. We’d only recently started looking at this tactic and comrades in Brighton were already busy organising the Carnival and some of the blocs that were set-up such as the Folk Against Fascism bloc, so we decided to call a Plan C mobilisation under the name ‘Beach Bloc’.
Plan C was interested in which aspects of this method could be used in the particular set up in Brighton given the limited resources available. In the end, it became apparent that the same materials could be used in quite different way.
We were eager to support the Carnival and we wanted to test out some of the logistics involved in inflatables and bloc formation so we chose a more playful stance. This was inspired by the work our comrades have been doing in our Caring Militancy Commune, where we have been exploring how to shift the understanding of what militancy means and who is seen as capable of being militant. Too often this gets reduced to an image of young able bodied cis men acting as street fighters. So we took the idea of the visual intervention as an opportunity to offer a way for people to be on the streets in a supportive space, child friendly and playful, potentially enabling a broadening out of who can be militant by enabling others ways to be involved that are just as crucial but often forgotten.
On the day we formed up with huge dolphins, green aliens and a lot of blow up swim rings. We gave these out to kids and parents and a whole bunch of party people and they brought a smile to people’s face and began to add an important visual element to the crowd, with a gentle reminder perhaps that ‘beneath the streets, the beach’. We had also brought a load of lilos, our initial attempt to produce a workable shield. The Carnival had asked us to carry one of the huge street wide banners the community had made and we were honored to do so. We linked together a load of the rubber rings, stuck the lilos under our arms, hoisted our Plan C flags and stretched the banner across the street.
It rapidly became clear that the police were on the move, despite some 4000 people swarming and blocking the Station where the fascists were arriving. The Carnival coalition had structured into a whole series of blocs, each autonomous but connected, and these blocs were there to enable the demo to be mobile and offensive rather than static and defensive. We joined with the Trade Union bloc and the Folk Against Fascism bloc in moving a large part of the crowd towards a choke point called the Seven Dials where we were hoping to do a blockade.
Despite the limited numbers of our bloc, our visual presence and co-ordination proved to have a clear role and we began to form a backline for these crowd movements, gently encouraging and communicating what was happening. Once we had reached the first blockade point and helped take the streets over, swarming the limited police presence, it soon became clear we needed to move again. The police had violently attacked the frontline on Terminus Rd, going up from the Station into a residential area. They had been slowly pushed back under repeated truncheon blows. Things were close to breaking and so the Seven Dials blockade had to be abandoned and the crowd moved to back up the frontline on Terminus Rd. Once again, together with the Trade Union bloc in the lead and the Folk Against Fascism bloc we helped to move the crowd into a new position. Here again the organised line we had formed showed itself to have a role as we helped the crowd be concentrated in the blockade points that were being held by the front line.
We realised a number of things on the day. For some comrades more used to being on the frontline it was strange to experience the other end of things perhaps but one thing that was clear was that crowds don’t just have front lines – they have edges and a backline as well. Often these are left to their own devices but what can then happen is that those people who are at the back can’t see what’s happening, don;t really know why they are there or even if they are on the demo really as it simply appears like they are in a group of people milling about in the streets. So they wander off, go home, get bored – each step away gradually dispersing the crowd in a kind of evaporation effect. Keeping a line that clearly is ‘the back’ has a useful effect. It enables communication – ‘stay here if you can, the front line is holding but we need to keep the pressure on’ – as well as movement and the feeling of clearly participating because they were clearly participating – the density and depth of a crowd behind a frontline hugely effects how hard the police can go. It enables people to take a break and rest, recover and find support. It enables the young parent with the pram to be there, to be militant, without having to feel like they are putting themselves or their kids in immediate danger and it helps keep the demo visible, so when you come round a corner a quarter mile away you can see immediately where you need to go rather than just encounter a vague group of people milling about who might be on your side.
It was a valuable day for us, teaching us much about bloc work and prompting us to think harder about the role of the bloc tactic. As one comrade said recently, we need to begin to develop a ‘block-ology’ and think through the practical realities of street work and militant confrontation tactics in the face of the rising threat of fascism. Crucially the Brighton Carnival shows that one of the most powerful tactics we can deploy is to combine mass mobilisation with militant anti fascism, but in order for those mobilisations to be the mass events they must become we need to think through all sides of the situation, not just the frontline. There are going to be many challenges to come and the fight against fascism is everyone’s problem.
