Preston: A Day Out at the Protest

The following is an account from two of the tens of thousands of anti-fascists who mobilised across the UK to stand against the reckless hate and violence of fascists, paper patriots and the wider far-right. These demonstrations were called by a decentralised network of groups and individuals using the deaths of three young girls in Southport earlier in the week as a call to arms, excused by the malinformation that the attacker was a muslim asylum seeker.

A series of photographs and commentary, documenting the events of the right-wing protest and Unity Rally counter-protest which occurred in Preston, Lancashire on Saturday 3rd August 2024. Protests are not always this light, and not everyone will have had such a positive experience this Saturday. Our intention is to show that activism can be a productive and joyful experience in these contested times.
- SA and HW

Friday night, a message pops up in my (S’s) local queer Discord server: a far right protest has been planned at the Preston Flag Market for tomorrow, and the council have put out a notice asking people to stay away and stay safe. Shortly after that, the Preston branch of Stop The War shared a poster for a counter-protest Unity Rally. Initially I had assumed this was organised by Stop The War Preston & South Ribble, but this was not stated on the poster, and they made it clear that they were just sharing this call to action. I decided I would go to the counter-protest and take my camera, to document what was happening in and to our communities. While I was scoping out the area and taking some test shots, I ran into a friend, another anarchist-feminist trans woman, and we spent the day together hanging out, helping someone in need, and shooting photos. These are some of the things we saw.

The far-right protest consisted mainly of a small group of younger people who occupied the Obelisk on the Market Square.

The counter-protest was about five times larger, and included members of the local branches of the Socialist Workers Party and Stand Up to Racism East Lancashire.

One of the protesters held up cardboard signs and shouted right-wing propaganda.

At one point, one of the protesters, donning a Union Jack flag as a cape, wandered through the space that had formed in the middle of the square, and started to taunt the counter-protesters. Police presence was moderate at this stage, and things were mostly calm. It felt more like a bunch of people standing around than a rally or demo. Which is fine, since we want peace in our communities.

I didn’t manage to hear what words were said, but eventually they stalked back over to their group.

Later on, the protesters kicked off. A few eggs were thrown, and a glass bottle, and at one point they ran off the Obelisk and down the side of Turtle Bay. Some banged on the windows in an attempt to smash them. At this point, the police took a more active role, and here we see a gaggle of officers bundling a protester into a van.

Everyone poured up the street from the square and onto an intersection on the main road. The movement was brisk but calm, right-wing agitators and left-wing locals woven together in the crowd.

One of the eggs that were thrown, this one on the ground outside Turtle Bay.

Once the different groups had moved to the main road, they seemed to fragment again into little clusters dotted on all corners of the street, like party-goers sticking with their friends in a nightclub. The police tried to pull apart some of the different contingencies and keep people out of the road. Life went on calmly.

One of the protesters got a bit aggro with H:

She baselessly accuses me of starting on her, attacking her. That tends to represent how a lot of transfemmes get attacked.

and splashed her with energy drink. The police moved in to pull our groups apart and try and restore some calm, even though my friend had been assaulted. To any established order, a nullifying peace is more desirable than a fight for radical justice.

A couple of officers chatting to a group on the other side of the street. For many people, it’s not clear from their appearance what they believe or what they want. Throughout the day, some people engaged in constructive dialogue, or at least attempted to. It makes me wonder how we can reconfigure protest / counter-protest events to facilitate discussion and prefiguration.

Police maintained an eye on our agitators as we stood off to the side, enjoying the sunshine.

Stood on some street furniture and shaded by a tree, we see the diffuse groups of different people who came to today’s events.

Later on, the most vocal of the protesters started to chant and rally their troops again, but their contingent was small. At this point the counter-protest had essentially dissipated, as the job of demonstrating the insignificance of the right-wing, both to them and their supporters, and to our community and ourselves, was mostly complete. Here we see some police officers recording video evidence of the protesters.

They decided to move on to the park, and H and I decided to follow them down and keep an eye on them. The police remained on the main road. Their demo was a fizzle, and I felt like we had leisurely chased them off.

Our Monster-wielding antagonist then appeared from across the street and attacked H:

She sprayed the entire contents of her can in my face, repeating her accusations from earlier. (Every accusation is a confession, after all). When I refused to cede any physical or verbal ground to her, she then began swinging without a second thought, initiating a physical confrontation.

I decided to stay back and document this, and record evidence - which worked, as the attacker’s friends eventually convinced her, after several bouts in a car park, that she was incriminating herself.

And with pagan flare, my friend casts away our enemy with a final verbal and physical gesture.

The group moved off and dispersed before the police arrived; we heard talk of them reconvening in Avenham Park, but, thankfully, didn’t see any evidence of this happening. We met up with someone else from the counter-protest and wandered down to the park together. We saw some of our agitators slide past us later on, shielding their faces from our biological and mechanical eyes. And then we just camped out on the grass, at the edge of a free party that was going on, completely unrelated to everything else that had happened earlier in the day. Not bad for a summer afternoon in these meteorologically and politically uncertain times 😊