On one occasion the EDL’s leader was arrested for trying to walk, with one companion, through the heavily Muslim area of Tower Hamlets in London. On another occasion he was arrested after an organised protest overran its running time by three minutes. And from the outset the authorities did everything they could to make life difficult if not impossible for the leadership of the group. From the moment Robinson started the organisation his bank accounts were frozen. He and all of his immediate family had their homes raided by police and files and computers were taken away. Eventually, a mortgage irregularity was found and Robinson was tried, convicted and sent to prison for this offence.15 At the same time there were constant threats from Islamist groups. As well as repeated assaults by Muslim gangs on the EDL’s leaders, there were also serious efforts to kill them. In June 2012 the police stopped a car containing part of a cell of six Islamists. The vehicle contained bombs, sawn-off shotguns, knives and a message attacking the Queen. The men were heading back from an EDL demonstration where they had planned to carry out the attack but due to a small attendance that day the protest had finished early. As on other occasions there was little public sympathy due to a general feeling that the EDL had brought any such attacks upon themselves. In response to the problematic light in which their town was shown by the emergence of Muslim gangs as well as the EDL, the local council put on an event called ‘Love Luton’. This was a celebration of the ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ in Luton that included a range of foods and also stilt-walkers.

In different versions this same story has been replayed across Europe. In Germany in 2014 a movement calling itself Pegida formed in Dresden. Their agenda was similar to that of the EDL and other popular protest movements across Europe. They expressed themselves opposed to radical Muslims and mass immigration, though stressed their openness to immigration in general (especially in the case of Pegida to legitimate asylum seekers). As with the EDL their numbers included prominent members of ethnic and sexual minorities, though these were rarely if ever mentioned in the press. Pegida’s protests centred on an objection to indiscriminate Muslim immigration and an objection to hate-preachers, Salafists and other extremists. As with the EDL, the group’s founding symbols were not only anti-Islamist but anti-Nazi, attempting to distance themselves at the outset from any connection to such horrors of the past. Although such connections were consistently made in the media, by December 2014 the number of attendees at Pegida protests grew to more than 10,000 and had begun to spread across Germany. Unlike the EDL, which had attracted an almost exclusively working-class contingent in Britain, Pegida seemed able to appeal to a wider range of citizens in Germany including middle-class professionals. Eventually (though in much smaller numbers) the movement spread to other parts of Europe.