Anti-Fascist Action

In the early 1990s, AFA continued the pattern of twin-track physical and ideological confrontations with fascism. Examples of the former include the first Unity Carnival in east London in 1991, with 10,000 participants, and a demonstration in Bethnal Green, with 4,000 participants (under the slogan “Beating the Fascists: An old East End tradition”). In September 1991, AFA launched its magazine Fighting Talk, of which 25 issues were published between 1991 and April 1999; the magazine incorporated Cable Street Beat Review.[12] The first issue reported the recent launch of a Dublin branch and a Glasgow branch, the latter with the support of Red Action, Class War, Direct Action Movement, Workers Party Scotland, Scottish Anti-Racist Movement and the Republican Bands Alliance.[13]

Cable Street Beat continued in the early 1990s, with the involvement of bands including the reformed The Selecter,[14] Bad Manners and Gary Clail.

Physical resistance to fascism also continued. In 1990, three AFA members were jailed for a total of 11 years following an attack on a neo-Nazi activist.[15] AFA's militant approach to anti-fascism was given media airing in May 1992, when the BBC screened a documentary, Fighting Talk, as part of its Open Space series.[16]

A long street battle between AFA against Blood and Honour supporters, skinheads, hooligan firms and far-right groups on 11 September 1992 was dubbed the Battle of Waterloo as it was centred on Waterloo station. There were stabbings and 36 people were arrested.[17][18]

By this time, there were 21 branches of AFA listed in Fighting Talk, in locations including Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Oxford, Exeter, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester and Norwich.[19]

In 1993, Derek Beackon, a candidate from the British National Party (BNP), won a council seat on the Isle of Dogs in Tower Hamlets, East London, under the slogan of "Rights for Whites".[20][21] This signalled a turn in the BNP's policy from confrontation on the streets to a bid for electoral respectability, partly as a response to their defeat on the streets by AFA.[20] In 1994, BNP activist Tony Lecomber announced this turn in tactics with a statement to the press that there would be "no more meetings, marches, punch-ups".[22][23] In 1995 London AFA responded with its Filling the Vacuum strategy,[24] which involved offering a political alternative in these communities instead of concentrating on challenging the fascist presence on the streets. Red Action and its allies campaigned within the AFA Network after 1995 for AFA as an organisation to adopt the "Filling the Vacuum" strategy. However, given that AFA contained a number of political groups, with differing political programmes, this, and the decline of street action by the BNP as it embraced "respectable electoralism", contributed to the breakup of much of the AFA network, with much internal recrimination.[25]

Anti-fascist mobilisations still occurred after 1995, such as ones against the National Front in Dover in 1997 and 1998. The number of AFA branches across the UK peaked at 38 in the mid-1990s, with regular national conferences and an active Northern Network. A new AFA National Coordinating Committee was set up, and in 1997, an official AFA statement forbade members from associating with Searchlight. In 1998 the committee expelled Leeds and Huddersfield AFA for ignoring this policy. There were some local relaunches of AFA groups, such as in Liverpool in 2000, but by 2001, AFA barely existed as a national organisation.

Red Action and other AFA activists followed the logic of providing a political alternative to fascism in setting up the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) in 1995, which became the sole focus of Red Action activity after 2001. Others formerly involved in AFA, predominantly anarchists, have maintained militant, street-focused tactics, initially in the group No Platform, then Antifa UK.[2] Some of these groups re-formed in the Anti-Fascist Network in 2011, which aims to recreate the "two-track" approach of AFA.[26]