Loud and proud: Passion and politics in the English Defence League
The book uses interviews, informal conversations and extended observation at EDL events to critically reflect on the gap between the movement's public image and activists' own understandings of it. It details how activists construct the EDL, and themselves, as 'not racist, not violent, just no longer silent' inter alia through the exclusion of Muslims as a possible object of racism on the grounds that they are a religiously not racially defined group. In contrast activists perceive themselves to be 'second class citizens' disadvantaged and discriminated by a 'two tier' justice system that privileges the rights of 'others' This failure to recognise themselves as a privileged white majority explains why ostensibly intimidating EDL street demonstrations marked by racist chanting and nationalistic flag waving are understood by activists as standing 'loud and proud' the only way of 'being heard' in a political system governed by a politics of silencing.