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The one image that sums up Birmingham's response to EDL march

'Who looks like they have power here, the real Brummy on the left or the EDL who migrated for the day to our city and failed to assimilate,' says MP Jess Phillips

Monday 10 April 2017 16:32 BST

After the EDL announced they would be holding a rally in Birmingham on Saturday, a local mosque decided they would counter the far-right group’s antagonism with a 'best of British' tea party (PA)

An image shared by thousands of an incensed English Defence League member head to head with an apparently calm but disdainful counter-protester has perfectly encapsulated Birmingham’s response to a march by the far-right group.

Only around 50 members of the anti-Muslim organisation turned up for a demonstration that was largely met by mild irritation and bemusement by people in the second city.

And one picture seemed to sum up the general reaction in a part of the country renowned for its multi-cultural history, the nonchalant defiance and calm amusement of the female protester in direct contrast with the visible anger and hatred on the EDL supporter's face.

The image has been widely shared on social media, with many noting the stark difference in their expressions.

“I love this photo. Look at how helpless, clueless and raging the EDL pr*** is. Look at how in control, calm and cool-as-f*** she is,” said one.

“Ian Crossland EDL leader sh** his pants and shouted for cops to intervene when confronted,” said an anti-fascist activist.

“The past vs the future,” noted freelance reporter James Doleman.

After the EDL announced it would be holding a rally in Birmingham on Saturday, a local mosque opted to counter the far-right group’s antagonism with a “best of British” tea party.

The party at the city’s Central mosque, which saw the building decorated with union flag bunting, was open to all and attended by people from across Birmingham.

EDL protesters were significantly outnumbered by their counter-activists. While the EDL rally attracted around 50 people, an estimated 300 guests attended the tea-party.

The mosque’s chairman, Muhammad Afzal, said: “We are just holding this event to show EDL that Birmingham is a peaceful city and we are all united irrespective of colour, race or religion.”

10 things immigration has done for Britain

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1/1010 things immigration has done for Britain

10 things immigration has done for Britain

The Mini

The 1959 classic, that is, perhaps our greatest piece of industrial design, a miracle of packaging and revolution in motoring. Its genius designer was Sir Alec Issigonis, who was an asylum seeker. His family, Greek, fled Smyrna when Turks invaded this borderland in around 1920, and he wound up studying engineering at Battersea Polytechnic. He went on to create that most English of motor cars, the Morris Minor, as well as the Austin-Morris 1100, all much loved products of his fertile imagination.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Marks and Spencer

Once upon a time there was no M&S in Britain, difficult as that may be to believe. We have one Michael Marks to thank for our most famous retailer, and he was a refugee from Belarus, arriving in England in about 1882, and soon after set off to flog stuff around Yorkshire. He eventually teamed with Thomas Spencer to create the vast business we know today.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Thunderbirds

And many other TV shows created, funded and otherwise produced by that largest of larger-than-life characters, Lew Grade (also a world class tap dancer). The man who dominated commercial television gave us memorable entertainment such as The Prisoner, the Saint and brought the Muppets to Britain (a sort of fuzzy felt wave of immigration), as well as puppet shows where you could see the strings. All this from a penniless Jew from Ukraine, born Lev Winogradsky, who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine with his family in the 1890s. His nephew Michael Grade has also done his bit for British television.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The House of Windsor

Or the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until George V prudently rebranded the family during the First World War. Well, our royals are a pretty German bunch, as well as having various types of French and other alien blue blood coursing around their veins. ‘Twas ever thus. There was William the Conqueror, Norman French, who certainly broke the immigration rules; William of Orange, a direct import from Holland; the Hanoverian King Georges, the first barely able to speak English; Queen Victoria, who married a German, Edward VII, who couldn’t stay faithful to his wife, a Danish princess; George V wed another German princess; Edward VIII married an American (though she hardly visited England and prompted his emigration and exile); and the Queen is married to man born in Corfu. The embodiment of the British nation, to many, but one thinks of them as quite multicultural really.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

I Vow To Thee My Country

Our most patriotic hymn was the product of a man named Gustav Holst (pictured), born in Cheltenham, but of varied Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, who adapted part of his suite The Planets to put a particularly stirring and beautiful poem to music, just after the Great War. As the second verse has it, “there's another country/I've heard of long ago/Most dear to them that love her/most great to them that know”. Imagine if the Holst family had been kept out because the quota on musical European types had been reached.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Curry and Cobra

Chicken Tikka Masala is, so they say, a dish which not only the most popular in Britain but specifically designed to cater for European tastes. For that we probably have to thank an Indian migrant, Sake Dean Mahomed, who came from Bengal to open the first recognisable Indian restaurant, the magnificently named “Hindoostanee Coffee House”. History does not record if a plate of poppadoms and accompanying selection of pickles and yoghurts were routinely placed on the table for new diners, but we do know that we had to wait until 1989 to taste the ideal lager for a curry - Cobra. That brew was brought to us by Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria, a Cambridge law graduate who hailed from Hyderabad.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

That big red swirly sculpture at the Olympic Park

Or Orbit, to give it its proper name, the work of Anish Kapoor, who arrived in 1973 from India and had the artistic imagination to fill a power station.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The Sun

Love it or hate it, and many do both, this has been a symbol of much that is successful and a lot that is awful in British journalism since its inception in 1969. In its turn it spawned the Page 3 Girl and some nastily xenophobic headlines. All the stranger when you consider its creator was, of course, Rupert Murdoch, born 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Marxism

OK, Karl Marx’s philosophy was not much of a gift to the world, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. Though we might not dare admit it, Marxism still has a few insights to offer to anyone wanting to understand the workings of capitalism, though too few to excuse everything that was done in its name. Born in Germany spent much time in the British museum and the British pub, buried Highgate Cemetery. Oddly, his ideas never really caught on in his adopted homeland.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The NHS

They came from many, many backgrounds, including Ireland, the Philippines, east Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, as they still do, but the contribution of the black nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean to heal and care for is a debt of honour that must be recognised. It so sometimes forgotten that it was Enoch Powell, then Minister of Health (1960-62), who campaigned to recruit their skilled nurses to come and work over here. One abiding legacy we can thank Enoch for.

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Local Labour MP Liam Byrne said the simple civility of the tea party, which saw a mixed crowd enjoy tea and cake in the sun, was able to counter the divisive message of the EDL rally.

He told guests: “This is how we protest – by celebrating the quiet miracle of a normal life and the things that we love most about our city and our country.

“Getting together as friends, getting together as neighbours, breaking a bit of Victoria sponge and having a cup of tea. That is a potent, powerful message that we will send to those who seek to divide us.”

In the end, the rally - condemned by the leaders of the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative groups on Birmingham city council - ended with no serious disorder.

Despite the low attendance, there was heavy police presence, including riot vans, in the town centre.

While the EDL demonstration had originally been arranged to take place in the East Midlands, it was moved to Birmingham city centre after the Westminster terror attack to highlight what the group describes as a "continued increase in Islamic terrorism" linked to the city.

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