'No surrender to the Taliban!': Football hooliganism, Islamophobia and the rise of the English Defence League

On a number of occasions throughout 2009 and 2010 violent clashes occurred between white and Asian males, anti-fascist demonstrators and the police in city centres in the United Kingdom. These disturbances involved a new organisation, the English Defence League (EDL), which claims to oppose ‘radical Islam’. This article charts the growth of the EDL and the affiliated Casuals United, and examines their motivations and ideologies. It assesses their links with football hooligan ‘firms’, and whether these links mean that the EDL has a large pool of violent ‘foot soldiers’ at its disposal, and concludes that the EDL’s Islamophobic views and provocative street army tactics mean that it poses the most serious threat to public order and community cohesion since the heyday of the National Front in the 1970s.