Cricklewood, North West London, found itself at the centre of a weird three way political battle on Saturday. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood – the Islamist political party that ruled the country until last July's coup – is currently headquartered in a cramped flat in Cricklewood Broadway. The party is on the run in Egypt, listed as a terrorist organisation and its leader Mohamed Morsi thrown in prison, and it's now having to plot its comeback from above a kebab shop.
As if the organisation didn't already have enough problems, it now also has an enemy in the British far-right. The South East Alliance (SEA) – basically some former EDL members led by a man best known for harassing anti-racist campaigners – organised a march on the weekend to demand that the Brotherhood should be labelled as terrorist by the UK government as well. As is always the case when the far-right do anything, anti-fascists organised to tell them to fuck off. I headed to Cricklewood to watch the day's events unfold.
As the SEA and other assorted far-right hangers on gathered outside the station, I noticed these guys' flags. The guy on the right of the picture is sporting a flag of the Golden Dawn – a Greek political party whose supporters sung the Nazi Horst Wessel song in Athens just this month. So, the message is: Islamist political parties with a questionable history should be banned, but Greek neo-Nazis who stab immigrants, attack women on TV and murder rappers are great and their flags should be worn as capes.
That said, maybe it's unfair to call all the people who turned up Nazis – some of those gathered outside Kilburn tube station looked more like something from the opening credits of a World Cup match than a Leni Riefenstahl film.
Then again, even Paulo Di Canio would probably rein this sort of thing in on Match of the Day.
By the time the march set off at midday there were about 50 of them. Perhaps this is a sign of a dwindling of the far-right street movement, or maybe targetting a political party that is already being destroyed in its own country was just a bit too niche to attract any half-hearted bigots.
As they set off towards Cricklewood Broadway they encountered a few passing anti-fascists, resulting in some pretty awkward glaring.
Up the road was a larger group of anti-fascists, who were blocking the street with their banner.
They pushed against the police lines to get closer to the fascists, but there were too few of them to move forward. They had, however, succeeded in stopping the march from moving any further.
Neither side was big enough to cause much disruption to pedestrians on the high street. People in the hundred-metre gap between the two groups stared bewilderedly, asked what was going on, and questioned what the Muslim Brotherhood have to do with anything.
Before long, the SEA decided to head to the station and leave Cricklewood, but the far-right's big day out was far from over. It turned out that many of them had a secondary target: they got the train to central London where their arch nemesis, anti-racist campaign Unite Against Fascism (UAF), was holding a conference. I guess attacking Muslims and the left in one day is like killing two birds with one stone for these people.
I waited for them outside the Trades Union Council, with the conference going on inside. Eventually, a few dozen of the Cricklewood marchers turned up and started throwing abuse and threats at the UAF as they came in and out.
Some anti-fascists who had been in Cricklewood were in hot pursuit, and arrived to counter the vitriol of the fascists by heckling them. A lot of tit-for-tat shouting and pointing took place.
Sometimes it nearly went further than angry words and jabby fingers. For a second it looked like these guys were going to come to blows when the anti-fascists snuck up on the right-wing demo from behind, interrupting the man in the white shirt's phone conversation.
But the Met's biggest cop got between them and pushed the anti-fascists away like a supermarket car park attendant moving a load of trollies at the end of a particularly long shift.
The standoff went on for a few hours, with a lot of wide armed gesturing and the anti-fascists every so often breaking through the police to have a go at the right-wingers, who all eventually sloped off to the pub a few streets away.
I'm not sure what they achieved, other than showing their disapproval to two groups that probably don't care very much about what a load of fascists think of them.