Drummer Lee Rigby. "We've got a very serious situation here," said Weyman Bennett, joint national secretary of UAF. "If we sit back and allow vans of people to rampage around the streets, then you have a kind of pogrom atmosphere build up ... We understand people are hurt and angry but we're not going to let this get hijacked by racists and fascists to try and organise systematic attacks on people." Mr Bennett said he was in Woolwich when the EDL arrived after Rigby's murder. "Three hundred men turning up with balaclavas is not a sign they've come there for peace," he said. Support for the EDL has apparently soared since the Woolwich attack, mobilised via Twitter and Facebook groups. The organisation splintered from the BNP around 2009, with the aim of taking its politics to the streets rather than running for elections.

Dr Paul Jackson of the University of Northampton, who researched the group's origins in a paper published in 2011, said the EDL was part of the "new far right" in Europe, typified by groups such as the Norwegian Defence League, associated with mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. "For all the novelty, the EDL represents an age-old phenomenon: the politics of hate," he wrote. "This hatred is directed overwhelmingly at Asian Muslims in Britain. "(It is) a social movement driven by a unique alliance of football hooliganism, xenophobic nationalism and street politics — collectively organised and disseminated from the leadership to grass-roots supporters via the new media." Much of the EDL's bedrock is the network of football hooligan "firms" that emerged in the 1970s, met in pubs before games and sought out pitched battles with rival firms. Mr Bennett said the firms brought old rivalries to the EDL which, together with arrests following early violent protests, gave people hope it would be shortlived. "But they've overcome some of their previous differences in order to revive the EDL," he said. "They're a violent group of thugs who are trying to become a political street army."

EDL leader "Tommy Robinson", unmasked in 2010 as former BNP member Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was released from prison in February after being jailed for using a friend's passport to travel to the US. Mr Lennon insists, in YouTube videos and through his Twitter feed, that EDL is opposed to violence. "To any lads that are really angry, yeah, this is an ideological war," he said in a video last week. "This is not a war that you're going to win with punches, kicks, bottles, bricks or smashing things up." However, he railed against Muslims, whom he blames for terrorist attacks and "grooming gangs" of rapists. "We went to the streets to show solidarity and anger," he said after the Woolwich attack. "People can't just sit in their houses shouting at their TVs any more... we're at war and ... the enemy is Islam."

As part of its response to the Woolwich murder the government has set up a taskforce to "look again" at how to deal with extremism and radicalisation. The taskforce will look at blocking violent websites, and re-examine police powers against people "fostering extremism". Mr Bennett said he was worried the taskforce would focus on Islamist extremists, and ignore the fascists and far right. Tottenham Labour MP David Lammy said the "workless poor" were turning to Islamist groups, gangs and far-right factions in an attempt to "fill a void". "In many of our major tower block housing estates there are groups of young men who are a long way from employment, they are some way from education, their parents or particularly father figures are not present in their lives," he said. "Whether they are white, black or Asian (there is) the prospect of them being seduced by extremism." Police commander Simon Letchford this week appealed for calm.

"What is important now is that we as Londoners come together," he said.