Police have arrested five people following scuffles between marchers on Britain’s first anti-Islam Pegida rally and a larger group of anti-racist demonstrators.  Northumbria police said 375 people were on the Pegida rally while 2,000 joined the Newcastle Unites protest in the city centre.  There was a brief scuffle involving members of far-right groups which temporarily damaged Pegida’s PA system, a steward said, but there was no outbreak of major trouble.  It was unclear which sides the five arrested men were from, and their alleged offences ranged from assault to being drunk and disorderly, and breach of the peace.  Police said the arrests were for isolated incidents and both events passed off smoothly.  Pegida organisers insisted before the event that it would be peaceful, that they were not racist and that the far-right were not welcome.  The rally was supposedly organised by Pegida, or “patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the west”, which claims that Germany is being overrun by Muslims and has held marches, mostly in Dresden.  However, it was unclear whether the organisation had set up a branch in Britain or whether its name had been appropriated for Saturday’s rally.  Pegida UK’s Facebook page has 17,000 likes, and 800 people had said that they would attend the event.  Men holding National Front banners could be seen among the Pegida supporters.  Gateshead MP Ian Mearns said the turnout for the anti-Pegida protest was very encouraging. “The Pegida protest only had numbers in the low hundreds, and the counter-protest had thousands,” he told the Newcastle Chronicle.  “But what I can’t understand is among the Pegida rally there will have been British Nationalists demonstrating alongside proud Europeans - it doesn’t make sense,” he added.  Fears that anti-Islam sentiment is growing in Britain have intensified as violence by Islamist militants in the Middle East dominate the headlines and attacks in Europe.  Some Islamic groups have criticised the government’s response to the threat from militants, saying it has demonised Britain’s 2.7 million Muslims.  Pegida rallies in Germany, along with others in Austria and Sweden, have been dwarfed by the turnout for counter-demonstrations against Islamophobia.
Five arrested but no major incidents after 2,000 people take to city’s streets to protest against anti-Islam rally that attracts just 400 supporters