by Andy Beckett
When we read about Eric Clapton’s Birmingham concert … we nearly puked … Come on Eric … you’ve been taking too much of that Daily Express stuff… You’re a good musician but where would you be without the blues and R & B? … Rock was and still can be a real progressive culture … not a nightmare of mediocre garbage … We want to organise a rank and file movement against the racist poison in music. We urge support for Rock against Racism.
At the end of the letter was an east London PO box number. ‘We got so many letters, 200 or 300 in the first week, mainly from soul fans and mixed-race couples, that we felt confident,’ Huddle remembered. Rock Against Racism quickly turned into a real campaign. Huddle was working as a graphic designer for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), as the International Socialists now called themselves. By the late seventies, the SWP was the radical left-wing group with the largest membership and the most energy. Along with supporting strikes and opposing the social contract, anti-racism had long been a favoured SWP cause. The party also saw Rock Against Racism as an opportunity to widen its influence and form coalitions, both of which were perennial SWP ambitions. ‘The SWP let us use their PO box,’ said Huddle. ‘They gave us their whole infrastructure, their ability to book coaches for demonstrations. The SWP print shop became the powerhouse for RAR propaganda.’
Huddle is a short man with cropped grey hair and an appealing energy about him. In 2006, he was working for a trade union and doing an art MA, and was still ready to cite Marx and Lenin and use the phrase ‘dialectical relationship’ in his quick sentences without a hint of embarrassment. But he was keen to emphasize, setting out the intricate political geometry of Rock Against Racism with neat choppy hand gestures over our cheap restaurant table in King’s Cross, that the campaign was much more than an SWP front: ‘RAR was very independent. Red was a fellow traveller, not an SWP member.’ Such distinctions were important to Rock Against Racism’s chances of success because the SWP was a controversial body in the seventies, not just for its empire-building, but for its confrontational approach to the National Front. In his history of the street politics of the period, the SWP activist and author David Widgery describes a typical stand-off:
The NF’s first big demonstration of 1977 was planned for April, through a multi-cultured inner city suburb … Wood Green [in north London] … The SWP led the argument for direct confrontation… While the worthies … of the Labour Party and the Communist Party and the official ethnic bodies … addressed a rather small audience in a local park, the Front and their police protectors were faced with much more numerous, better organised and determined opposition armed with smoke bombs, flares, bricks, bottles and planned ambushes. At Ducketts Corner … there was a spontaneous move to block the road and physically attack the Front … Conventional anti-fascist politicos had been augmented by North London tribal gangs, rockabillies, soul girls and tracksuited Rastas … [and] a squad of black kids accurately hurling training shoes borrowed from Freeman, Hardy and Willis …
The concerts by reggae and punk bands which Rock Against Racism put on across Britain from late 1976 onwards still had some of this confrontational quality. National Front supporters would turn up – the activities of the SWP and the NF often seemed symbiotic – as well as anti-racists and politically uncommitted music fans. Sometimes even the bands themselves became contested ground. ‘The battle for Jimmy Pursey became crucial,’ said Huddle, quite deadpan, about the singer of punk group Sham 69, whose mixture of mouthy working-class pride and a raucous football-terrace sound had attracted a large NF fanbase which Pursey seemed unsure whether to welcome or disown. ‘He was a weird lad. I think he was a good lad,’ said Huddle. ‘But at one show’ – his voice lifted at the memory – ‘we had to hold the [anti-racist] dockers back from attacking the skinhead Sham fans with pickaxes.’
Other members of the Rock Against Racism coalition were milder. The singer Tom Robinson, who wrote Top 10 hits with socially conscious lyrics and clever choruses, joined the campaign after being involved, years before, in the more herbivorous activities of the Gay Liberation Front. ‘I saw the RAR letter. I wrote to the address: “What is this Rock Against Racism? Where do I join?” I had seen skinheads around. I’d read up my history about the rise of Hitler. The SWP were the only band of people prepared to roll up their sleeves. If it had been the Young Conservatives, I’d have gone along as well.’
Like many of those involved in Rock Against Racism, Robinson was contemptuous of Labour’s caution, or worse, on race and other social issues. ‘The Callaghan government was a wretched fucking government,’ he told me as we had lunch in a rather grander London restaurant than the one where I met Huddle. Robinson sat back in his jeans and leather jacket – he was by now a well-known radio DJ and presenter – and continued with slightly studied candour: ‘In RAR we thought, “The government are the enemy as well as the NF. This reactionary Labour home secretary [Merlyn Rees, the less liberal successor to Roy Jenkins] is as bad as it gets. How could the government get any worse?”’
The climax of Rock Against Racism was a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in April 1978. It was followed by a march to Victoria Park in east London and a free open-air concert. By midday in Trafalgar Square, wrote Widgery, ‘The sun was out and the whole lot were there … punks and hippies and skins, vicars and trade unionists, blacks, browns and pinks. It was certainly the biggest antifascist rally since the thirties.’ Along the six-mile route to Victoria Park, a flat windswept space fringed with tower blocks which was the only park the organizers could get permission to use – and was where the Chartists had rallied in 1848, and the GLF had held ‘Gay Days’ of picnicking and public kissing in the early seventies – the march fattened and the crowd listened to bands playing from the backs of trucks. It was almost as if the demonstrators were at a leftist rally in the pre-Pinochet Chile of the radical socialist Salvador Allende, and not in London under careful old Callaghan. Giant pa-pier mâché heads of Hitler and the NF’s leaders, made by Roger Law, who would give Margaret Thatcher the same treatment on Spitting Image a few years later, were rolled along the tarmac. The organizers claimed an attendance of 80,000, even 100,000. ‘We expected 20,000,’ said Robinson, whose band played in the park, ‘so the PA system was for 20,000. When 80,000 came, they couldn’t hear.’
There were backstage arguments about the running order for the bands, and the stage had to be guarded in case of National Front attack. But none of this mattered much. Billy Bragg was in the audience as a nineteen-year-old Clash fan. ‘Almost everyone I know who went, went to see the Clash,’ he told me. ‘It was a style trip … [But] Rock Against Racism did engage me. Through RAR I engaged with race, with gay rights, women’s rights.’ Widgery writes a little mockingly but also excitedly:
As the park slowly filled up one could float through three generations of the Left. At the outskirts there were couples who might have … been in Trafalgar Square when Bevan spoke against the Suez invasion … Their sensible footwear had been learnt on the Aldermaston march but the thermos flask and binoculars came from bird-watching outings … The middle [group] was the generation of 1968 … They had henna on for the occasion even if it did remind them of a commune they’d rather forget and they were slightly worried about the whereabouts of their eight-year-old whom they had arranged to hand over to its other single parent by the inflatables… They had quite liked Tony Benn’s speech… [And finally there were] the front-line punks [who] had been on amphetamine for days and were living for this moment. This was their Woodstock and their Grosvenor Square. The punks didn’t like any of the speakers but knew exactly what the music was saying.
Victoria Park, part hippy-tinged free festival, part sequel to the multiracial pickets at Grunwick, part precursor to the fusions of pop music and celebrity with good causes achieved at Live Aid and Live 8, was a culmination of sorts for the new left-leaning political movements of the British seventies. It was a sign that their ideas and tactical innovations would, regardless of who won the forthcoming
general election, remain influential for years to come.
In the long term, Rock Against Racism succeeded in a broad sense. In its racial attitudes and level of integration, ‘London now is unbelievable compared to thirty years ago,’ said Huddle. Yet the creativity of Rock Against Racism – from its sharply designed campaign newspaper, a little like an eighties style magazine before its time, to its clean-edged modern logo – did not mean that racism had ceased to be a force in Britain by the end of the seventies. In 1982, a credible survey by the Policy Studies Institute found that since 1974, ‘The British job market has changed little in its hostility to black workers, except that it now excludes more of them from work altogether.’ When the survey asked its respondents whether life in Britain had improved for their ethnic group over the last five years, only 20 per cent of West Indians and 15 per cent of Asians said it had. Three times as many people in both groups said things had got worse.
In local politics during the seventies, especially in London, there was the beginning of a reaction against these inequalities. At the 1974 borough elections, the number of non-white councillors in the capital rose from none to ten; at the next such contests in 1978, to thirty-five. But even the latter figure was nothing like a reflection of the city’s ethnic make-up. Despite these small election successes, despite Rock Against Racism, despite Grunwick, the seventies did not fundamentally change the political position of non-white Britons. It would take an expression of their discontent on British city streets in 1981 that was much fiercer, and on a much greater scale, than ‘black kids hurling training shoes’ at the NF to get that process started.
In Northern Ireland, too, the late seventies brought not resolution but a sense of pressures building. In July 1979, the New Statesman published an article by the respected investigative journalist Duncan Campbell based on a leaked British army document written in November 1978. ‘Northern Ireland, Future Terrorist Trends’ predicted that for the foreseeable future, ‘Any peace [in Ulster] will be superficial and brittle.’ Instead, the briefing paper continued, ‘We can expect to see increasing [IRA] professionalism and the greater exploitation of modern technology for terrorist purposes.’ During the 1979 general election campaign, the Guardian’s political reporter Michael White told me, ‘There was a rumour the IRA had a Sam-7 [anti-aircraft missile]. The press flew in a separate plane from the party leaders. We all joked that it was the decoy. But we were quite relieved to land after the last flight of the campaign.’
Across the Irish Sea, an ‘acceptable level of violence’ continued in Ulster through the late seventies, in all its unacceptable forms. The number of soldiers killed in 1978 was the same as it had been in 1975; in 1979, it was much higher. In March 1979, the Bennett Report, an official inquiry into the interrogation techniques used by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had ‘no doubt’ that many injuries recently sustained by Republican prisoners ‘were not self-inflicted and were sustained during a period of detention at a police office’. The report recommended that prisoners detained for terrorism-related questioning should be seen by a doctor every twenty-four hours, and that CCTV should be installed in the RUC’s interview rooms. The Callaghan government agreed, but its Northern Ireland secretary Roy Mason, the most pro-military and least conciliatory holder of the position in the seventies, nevertheless insisted: ‘The Bennett Report has not said that ill-treatment has taken place.’
It was in South Armagh, the southernmost part of Ulster, a mazy borderland of hills and high blackthorn hedges, where unmarked roads led to the Irish Republic and watchful IRA supporters had farms on the vantage points, that the near-stalemate in which the British government and army found themselves by the late seventies was most obvious. ‘The law’, wrote A. F. N. Clarke, a captain in the Parachute Regiment, in a memoir of serving in the area during 1976, ‘does not apply here … We are right in the heart of their country.’
In 2005, South Armagh still felt a little like that. From the railway station at Newry, which was still a damp temporary box of plaster-board and wire mesh – ‘It kept being blown up,’ said my driver – I took a taxi to Bessbrook Mill, in the seventies the largest British base in South Armagh, and now one of the few left. For a few minutes we drove past off-white housing estates and small wet fields. Then, in the middle of a village, at the top of a short steep lane, the taxi stopped. At the bottom of the lane, blocking the road, was a wall of green corrugated metal as high as a bus. There was a gap in the wall, a narrow, twisting chicane of an entrance, with floodlights and cameras covering it. The fortifications were still a slight shock to come across, for a first-time visitor to Ulster, as if the army occupation of the British Isles that people were always worrying about in the seventies had actually happened. Beyond them was a long grey Victorian building with blocked-up windows and a roof covered in radio aerials. A bright orange wind sock flapped in the grey wind. From behind the wall came the rising sound of a helicopter.
Bessbrook Mill was built by Quakers in the nineteenth century as part of a model community for linen manufacturing. In the mid-seventies, a less pacifist body, the SAS, started using it. Bessbrook quickly became a centre for regular British army operations as well. On this dark December lunchtime in 2005, its main gate was being guarded by a private with a Liverpool accent, pink cheeks and not even his first hint of stubble. He treated my request to visit (I had phoned ahead) with mild puzzlement, but he let me in. Inside the gate were half-empty helipads. In the seventies, they were said to be the busiest in Europe – in South Armagh then, as in Vietnam, it was not safe for soldiers to travel on the ground. Between the buildings were signs of a long and settled military presence: a trimmed lawn, some topiary, three gravestones. In the guard room a tanned army press officer ‘just back from Iraq’ looked at my notes and answered my questions politely but not very concretely. When I asked if there were any army border watchtowers nearby that I could easily go and look at that afternoon, before they were dismantled, he shrugged. ‘You know what the weather’s like in Northern Ireland,’ he said, as if Bessbrook was still a kind of cursed imperial posting. ‘Probably not.’
He offered to phone me a taxi. While I waited for it by the main gate, I chatted through the slit window of the sentry post to the private I had met earlier, and to another soldier who had joined him. They talked about army chocolate bars, stolen cars and bored local teenagers. Occasionally they checked a car as it drove into the base. After three quarters of an hour, the taxi had not come. One of the soldiers made an anti-Irish joke about it. Realizing belatedly that South Armagh taxis were still perhaps not that keen on collecting passengers from British army bases, I walked uphill into the village. Almost immediately I saw a taxi passing and hailed it.
The driver was a freckled talkative man of about thirty. ‘I had a cousin who married a soldier twenty years ago,’ he said when I mentioned where I had just been. ‘She had to leave the country. You don’t want to be out here if you’re not staunch Republican.’ I asked if he would show me some army watchtowers, and he agreed. As we drove off in the failing light towards the border, he told me about South Armagh in the seventies.
‘I grew up in Newry,’ he began. ‘On any given night you’d hear gunfire. I remember the soldiers shitting themselves. I saw one guy start to cry. Another one drop his gun. I felt sorry for a lot of the soldiers – only normal kids …’ He gestured at the farms dotting the green slopes and ridgelines. ‘Every single house would have someone who would see the soldiers coming, tell the IRA. There were always twenty other roads to use to avoid the army checkpoints. Roads you paid people to use, smuggling roads. South Armagh had some fucking super-terrorists. Fucking bad men.’
We drove fast through a puddle. ‘My dad and uncle were both in the H-blocks,’ the taxi driver continued matter-of-factly. ‘My dad moved here from Belfast in the late sixties. Burned out by Protestants. In the late seventies, he went to Donegal [in the Irish Republic] for a week of basic weapons training. He was arrested in 1979. Convicted on the evidence o
f one tout. My dad did eleven years. My uncle a bit longer.’ What was it like having his dad in prison? ‘It was shit. It was shit. But I wasn’t the only one. One day a week at my school, half the kids wouldn’t be there. They would be going to see their daddies.’ What did he think about his dad being in the IRA? ‘He was a brave man,’ the taxi driver answered without a pause. ‘Big balls. Fought for what he believed in. Proud of him. Absolutely.’ Then, much more softly: ‘Absolutely.’
The light was too bad to do more than glimpse the tall spidery outlines of British surveillance posts on distant hilltops. In one pretty, blustery village we passed a great angular bunker like the hull of a battleship. Northern Ireland in the seventies, like North Sea oil, had required the British government to improvise a new architecture with an ugly but lasting charisma. But the soldiers were already gone from most of the villages we drove through. On one hill which the army had abandoned there was a Republican flag on an enormous flagpole. ‘They took the towers down by helicopter,’ said the taxi driver with satisfaction, ‘just like they built them.’
In the late seventies, another unhealed sore for the Callaghan government was unemployment. Although the total had started to fall, the fall was slow. The number of jobless remained much higher than Britons had been used to in the years before the oil crisis. And it could not be attributed solely to that event: there were also unforgiving long-term forces at work in the British labour market, such as mechanization and increased competition from abroad. ‘I had a strong sense that the traditional industries were all contracting simultaneously in the seventies,’ recalled Callaghan’s adviser Tom McNally. ‘The mills in my constituency in Stockport were just melting away.’