by David Renton
“I was gripped and loved the way it took me through different elements of popular culture, personal reflection and policy. It is the best account of the relationship between punk and the Anti-Nazi League/Rock Against Racism.”
Lucy Robinson, Professor in Collaborative History, University of Sussex
“A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the post-war history of racist and fascist movements and the strategies of resistance to them.”
Hsiao-Hung Pai, author of Angry White People
“David Renton’s book helps us understand a pivotal moment in the defeat of fascism; it addresses the militant tradition of anti-fascism with real consideration.”
Louise Purbrick, contributor to Physical Resistance: A Hundred Years of Anti-Fascism
NEVER AGAIN
By 1976, the National Front had become the fourth largest party in Britain. In a context of national decline, racism and fears that the country was collapsing into social unrest, the Front won 19 per cent of the vote in elections in Leicester and 100,000 votes in London.
In response, an anti-fascist campaign was born, which combined mass action to deprive the Front of public platforms with a mass cultural movement. Rock Against Racism brought punk and reggae bands together as a weapon against the right.
At Lewisham in August 1977, fighting between the far right and its opponents saw two hundred people arrested and fifty policemen injured. The press urged the state to ban two rival sets of dangerous extremists. But as the papers took sides, so did many others who determined to oppose the Front.
Through the Anti-Nazi League hundreds of thousands of people painted out racist graffiti, distributed leaflets and persuaded those around them to vote against the right. This combined movement was one of the biggest mass campaigns that Britain has ever seen.
This book tells the story of the National Front and the campaign which stopped it.
David Renton is a British barrister, historian and author. His previous books include Fascism: Theory and Practice (1999), Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (2000), This Rough Game: Fascism and Anti-Fascism (2001), British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (2004, with Nigel Copsey) and When We Touched the Sky: The Anti-Nazi League 1977–1981 (2006).
ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN FASCISM AND THE FAR RIGHT
Series editors:
Nigel Copsey, Teesside University, and Graham Macklin, Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo
This new book series focuses upon fascist, far right and right-wing politics primarily within a historical context but also drawing on insights from other disciplinary perspectives. Its scope also includes radical-right populism, cultural manifestations of the far right and points of convergence and exchange with the mainstream and traditional right.
Titles include:
France and Fascism
February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis
Brian Jenkins and Chris Millington
Cultures of Post-War British Fascism
Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson (eds.)
Tomorrow Belongs to Us
The UK Far Right Since 1967
Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (eds.)
The Portuguese Far Right
Between Late Authoritarianism and Democracy (1945–2015)
Riccardo Marchi
Never Again
Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976–1982
David Renton
NEVER AGAIN
Rock Against Racism and the
Anti-Nazi League 1976–1982
David Renton
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 David Renton
The right of David Renton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-50270-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-50271-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14503-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
CONTENTS
Preface
1 In England, dreaming
2 A history of coups and expulsions
3 The other young believers
4 Reggae, soul, rock ’n’ roll
5 Lewisham
6 Even God has joined the Anti-Nazi League
7 We got high, we touched the sky
8 Southall
9 Keeping on keeping on
10 Conclusion
Index
The Carib Club got petrol bombed
The National Front was getting awful strong
They done in Dave and Dagenham Ron
In the winter of ’79
When all the gay geezers got put inside
And coloured kids was getting crucified
A few fought back and a few folks died
In the winter of ’79
Tom Robinson, Winter of ’79
PREFACE
This book tells the story of the National Front (NF) and two of its opponents in 1970s Britain: Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL). The Front was a rising electoral force, in competition with the Liberals to become Britain’s third party. The Front secured 44,000 votes in local elections in Leicester in May 1976. In March 1977, the NF beat the Liberal Party in a by-election at Stechford in Birmingham. At Greater London Council elections in May 1977, the Front secured just under 120,000 votes, beating the Liberals in 33 out of the 91 seats which both parties contested. With a paid membership of 13,000 people in 1976–1977,1 the party had around twenty times more supporters than the Ecology Party (the forerunner of today’s Greens) and more than any of the Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish parties.
Indeed, the NF was more than an electoral machine. Part of its appeal came from its association with violence. The Front was feared by its political opponents and by the victims of racist attacks. To give just two examples: in July 1978, a report by the television programme World in Action claimed that the first six months of the year had seen twenty-three separate attacks by the Front on its opponents in Leeds alone. Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council documented a series of attacks by Front supporters in the East End over summer and autumn 1978, ranging from sending people in large groups to chant racist slogans outside local shops to attacks by Front supporters on black people in the street or in their homes. One Front fellow-traveller, 20-year-old Fred Challis, pleaded guilty to the murder of a white vagrant in the East End, in which he smashed the man’s face in with a gas cylinder, after which he had used the blood to smear the slogan ‘NF rules OK’ on a nearby wall. At his sentencing hearing, Challis admitted that he had carried out over three hundred attacks altogether.2
The National Front was an early exa
mple of a kind of politics which has since become all too familiar, a group influenced by the anti-democratic politics of fascism but standing for election to Parliament. By the time of this book’s publication, it has become conventional to date the rise of such ‘Euro-fascist’ parties to events in Northern France in 1983,3 when the Front National’s Jean-Pierre Stirbois won 16.7 per cent of the vote in local elections at Dreux in Normandy.4 Yet before the rise of the FN, it was the NF which seemed most likely to achieve a breakthrough. In 1973, Martin Webster won 16 per cent of the vote at a parliamentary by-election in West Bromwich. In July 1976, a council by-election in Deptford saw the National Front and the National Party (a smaller split-off from the NF) win a combined 44 per cent, more between them even than the winning Labour candidate. The opportunity which opened up for the far right in France was no greater than the chance available to its counterpart here.
This book integrates a narrative and document-based history of the 1970s with interviews with anti-fascists who campaigned against the Front. The result is not an autobiography; I was too young to play any part in the events this book describes. I was at primary school in west London when Margaret Thatcher gave her infamous St Francis of Assisi speech (‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony . . .’). I encountered the crisis of the 1970s only in brief moments. I heard it the day ‘Jew’ became a verb among my classmates, ‘Jew him’, ‘Jew you’. I saw it in the inkwell beside which a pupil had carved a swastika. It was the cough the other boys made as they jeered a racist insult and the shame on our teacher’s face as he fled from the room. There were other signs as well, possible resources of hope: the punks who gathered to be photographed outside the Chelsea Drug Store, the bass-scale and patter-rhythm of an Ian Dury song (‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’) blaring from a car radio, the graffiti I puzzled over as our school bus drove past the Westway, ‘George Davis is Innocent’, ‘Justice for Blair Peach’. Summoning these memories is like watching fireworks; the colours flare, depart – and only the smell of gunpowder remains.
In 2007, I published a previous history of the anti-fascism of the 1970s;5 this new book is, however, very different from its predecessor. At the time when I began writing about fascists and anti-fascists, the major threat on the British right was the British National Party which could plausibly be understood as a mere imitator of the interwar parties of fascist Europe. I was content to describe the National Front as a fascist party and to pass lightly over the exact nature of the group, the changing composition of its leadership, or the rivalries which swirled around the Front’s chairman John Tyndall. By the time of this book, the energy on the right belongs to Islamophobic groups which owe little if any loyalty to Mussolini or Hitler and disclaim even the core fascist ambition of purging the liberal state. Indeed, for all the confidence with which the Front’s enemies characterised the Front as ‘Nazis’, there were times at which even the National Front (or at least its minority factions) behaved something like today’s post-fascist parties. Re-considering this history ten years later, I have had no choice but to look with greater care at the Front and how it organised.
There are an increasing number of memoirs written by former members of the Front. Where they (or, for that matter, their opponents) tell the story of the 1970s as a series of military confrontations, each one ending in yet another glorious military victory, I have disregarded them. Where members of the Front have written their memoirs with insight, acknowledging their mistakes, I have treated their accounts with respect. The resulting narrative is intended to go further than any previous account in integrating the stories of fascism and anti-fascism, showing how the tactics of the right forced the left to adapt and the other way around.
While much of this book is devoted to Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, I have sought to contextualise both campaigns. As well as the part which RAR played in the history of anti-fascism, it also occurred at a particular stage in the history of black Britain, just as the first mixed black-and-white generation of British youth reached adulthood. Consequently, there was a much greater opening for an integrated music scene than at any time in the previous twenty years. Any history of the 1970s must also acknowledge the mixture of possibility and threat posed to anti-racists by the rise of punk, which in turn requires an explanation of this cultural milieu and such dynamics as its relation to the memory of the Second World War, and the role played by old and new cultural media (the music press and the punk fanzines).
While in this book I do not limit my definition of anti-fascism to members of particular groups or people shaped by any ideology, still less a left-wing one, I do restrict the term to those who took action of some sort against the National Front. Anti-fascist activism took numerous forms, from leafleting voters to resisting a racist attack, from demonstrating in the streets to attending a concert.
The purpose of treating action as essential to the definition of anti-fascism is not to draw a line between politics and culture;6 the distinction is instead between activity and passivity, between the opposition of fascism’s repeated adversaries and of its occasional critics. Perhaps as many as 50,000 people joined the Front at some point in the 1970s, only to leave the party later in the decade. Even if all of those who voted for that party at least once in any election, local or national, are added together the resulting calculation still restricts the group’s support to no more than 1 or 2 per cent of the adult population. It would be meaningless to treat the other 98 per cent of the population as a single granite bloc of anti-fascists. Hundreds of thousands of people despised the Front, while similar numbers were sympathetic towards that party or its programme of repatriation. If the press was to be believed, when most people read about the clashes between the far left and the far right, they wanted the police to eviscerate both sets of unwelcome extremists. And yet, as the decade wore on, opinions changed and the Front was increasingly seen as the greater problem. This book investigates why the National Front fell in popular estimation.
The late 1970s and early 1980s provide innumerable examples of people from Thatcherites to (ex-)Trotskyists who at one time were doing all in their power to stop the Front and at other times were in some sort of alliance with it. On the right, it would be meaningless to describe the Monday Club as anti-fascist in 1972, when the Club welcomed Front supporters to its events and gave Front leaders platforms to address its local meetings. A case could however be made for the Club’s anti-fascism however a year later, when its leader Jonathan Guinness expelled all known National Front fellow-travellers from the Club’s ranks. The book extends a similarly nuanced approach towards the Labour Party, anti-fascist when it instructed its local authorities to refuse the Front to book halls on their premises, yet less impressive when its MPs tailed the Front in advocating intensified immigration controls. Even the far left was not without its renegades, as future chapters show.
This book makes use of a number of previously unexplored primary sources, including the report of Commander John Cass of the Metropolitan Police into the death of Blair Peach, one of two anti-fascists killed by police officers during the period of this book. In 2010, when the Cass Report was first published, a number of journalists reported Cass’s findings; in other words, the name of the officer whom Cass believed had killed Blair Peach. The first attempt to summarise why Cass had felt confident to identify a suspect appeared in a piece I wrote for the London Review of Books in 2014.7 This book’s narrative of the events at Southall in 1979 builds on that account.
A further new source has been the archive of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, now deposited at Northampton University. It includes complete runs of the main right-wing magazines, local reports from activists who passed on to the magazine everything that took place in their town over a period of several years and even correspondence between individuals on the right. Thanks are due to the archivist Daniel Jones for his assistance in accessing those papers. I am also grateful to the archivists at the National Archives and the Bishopsgate Institute fo
r their help.
Over the past ten years, further accounts have appeared which, like this one, have been based on interviews with surviving anti-fascists. They include Daniel Rachel’s compendious oral history of Rock Against Racism, Walls Come Tumbling Down.8 Veterans of the same campaign have published Reminiscences of RAR.9 Sean Birchall’s Beating the Fascists is based on interviews with a generation of anti-fascists (the ‘squaddists’), who were expelled from the SWP in 1981, formed their own party Red Action and later set up the UK’s next major anti-far right alliance, Anti-Fascist Action.10 The new edition of Nigel Copsey’s Anti-Fascism in Britain contains valuable new material on the 1970s, as does his and Matthew Worley’s collection of essays on the contemporary far right Tomorrow Belongs to Us.11 Another AFA veteran Dave Hann, in his book Physical Resistance,12 tells the story of the past hundred years’ struggles between left and right from a physical force perspective. Hann’s is a generous account, capable of giving credit to those whose behaviour he judged at other times reprehensible. I have attempted to emulate his non-sectarian spirit here and produce an account which should be broadly recognisable to all those who took part even if they might interpret any particular incident differently from me.
Some 80 anti-fascists were interviewed for my earlier book, When We Touched the Sky, and I have conducted a dozen further interviews for this new account. Previously, I published my interviewees’ first names only; that caution is however no longer appropriate now that the majority of them are identifiable from other published sources.
I have discussed the ideas in this book with friends, including Jon Anderson, Anindya Bhattacharyya, Juliet Ash, Nigel Copsey, Colin Fancy, Craig Fowlie, Ruth Gregory, Arun Kundnani, Graham Macklin, Gary McNally, Louise Purbrick and Lucy Robinson. I am grateful to Syd Shelton for permission to use the cover image, to Tom Robinson, for allowing me to quote from ‘Winter of ’79’, and to Craig Fowlie and Rebecca McPhee at Routledge and Jeanne Brady at Cove Publishing Support Services. Thanks are also owed to those who have loaned me documents from the period, including Annie Nehmad and Evan Smith, to Mitch Mitchell who gave me his collection of fascist and anti-fascist newspapers cuttings, and to Lucy Whitman (aka Lucy Toothpaste) who granted me access to her archive, including materials from Rock Against Racism and Rock Against Sexism and copies of her pioneering punk fanzine, JOLT.