by David Renton
My greatest debt I owe, as ever, to Anne, to Sam and to Ben.
Notes
1 N. Fielding, The National Front (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 55, 180.
2 Bethnal Green and Stepney Green Trades Council, Blood on the Streets (London: Bethnal Green and Stepney Green Trades Council, 1978), p. 41.
3 C. Mudde, ‘Europe’s centre-right is on the wrong track with “good populism”’, Guardian, 30 October 2017.
4 J. Rydgren, Political Protest and Ethno-Nationalist Mobilization: The Case of the French Front National (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2002), pp. 288–290; J. Marcus, The National Front and French Politics: The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 9–10.
5 D. Renton, When We Touched the Sky: The Anti-Nazi League 1977–1981 (Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 2007).
6 For a different perspective, giving greater credit to the ‘passive’ anti-fascists of precious decades, N. Copsey and A. Olechnowicz (eds), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
7 D. Renton, ‘The killing of Blair Peach’, London Review of Books, 22 May 2014.
8 D. Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016).
9 R. Huddle and R. Saunders (eds), Reminiscences of RAR (London: Redwords, 2016).
10 S. Birchall, Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action (London: Freedom Press, 2010).
11 N. Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 1; N. Copsey and M. Worley (eds), ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Us’: The British Far Right since 1967 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
12 D. Hann, Physical Resistance: A Hundred Years of Anti-Fascism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013).
1
IN ENGLAND, DREAMING
Any adequate explanation of the National Front between its launch in 1967 and its late 1970s high point must start with the history of Britain since the Second World War. In common with other parties of the extreme right, the National Front preached a message of national decline and reinvigoration saying that Britain was in crisis and could recover only under the Front’s leadership. Of necessity, such a message could have had little resonance in the Britain of 1918, which was still one of the world’s two principal industrial and military powers. The politics of national renewal could hardly have been compelling in the aftermath of the Allied victory in the Second World War, when Britain was chosen as one of five permanent members of the United National Security Council, nor in the early 1950s when one-fifth of the world’s exported goods were still manufactured in the UK and the economy remained a leading force in the emergent technologies of electronics, computers and aerospace. Two decades later, however, Britain was in the words of the historian Robert Colls, ‘No longer a world military power, no longer an imperial power, no longer a manufacturing power’.1
The absence of empire and the memory of war
There was no clearer sign of the country’s decline than the loss of her colonies. In 1945, the British Empire included most of the Caribbean, all of the Indian subcontinent, much of the Middle East and a third of Africa. By 1976–1977, little was left other than Northern Ireland, the Falkland Islands and the dubious boon of Rhodesia, whose unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 continued to haunt British politicians (and inspire the Front) a decade later. Through the 1970s, the British suffered repeated reminders that they were a diminished force. Edward Heath’s 1970–1974 Tory government announced five national emergencies. Such was the crisis in the private sector that in 1971 even the luxury car manufacturer Rolls Royce was declared bankrupt and had to be nationalised. In winter 1973–1974, in response to a combination of miners’ strikes and oil shortages following the war between Israel and Egypt and with interest rates standing at a punitive 13 per cent, the government introduced a three-day working week. In winter 1976–1977, Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, who had once promised to ‘squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak’, applied to the IMF for the largest loan the Fund had ever granted.
The reason that Britain agreed to concede her empire was that a generation of British politicians were well aware that the UK had neither the military capability nor the economic resources to fight colonial wars on multiple fronts. On occasion, Britain did fight independence movements with murderous consequences, notably in Malaya (1947–1960) and Kenya (1952–1960). But from the perspective of Britain’s ambitions to remain a colonial power the more significant conflict came at Suez in 1956 when Israel, the UK and France invaded Egypt to take control of the Suez Canal and remove Colonel Nasser from power. Egypt succeeded in closing the Canal and, Britain and France had no choice but to withdraw, after pressure was applied by the US. Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned and was replaced by Harold Macmillan whose subsequent ‘Winds of Change’ speech to the hostile members of the South African Parliament in February 1960 acknowledged the inevitability of African independence.
In the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, it had seemed possible that resistance to decolonisation might emerge within Parliament and one member of the Cabinet, Lord Salisbury, was touted as a challenger to Prime Minister Macmillan from the right. Salisbury was defeated, however, in 1957 and forced to resign.
The fact of empire gave opportunities to hundreds of thousands of British people. Merely by relocating abroad, a British civil servant would be charged with great power and find him- or herself making life or death decisions about others – where the subjects of empire were to be housed, whether at times of famine they were fed. In the words of George Orwell, writing at the end of the 1930s:
[T]he over-whelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain but in Asia and Africa. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India and we are at great pains to keep it so . . . It is quite common for an Indian coolie’s leg to be thinner than the average Englishman’s arm. And there is nothing racial in this, for well-fed members of the same races are of normal physique; it is due to simple starvation. This is the system which we all live on and which we denounce when there seems to be no danger of its being altered.2
In the 1970s, there were still tens of thousands of British people drawing down pensions earned in years spent as colonial administrators. Hundreds of thousands of others had migrated to Britain from her white colonies. Yet the status of all these people depended on Britain’s past, not her future. On the fabric of Britain’s declining cities, meanwhile, the large, often deserted, buildings of the past contained countless subtle visual reminders of the country’s imperial history.
In the context of British geopolitical decline, the Second World War took on retrospective importance as a symbol of the greatness the country had once enjoyed. Most politicians had served in the war. The Conservative chair Willie Whitelaw had been a major in a tank brigade. The shadow Home Secretary and advocate of austerity (‘monetarist’) economics Keith Joseph had been an artillery captain during the war. Prime Minister Edward Heath, notoriously awkward in office and seemingly incapable of expressing emotion, had watched the Nuremberg Trials as a young man and suffered as he realised the scale of the Nazi crimes. Even the pacifist Tony Benn had undergone military service as a young RAF pilot officer. The war was a constant presence on 1970s TV screens, in Dad’s Army, Are you Being Served? and Coronation Street, where adversity would be answered with patriotic singsongs and bitter complaints about the younger generation who did not understand the sacrifices the old had made. For Alf Garnett, or for Rigsby in Rising Damp, the war was a better Britain to which the worse present day had constantly to be compared.
Yet as the decade went on, the optimism of the war films, the boys’ comics and the television documentaries that had been ubiquitous for many years seemed to give way to a darker mood and even a fascination with the defeated enemy. This process of rediscovery was not limited to
Britain. One theme of Peter Novick’s classic account, The Holocaust in American Life, is that the collective memory of the Second World War in the United States was not at its most pressing in 1945 but grew as the 1960s and the 1970s went on, as the Eichmann trial raised awareness of the Holocaust and in response to Israel’s 1967 and 1973 wars. For Novick, the moment when the Holocaust moved to the centre of American life was at the end of the 1970s, in a short period which saw the formation of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (1977), an attempted march through the Jewish district of Skokie by partisans of the National Socialist Party of America (also 1977) and the television series Holocaust, which was watched by nearly one hundred million Americans in 1978.3
A similar account of awareness of the Holocaust in British life would also see the 1970s as the crucial period. For in Britain, as in America, and for decades after the war ended, popular memory of its events downplayed the extent of civilian casualties, including Hitler’s Jewish victims. As Tony Kushner has noted, there was ‘a prolonged and complex process of understanding [the Holocaust] which is yet to be completed’. The story of the War, as told in Britain, was one of isolation and vindication. The UK was the plucky little nation who had stood alone. The Holocaust came into this narrative through Richard Dimbleby’s broadcasts from Bergen-Belsen, showing emaciated but living survivors, rescued from death by heroic British soldiers. Even the name Auschwitz was little known in Britain until the 1970s, as the camp had been liberated by Soviet rather than British troops. Hitler’s war against his own people was understood as a process of imprisonment in labour camps and death through overwork, rather than the cold-blooded extermination of millions.4
Slowly, a different story was emerging in which the crimes of the Holocaust were acknowledged. The Holocaust made its way into popular consciousness from the 1968 BBC documentary, Warsaw Ghetto, and through the success of Judith Kerr’s children’s novel, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. As the decade wore on, fascism became an ever more present concern. Luchino Visconti’s film The Damned, about a family of German industrialists who make peace with the Nazis, was first shown in the UK in winter 1969–1970. The subject of Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 best-selling novel The Odessa File was a conspiracy of former Nazis travelling between Germany and Argentina. Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli, was released in 1972 and The Night Porter in 1974, both films exploring the sexualised appeal of fascism. In John Gardner’s 1975 novel, The Werewolf Trace, a conspiracy of former Nazis was hiding from capture in England. The following year, Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil returned to the story of Hitler’s survivors in South America. Rather than receding into the past, in popular culture the events of the War were becoming more prominent.
Ruining the government’s plan
Britain, meanwhile, was poorer than she had been. By 1976, the UK’s economy (measured in GDP per capita) had fallen behind not just the US, but Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. The sense of decline was embodied in the rotting wallpaper in Rising Damp, in the Czech millionaire DeVere who acquires the stately home in To the Manor Born.
A recurring theme of National Front propaganda was that the people of Britain could be protected from hunger and bad housing only if black migrants were repatriated to their or their parents’ home countries. The view that ‘we’ owed no obligation to ‘them’ was not a minority sentiment, it was the majority view among all generations save for the very young. The inferiority of foreigners was the common sense of the times, reinforced by every paper, every television show. It was the joke dragged out through four seasons of Mind Your Language, seven series of Love Thy Neighbour and more than fifty episodes of Till Death Us Do Part. At times, the idea that ‘they’ should not be ‘here’ was stated in violent language; at other times, its expression was agonising or guilty, with the point being made that of course Britain should be more welcoming – just not now, when the country was in such an awful mess. Here is Katherine Fussell, an ‘ordinary housewife’ writing to The Times in 1972:
[W]e hear of men in all walks of life offered redundancies in place of their work. White and black citizens of this country cannot buy or rent a home easily. Many young folk cannot get married because of the housing problems or if they do they live with in-laws and many marriages fail. Young school leavers, white and black are on the streets with nothing to think about or do . . . Let the government make it clear to these people from any country wanting to come to us, that the immigration quota remains.5
The 1972 miners’ strike saw power cuts and the introduction of a three-day working week. The miners employed ‘flying pickets’, workers who rather than merely standing defensively outside their own pit visited adjoining workplaces to bring them out on strike as well. The use of this tactic reached its culmination at the Saltley Coke depot, just a mile outside Birmingham, where up to seven hundred vehicles gathered each day to collect fuel for local businesses. On 7 February 1972, some four hundred Barnsley miners picketed the depot. For four days, the miners sat in the road, blocked the outgoing trucks and wrestled with the police. The miners’ leader Arthur Scargill called on Birmingham’s engineers for support. That Thursday, the miners were joined by 10,000 supporters from the city chanting ‘Close the gates’. Derrick Capper, Chief Constable of Birmingham Police, reluctantly agreed to their demand. Over the following eight days as the papers warned of the danger of blackouts, the government increased its pay offer to 27 per cent, which the jubilant miners accepted.
Events on this scale shaped the activists of the right and their audience. Eight days after Saltley Gate, the future runaway Lord Lucan walked into Hatchards bookshop. His marriage was at an end and he was sick of reading in the press that Britain was on the verge of civil war. He left the shop carrying two books, Grey Wolf: An Intimate Study of a Dictator and a copy of Mein Kampf.6
Edward Heath’s government had moved to pre-empt a feared wave of strikes by introducing legislation enabling the courts to sequester the funds of unions which took part in unofficial strike action. His Industrial Relations Act was tested in summer 1972 when dockers protested against containerisation and job losses. The National Industrial Relations Court declared the picketing unlawful and five dockers, the ‘Pentonville Five’, were jailed. Workers on building sites and in Fleet Street struck in support of the Five. The TUC General Council belatedly voted to join the protests, promising a one-day general strike in support of the dockers. Before this could be held, the Official Solicitor found an excuse to apply for the jailed men’s release.
Over the next two years, strikes by rail workers, engineers and others destroyed the remaining apparatus of the Industrial Relations Act.
In response, public figures canvassed the formation of private armies capable of taking over the factories and the power stations in the event of further strikes. Colonel David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Services (SAS), proposed the formation of a private volunteer army, ‘GB75’.7 Junior minister Geoffrey Rippon noted that ‘the foundations of our society are being shaken by violence and extremism’, and proposed creating a Citizen’s Voluntary Reserve.8
Part of the Tories’ problem was that their leaders were trying to solve too many problems at once. As Prime Minister Heath saw it, he was fighting both inflation and unemployment. When he entered Downing Street in 1970, the number of people out of work had been a troubling 600,000. By November 1970, this had risen to 970,000. Such was the fear of unemployment passing the psychological barrier of one million that demonstrations were called in protest and 20,000 people marched to demand that the government take urgent action. In January 1972, the one million threshold was crossed for the first time. The Evening Standard’s front-page headline carried no words, just ‘1,023,583’. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Labour MP Tom Swain threw the newspaper in disgust at Heath’s dispatch box.
Terrified by the prospect of sustained mass unemployment, Edward Heath’s government set out a programme of state spending but this in turn aggravated the s
hortfall between imports and exports. Between September 1972 and September 1973, the price of key manufacturing imports, including cotton, copper and zinc, all rose. This was before the oil shock of late 1973, when oil prices tripled and inflation rose to 16 per cent. Heath’s struggle against unemployment provided, against his and his party’s intentions, the ideal conditions for labour to flourish. Stable employment put labour at a premium. With prices already rising at double-digit rates, no employer could refuse to pay a cost-of-living pay rise.
The relative increase in the power of labour at the expense of capital was not however universally popular, nor could it have been, for it meant a loss of relative privileges and the diminution of the status of those who did not work or whose wealth was bound up in the ownership of shares or a private pension.
Signs of a backlash against the unions could be seen in the 1971 film Carry on at Your Convenience in which the moustachioed villain Vic Spanner refuses to let his men work or allow them any say over union decisions. Two years later, the Strawbs’ sarcastic hit, ‘Part of the Union’ (‘So though I’m a working man I can ruin the government’s plan’) complained that trade unions turned mere workers into something like supermen. The actor Kenneth Williams wrote in his diary, ‘What a scourge and a blight is the English working man! What a dishonest, lazy bastard!’9