Never Again

by David Renton

  Also among those who left the Front at the same time were such figures as David McCalden and Richard Lawson who were moving towards a ‘Strasserite’ reading of German history, namely that the Nazi revolution had been a popular uprising of the unemployed and the poor which was betrayed by Hitler, the revolution’s gravedigger. Rather than escape from the legacy of fascism, the new party was pulled back towards an exotic and sectarian form of it. Tyndall’s critics were, in short, an unsustainable mixture of discontents from both the electoral and the militant wings of the Front, the two groups sharing little more than a sustained dislike of him.

  Racism: state and popular

  Having been boosted once when he first became chairman, by the arrival of refugees from Uganda, Tyndall enjoyed a similar piece of luck on his return to the leadership with the arrival of the Malawi Asians in spring 1976. The press coverage began when two families were placed in a hotel while Crawley Social Services decided whether or not to house them. The Sun claimed that refugees were living in four-star hotels and The Mirror condemned what it called a ‘New Flood of Asians into Britain’. Front supporters rushed to Gatwick where they chanted at visiting tourists, ‘Don’t unpack, you must go back.’ The Sun warned that 4,000 other migrants were bound to follow; the Daily Express that the true number of new arrivals would be as high as 145,000 people.78 While the British tabloid press was able to recycle its favourite stories about the country being swamped by a vat influx of new arrivals, few paused to check the numbers involved. Among the entire Asian population of Malawi, there were no more than two hundred British passport holders altogether.79

  In an atmosphere of increased racism, the NF recruited around 3,000 new members. Local elections were due for May 1976, days after the Malawi Asians story broke. The average Front candidate won 8.9 per cent of the vote.80 In Leicester, the Front came within sixty votes of winning its first council seat. At parliamentary by-elections in Rotherham in June and Thurrock in July 1976, the National Front scored between 6 and 7 per cent of the vote, The vote in Rotherham was all the more impressive given that at the start of the campaign the Front had had no more than two members in the town.81 ‘It is difficult to communicate’, Stuart Hall wrote, the ‘severity of the race issues which have passed, like seismic tremors, through society in 1976.’82

  The Front’s message was that immigration control would prove insufficient to protect the white identity of Britain and that measures for control needed to be supplanted by measures for repatriation. Indeed, the Front was not alone in advocating this policy. For several years, Enoch Powell had been an advocate of repatriation (‘outflow’) as he explained in his Rivers of Blood speech:

  The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect [of mass migration] is to ask: ‘How can its dimensions be reduced?’ Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

  The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping or virtually stopping, further inflow and by promoting the maximum outflow.83

  Meanwhile, the Monday Club had also adopted a policy of repatriation, a message developed in pamphlets such as George Young’s Who Goes Home?.84

  The Front was different from either of its rivals on the right in that it argued the politics of repatriation consistently; it grasped the practical reality that the large majority of black people in Britain had no intention of leaving and would not actually depart unless the state was to equip itself with the same sort of authoritarian resources that the fascist states of the 1930s had employed against racial outsiders.

  The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 had, as noted above, deprived UK passport holders of the right to live in Britain except for people born in the UK or their descendants – in other words, white people and their families. This structure was repeated in the Immigration Act 1971, which ended all Commonwealth migration except for a tiny category of ‘patrials’, again defined by UK (i.e. white) ancestry.85 Britain had become a locked-door to new arrivals, yet anti-migrant sentiment did not reduce. Rather, with the rise of the National Front it took on a new force. It was in this context that the Front’s high votes in spring 1976 were read, as a series of popular referendums on the party’s signature policy of repatriation.

  On 6 July 1976, the House of Commons held a debate on immigration. The Conservatives’ deputy leader William Whitelaw opened by stating that Britain had always been a generous society. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘we all know today that these principles of the fair and tolerant society which we seek to uphold will be undermined if individual fears and resentments are allowed to grow.’ Immigration, he continued, was threatening to turn the UK into an unfair and intolerant society. The answer, he implied, was not a return to generosity but the physical exclusion of outsiders.

  Unlike Whitelaw himself, whose language remained coded throughout, many of the Tory MPs who followed him used openly racist language. Robert Taylor, MP for Croydon North West, began by saying, ‘The area which I represent does not wish to be like Southall, which is synonymous with the Asian community.’ His colleague Nicholas Winterton demanded the termination of ‘all further immigration, from all sources, immediately’. Another Conservative MP, John Page, went further: no new immigration should be allowed for a minimum of five years.

  Another Tory MP, Michael Shersby, demanded that ‘all future illegal immigrants’, irrespective of how or why they came to Britain, should be repatriated.

  As the debate reaches its crescendo, John Stokes, the Tory MP for Halesowen and a member of the Monday Club, pointed to the ‘growing support for the National Front’ and insisted that if immigration was not stopped there would ‘be an explosion of wrath from ordinary English people such as we have never known in our long history’. Employing language from which no Front speaker would have demurred, Stokes portrayed Britain’s crisis as having both a gendered and a racial aspect. The solution to the breakdown of both family and nation was ethnic homogeneity:

  I have seen my task as that of trying to keep all that is best in England and to be able to hand on to my children, as my father handed on to me, a country to be proud of, a homogeneous nation, sharing the same faith, history and background.

  He, like the Front, had a notion that Britain’s war efforts of 1939–1945 had been stabbed in the back by racial conspirators who had conspired to hand the country to others, the majority having ‘never realised that we in Great Britain had won that war only to hand over parts of our territory to alien races’. Stokes demanded that the government adopt new policies of generalised repatriation: ‘The young immigrants who have just come here will have to return to their homelands and their families.’86

  As a result of the Front’s electoral success, opinions which had first been argued at the fringes of British politics were now being echoed in Parliament.

  Notes

  1 M. Billig, Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (London: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1978), p. 113.

  2 R. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), p. 241.

  3 D. Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); G. Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism after 1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).

  4 Union, 17 April 1948; Renton, Fascism, p. 41.

  5 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p. 241.

  6 J. Steele, ‘The bloody minded left’, The National European, July 1964; J. Hamm, ‘Europe-Africa’. The National European, July 1964; The Thunderer, May 1969.

  7 Kensington News and West London Times, 28 March 1969.

  8 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, pp. 70–71; S. Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsi
der (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 108.

  9 Union Movement Report, 8 December 1962.

  10 G. Thayer, The British Political Fringe: A Profile (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), p. 52.

  11 Renton, Fascism, p. 41.

  12 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p. 210.

  13 H. McNeile and R. Black, The History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour (London: A. K. Chesterton Trust, 2014), p. 28.

  14 McNeile and Black, The History of the League, p. 105.

  15 Harmston also stood for the Union Movement at a by-election in Uxbridge in 1972, the last parliamentary election contested by that party.

  16 The Times, 24 April 1968.

  17 In South London, the NF took a different view, with Dave Pascoe pointing out Powell’s opposition to capital punishment and support for the decriminalisation of homosexuality and warning that he could not be trusted: D. Pascoe, ‘Enoch Powell: friend or fraud’, Britain First 1(1) (1968), p. 4.

  18 P. Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 126. Anti-fascists later obtained an NF membership list from February 1968 (i.e. directly before Powell’s speech); it confirmed that the Front had just four members in Huddersfield at the start of the year: Searchlight Archive, University of Northampton, BRI/02/029.

  19 Jordan’s activities in 1967–1977 are discussed in P. Jackson, Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 50–51.

  20 Jenny Doyle to Richard Verrall, 8 July 1979, Searchlight Archive, University of Northampton, BRI/02/06.

  21 J. Tyndall, The Eleventh Hour: A Call for British Rebirth (London: Albion Press, 1988), p. 11.

  22 R. Hill, with A. Bell, The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network (London: Grafton Books, 1988), p. 159.

  23 S. Beauman, ‘What lies behind the Front’, Sunday Telegraph, 2 October 1977.

  24 M. Walker, The National Front (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 40; Hill with Bell, The Other Face of Terror, p. 159.

  25 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p. 238; ‘Ceremony of blood mingling’, Daily Mirror, 3 October 1963.

  26 Hill, with Bell, The Other Face of Terror, p. 151. The references to ballerinas and chorus girls was a jibe against Tyndall’s by then former ally Martin Webster.

  27 P. Trevelyan, ‘Why there is anti-semitism’, Spearhead 3 (January 1965), p. 7.

  28 Julius, ‘Gleanings from the Ghetto’, Spearhead 4 (February 1965), p. 5.

  29 J. Tyndall, ‘The meaning of Greater Britain’, Spearhead 8 (July 1965), p. 6.

  30 S. Taylor, The National Front in English Politics (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 55.

  31 J. Bean, Many Shades of Black: Inside Britain’s Far Right (London: Millennium, 1999), p. 151.

  32 Walker, The National Front, p. 75.

  33 Bean, Many Shades of Black, p. 202.

  34 Hill, with Bell, The Other Face of Terror, p. 84; Thurlow, Fascism, p. 239.

  35 Beauman, ‘What lies behind the Front’.

  36 ‘Police stand by as NF invade the Fabians’, Colchester Gazette, 10 February 1970.

  37 ‘National front man tackles PM’, Hertfordshire Express, 9 September 1971.

  38 ‘The “Red” Rev is heckled in his church’, Kentish Independent, 17 December 1971. Osterreicher would later be a founder member of the Anti-Nazi League.

  39 ‘Race chief is heckled by National Front men’, Luton News, 7 October 1971.

  40 Bean, Many Shades of Black, p. 214.

  41 N. Fielding, The National Front (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 159–160.

  42 M. Walker, The National Front (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 133.

  43 Y. Alibhai-Brown, The Settler’s Cookbook (London: Portobello, 2009), p. 281.

  44 Walker, The National Front, pp. 135–136.

  45 M. Pitchford, The Conservative Party and the Extreme Right 1945–1975 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 172; G. Bowd, Fascist Scotland: Caledonia and the Far Right (Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 2013), p. 252.

  46 Walker, The National Front, pp. 125–126.

  47 ‘John Tyndall speaks to Monday Club’, Spearhead, March 1973, p. 18.

  48 Walker, National Front, pp. 119–132; Pitchford, The Conservative Party, pp. 204–212.

  49 Message from the chairman of the National Front’, Spearhead 94 (May 1976), p. 20

  50 J. Tyndall, ‘Sunday Mirror dredges the depths’, Spearhead 100 (December 1976), p. 4.

  51 J. Tyndall, ‘My answer to the smear-mongers’, Spearhead 122 (October 1978), pp. 6–7.

  52 Searchlight and Tyne & Wear Anti-Fascist Association, Fascism and the Labour Movement: Facing the Threat (London: Searchlight, 1999), p. 30; E. Smith, British Communism and the Politics of Race (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 148–150; A. Sivanandan, ‘From resistance to rebellion’, Race and Class 2(31) (1981), pp. 110–152, at 138.

  53 ‘The National Front and the trade unions’, Searchlight 83 (April 1975), pp. 16–17; ‘Back to work at Imperial’, Race Today, September 1974; D. Edgar, ‘Racism, fascism and the politics of the National Front’, Race & Class 19(2) (1977), pp. 111–131; Fielding, The National Front, p. 159; A. Sivanandan, Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain (London: Institute of Race Relations, 1986), pp. 139–140; Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 15.

  54 NF Birmingham Branch, meeting at the Shakespeare [pub], 20 June 1975. Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/029.

  55 J. Pearce, Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love (Charlotte, NC: St Benedict Press, 2013), p. 63.

  56 ‘Why I was a racist’, in Big Flame, A Close Look at Fascism and Racism (Liverpool: Big Flame, 1978), p. 8.

  57 R. Tomlinson, Ricky (London: Time Warner Books, 2003), pp. 83, 85, 87.

  58 Rev. T. Holden, So What Are You Going to Do about the National Front? (Birmingham: Sidelines, 1978), p. 4.

  59 Walker, The National Front, p. 145.

  60 T. Gilbert, Only One Died (London: Kay Beauchamp, 1975); National Union of Students, The Myth of Red Lion Square (London: NUS, 1975).

  61 There is a short, plausible account of the fighting at the junction of Old North Street and Red Lion Square in M. Lux, Anti-Fascist (London: Phoenix, 2006), pp. 23–24. Lux, whose account is generally supportive of militant anti-fascism, recalls the CPE (M-L) contingent, describing them as the ‘most militant (or should that be crazed?) faction’ on the day.

  62 The Red Lion Square Disorders of 15 June 1974 Report of Inquiry by the Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Scarman OBE (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1975), p. 7.

  63 Gilbert, Only One Died, p. 129. Forty years later, Mullen gave a similar account of the day’s events in D. Hann, Physical Resistance. Or, a Hundred Years of Anti-Fascism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013), pp. 242–243.

  64 Transcript of inquest of Kevin Gateley, 12 July 1974, pp. 11–15. National Archives HO 233/59.

  65 Walker, National Front, p. 163.

  66 R. Clutterbuck, Britain in Agony (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 63.

  67 M. Webster, ‘Report to the Home Secretary’, 8 July 1974, Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/16.

  68 M. Webster to Scarman LJ, 11 September 1974. National Archives HO 233/83.

  69 T. Gilbert, Only One Died, pp. 31–38, 203–207; The Red Lion Square Disorders, p. 12.

  70 Fielding, The National Front, p. 37.

  71 National Front Halifax Group, ‘Members’ local bulletin’ 4 (26 February 1975), Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/24.

  72 National Front, Birmingham Branch, 4 October 1974. Searchlight Archive, 2.276.29.

  73 Walker, National Front, p. 149.

  74 John Kingsley Read (Birmingham: A. F. and R. Publications, 1975), p. 3.

  75 Letter from R. S. Marshall, undated but July 1975; Tyndall to Marshall, 29 August 1975, both in Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/16. Ralph Marshall was in fact an anti-fascist spy and a member of the Communist Party, David Roberts. ‘Mr R. S. Marshall and the NF’, Searchlight, May 1976.

  76 Walker, National Front,
pp. 153–156, 182–183.

  77 ‘Ex-NF man on race hate charge’, Standard, 4 January 1978. At Read’s trial, Judge Neil McKinnon told the jury that the law against incitement to racial hatred did not cover ‘reasoned argument in favour of immigration control or even repatriation’. He continued that ‘it was difficult to say what it is that this defendant is alleged to have done that amounts to a criminal offence’. On Read’s acquittal, McKinnon told him, ‘By all means propagate the views you may have but try to avoid involving the sort of action which has been taken against you. I wish you well’: J. Kelman, And the Judge Said (London: Polygon, 2008), p. 75. ‘“Nigger” Mackinnon’, Observer, 8 January 1978. A couple of weeks later McKinnon asked a black defendant to a traffic incident, ‘Have you ever thought of going back to Barbados?’: L. Flynn, ‘Another racist on the bench’, Socialist Worker, 4 February 1978. 113 Labour MPs called for McKinnon’s removal; however, he remained on the bench.

  78 S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 edn), p. 329.

  79 Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, p. 585.

  80 Z. Layton Henry, The Politics of Race in Britain (London: George Unwin, 1984), p. 93; Searchlight, From Ballots to Bombs: The Inside Story of the National Front’s Political Soldiers (London: Searchlight Publishing, 1984), p. 4; Taylor, The National Front, pp. 45, 102.

  81 Fielding, The National Front, p. 31. At about the same time, the Front also established a presence for the first time in Stainforth in North Yorkshire: D. J. Douglass, The Wheel’s Still in Spin (Hastings: Read ‘n’ Noir, 2009), p. 352.

  82 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, p. 328.

  83 The Telegraph, 6 November 2007.

  84 Pitchford, The Conservative Party, pp. 204–212.

  85 Sivanandan, ‘From resistance to rebellion’, p. 131.