Never Again

by David Renton

86 M. Barker, The New Racism (London: Pluto, 1980), p. 18.

  3

  THE OTHER YOUNG BELIEVERS

  There have been anti-fascists in Britain since the early 1920s.1 In the 1930s, Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was confronted by a large anti-fascist campaign, led at times by the Communist Party2 and including Jewish and ex-servicemen’s organisations. After the war, the revival of fascism led to the formation of the 43 Group, a network of anti-fascist Jews.3 By the 1960s, the 43 Group had given way to a new organisation, the 62 Group with one supporter of the latter, Gerry Gable, helping to establish the anti-fascist intelligence bureau Searchlight in 1963 and, from 1965 to 1967, a newspaper (today a magazine) of the same name. Other anti-racist groups included the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, established following Martin Luther King’s visit to England in 1964 and the Movement for Colonial Freedom (later Liberation), which called the anti-NF protests in Red Lion Square.

  In December 1966 when the LEL, RPS and BNP held a conference at Caxton Hall to announce the formation of the National Front, they were opposed. The Anti-Apartheid Movement had already booked a room in Caxton Hall on the same day and anti-fascists used the fact of the double booking to try and force their way into the building. To prevent disturbances, the Front had to close the doors to its own event, excluding around two-thirds of the intended participants.4

  Many of the earliest anti-Front activities were conducted by the 62 Group. It was not a large organisation but it was committed to harassing the Front at every opportunity. Several leading personalities within the 62 Group had served in the British Army during 1939–1945, including Harry Bidney, who had been a warrant officer and Cyril Paskin, a former RAF sergeant in Burma.5 Typical 62 Group actions included breaking into the National Front’s headquarters at Tulse Hill in 1967 and stealing a large volume of documents, and then repeating the attack two years later when they also destroyed the Front’s printing machines.6

  Within the trade union movement, a different approach dominated. The emphasis was on persuading large numbers of voters to reject the Front. Martin Walker suggests that in the early 1970s, union-backed local campaigns were a serious obstacle to the Front: ‘The more successful it became in local elections, the more left-wing and liberal bodies throughout the country recognised the threat and began to mobilise against it.’7 He gives the example of trade unionists in Leicester who circulated 20,000 copies of a leaflet showing John Tyndall in a Nazi uniform. Wayne Asher was one of those who distributed this material. In his account:

  Leaflets exposing the background of Tyndall and Webster created such anxiety among rank and file NF members . . . that NF HQ had to issue a special circular to Leicester members reassuring them that the charges only referred to a few people.8

  From 1973 onwards, the use of the image became a recurring tactic of almost every anti-fascist group. John Tyndall and the National Front were to complain repeatedly and fruitlessly that the photographs were more than a decade old and that most supporters of the Front had never been in Tyndall’s Greater Britain Movement.

  Anti-Fascist Committees (AFCs) were set up in a number of towns. A South Tyneside Anti-Fascist Committee was formed in 1972 with the support of the local Trades Council and Claimants’ Union. It campaigned against the Front during local and national elections. Two years later, Bernard Appleton, secretary of the South Shields Trades Council and a prominent North East anti-fascist had his face slashed with a razor. This incident followed the count at the October general election. Harry Donkin, a former Labour councillor who had defected to the Front, saw Appleton and pointed him out. Thugs then chased Appleton and attacked him.9

  A Manchester Anti-Fascist Committee was up and running by 1974; its members included long-term community activist Mike Luft and Graeme Atkinson, a former member of Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League. Around this time, Paul Rose, Labour MP for Manchester Blackley, also helped to establish a further network, Democratic Defence, following threats from local fascists.

  The Front complained after Luft and Atkinson printed leaflets calling on the electorate to vote for anyone but the Front. The anti-fascists were prosecuted for breaching electoral rules. A stipendiary magistrate dismissed the charges, reasoning that while Luft and Atkinson had been campaigning against the Front, they had not solicited votes for anyone else in particular and therefore that they were under no obligation to register their spending as spending for any of the other parties. The magistrates’ interpretation of the law was overturned on appeal.10

  Up to 1974 and with the exception of the campaign in Leicester, none of these local movements succeeded in pushing back the Front. Most voters were neither sympathetic nor hostile to that party. Bob Murdoch was a white-collar worker at the North East engineering company C. A. Parsons and a committed anti-fascist. The far right, Murdoch recalls, was rarely discussed even in union circles: ‘There was no feeling that the National Front was the threat. The enemy was the company.’ However, as the Front started to stand candidates locally, concerns grew. But even then, only a minority saw a need to confront the NF:

  We first raised it at a general meeting in 1974. One or two of the right-wingers raised a rival motion. We put it to the reps committee, which was still sixty strong or even bigger. Both motions were put and both rejected. It wasn’t something in which our members wanted to get involved.11

  In the aftermath of Kevin Gateley’s death in June 1974, the numbers turning out for anti-fascist protests increased. Some 8,000 people joined a silent march through central London in Gateley’s memory. A protest in Oxford that October saw National Front candidate Ian Anderson excluded from his own election meeting at Headington Middle School. Two days later, anti-fascists captured his platform a second time, forcing Anderson to flee from the stage at Oxford Town Hall.12

  The following spring, 2,000 people joined an anti-fascist protest outside a Front meeting in Oxford.13 John Tyndall and fifty members of his Honour Guard, armed with bicycle chains and iron bars, attempted to fight their way through the crowd into the meeting. Seven anti-Front demonstrators were hospitalised.14

  The anti-fascists of the 1970s were recruited from a generation who had lived through the events of 1968. They had seen the North Vietnamese score victories against the military power of the United States, the protests that followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August and the general strike that broke out in France in May 1968. For socialists, looking on with pleasure as Edward Heath’s Tory government was challenged by wave after wave of strikes, it was easy to imagine that each small protest would be a followed by a larger demonstration, each demonstration by a strike, each strike by a further occupation and on and on until the workers’ movement was strong enough to challenge for power.

  Yet once Labour had taken office in 1974, the optimism waned. The unions accepted a policy of wage restraint, the so-called ‘Social Contract’. The number of protests and strikes reduced sharply. Tactics of struggle that would have succeeded against Heath failed under Wilson. By the mid-1970s, a feeling of inertia was widespread on the left. Socialist-feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham noticed a new mood of demoralisation. Somehow, the movements of the late 1960s had begun to lose their confidence. ‘We were very active,’ she recalls,

  but there was some peculiar notion of a pause . . . There was lots of activity around hospitals and community politics. Also trade union struggles, like equal pay. Then we started to have meetings on women and literature, women and film. Then I was pregnant. It seemed to be something happening to me . . . The government started to make cuts. We had to defend things. It no longer seemed that workers’ control was going to happen.

  The early years of the second Wilson government saw the NF repeatedly attacking left-wing meetings. In 1975, the Front broke into a meeting held at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) on ‘The State, the Law and Northern Ireland’, sponsored by the National Council of Civil Liberties and the white-collar union TASS and with member
s of Big Flame and the International Marxist Group in attendance. Front supporters shouted, ‘Jewish maggots’ and ‘People like you should be exterminated’. In the fighting that followed, six anti-fascists were injured, one of them Graeme Atkinson needing nineteen stitches after a bottle was smashed in his face. Another, Malcolm Peach, suffered an eye injury and a broken arm.15 Thirty people were arrested. Lawyer Steve Cohen spoke:

  I wrote the pamphlet on the Prevention of Terrorism Act for the NCCL which was to the subject of the meeting. The other invited speaker was the then MP Bernadette Devlin. Bernadette didn’t make it but I’m sure it was her intended presence that provoked the NF. I never managed to get into the meeting as I was beaten up by the NF outside. My most vivid memory is then seeing an NF contingent line up alongside an Ulster Volunteer Force banner and then engage in a triumphalist march outside UMIST with the cops doing nothing.16

  Ian Birchall describes a widespread feeling of anxiety on the left: ‘You felt the threat, in terms of graffiti, in terms of the numbers [the National Front] could put on demonstrations, in terms of the results they were getting in elections.’ John Shemeld was a lecturer living in south London. Ten years older than most anti-fascists, he recalls: ‘We were in a hopeless situation. People would go on about “the Pakis” . . . They [the Front] seemed to be the ones that had the resonance.’

  A small number of Front recruits came from the left. In the New Statesman, Christopher Hitchens gave the example of Michael Lobb, a former Marxist, who had campaigned for the National Front in Silvertown, using the issue of redundancies at Tate and Lyle. In Bolton, the National Front candidate was Bill Roberts of Edbro Engineering: ‘Although he goes on about frightened old ladies, falling property values and the other standbys he is certainly no fascist and he estimates that half his local branch are ex-Labour voters.’17 Other examples could have been given: David McCalden, a Northern Irish Holocaust denier18 and National Front supporter, who told interviewees that as a teenager he had been a Maoist; Les Rodgers, a former Communist in the Front’s Birmingham branch; Bruce Anderson-Lyness, branch organiser of Sunderland NF who was said by other members of the Front to have previously been in the Young Communist League.19

  Christine Collette was working full-time as the staff-side representative at Lewisham Council. A socialist in the Labour Party, she remembers a series of political campaigns seeking to challenge racism. In the council, there were three reps, one for white-collar workers, one for direct labour and one for blue-collar workers. The last, she believed, was an ‘out-and-out racist’ who tried to prevent black people from being recruited to work in his section. This rep was confronted and voted out.

  The Front had a base around Brick Lane. According to Dave Widgery, it was

  impossible for anyone living or working in the E1 area not to have witnessed the provocations; doorstep and bus-stop abuse, the daubing of menacing graffiti, the window-breaking and air-gun pot shots, the stone- and bottle-hurling sorties on Sundays and the threatening atmosphere around certain estates and tube stations.20

  The Labour Party announced that it was planning a campaign against racism and the National Front. However, Labour’s response to the Front was uneven. A party political broadcast from 1976 showed some of the contradictions of Labour’s position. Michael Foot spoke, along with Tom Jackson of the Union of Post Office Workers and Millie Miller MP. Jackson argued against the Front from an internationalist position, saying that ‘The trade union movement was founded on solidarity, unity and international brotherhood. We must not allow anything to divide us, not race, not colour, not creed.’ Michael Foot, by contrast, told his audience that Labour was already cracking down on immigrants: ‘Some people don’t seem to realise just how strictly immigration to Britain is controlled already.’21

  The Communist Party was still by far the largest and best-rooted force to the left of Labour; however, it was shedding support. Its strategy of working closely with Labour was cutting it off from new generations of young workers for whom Labour’s record in power was far from compelling.22

  With the larger organisations of the left unable or unwilling to take a lead in the anti-racist campaigns, the initiative fell to other groups. Trades councils became more important, as did black organisations and members of the younger far-left parties, including the International Marxist Group and the International Socialists.

  In February 1976, supporters of the NF attacked an IS Right to Work meeting in Bolton and a South West African People’s Organisation meeting in Edinburgh. The left was able to claim a revenge of sorts when 1,500 anti-racists opposed a National Front march in Coventry. The Front’s Andrew Fountaine, John Tyndall and Martin Webster all claimed to have been assaulted.23 In March 1976, the IS called a picket of the BBC, after it had allowed Front supporters onto its Open Door programme. In April, anti-fascists confronted a Front demonstration through Manningham in Bradford. Some six hundred supporters of the Front clashed with 3,000 anti-fascists, the day ending with anti-fascists stoning the vans of the police protecting the Front. Anti-fascists were divided into two blocs, with a predominantly white demonstration marching into the city centre, while most black activists insisted on protecting Manningham. At the time of the demonstration, Tariq Mehmood was a member of IS, albeit increasingly at odds with his party:

  Lots of us lived in Manningham . . . Manningham was ours and we had to protect it. It was there that we really started thinking that we’ve got to get our own house in order, we can’t have this, we can’t leave our future in the hands of people like the community leaders or the Labour Party types.24

  Marsha Singh was a member of Militant; he too was angered by the willingness of most white demonstrators to leave Manningham at the day’s end: ‘I thought it was a betrayal of everything they were supposed to have taught me.’25

  In May 1976, there were large anti-racist marches in Birmingham, Portsmouth and Southall, while in June, there were more protests in east London, Southall, Brixton and central London. In Rotherham, IS members divided themselves into two contingents. One hundred and fifty took part in an Engineers’ Union demonstration for ‘racial harmony’, while around the same number again acted as a mobile picket, heckling the NF march and defending Eastwood, the Asian area of the town.26 Supporters of the IS joined occupations of the BBC studios in Newcastle and Leeds, in protest against interviews with the Front.

  Perhaps the far right’s best-known personality was the landlord Robert Relf, whose career on the right had included a stint as a bodyguard for Colin Jordan.27 In 1976, Relf placed a sign outside his house in Leamington, ‘For Sale to an English family’. The poet James Fenton attended meeting in Tilbury, in Relf’s support.

  ‘Parliamentary language’ barely conceals the assumptions which the Tilbury meeting shared. Indeed it is in a way refreshing to go from Westminster to such a gathering and hear people say what they really mean. As for Labour, the issue is fought in the worst possible terms – arguments about numbers and whether the pool of immigrants will ever dry up.28

  Relf was prosecuted under the Race Relations Act and convicted. The press chose to present Relf as a race martyr. In July 1976, the Front attempted to organise a march through London to demand Relf’s release. However, anti-fascists captured Relf’s ‘For Sale’ sign and rushed it to Southall, where a demonstration by the IS, the Southall Youth Movement and the Indian Workers’ Association burned it.29

  In central London, 15,000 people joined marches called by the two Indian Workers’ Associations against racism in July. Four thousand people protested against the Front and the National Party in Blackburn in September. In October, two hundred and fifty people picketed the Front’s AGM, while a weekly confrontation began between NF paper-sellers, and members of the International Socialists in Brick Lane. In November, 25,000 joined a TUC march against racism, and another 1,000 demonstrated in support of Asian immigrants fleeing to Britain from Malawi.

  Dreamers and practical people

  As the 1970s wore on, an i
ncreasing part in the anti-fascist campaign was being played by the International Socialists (later the SWP). With about 3,000 members in 1976, IS was not the largest force on the left but only one of several Trotskyist parties of roughly the same size (the International Marxist Group, Militant, Gerry Healy and Vanessa Redgrave’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party), each competing for hegemony in the space beyond Labour. IS’s founder, Tony Cliff, from a Polish Jewish family, was born in Palestine, and at the age of 30 emigrated to England in 1947. In his heavily accented English, he peppered his speeches with metaphors and unexpected jokes. From the 1940s, Cliff had developed an analysis of the Soviet Union as ‘state capitalist’. An approach which insisted that socialism was incompatible with bureaucratic control made IS attractive to students shaped by the events of 1968, including the general strike in France and Dubcek’s anti-Soviet uprising in Czechoslovakia. The large number of actors, graphic designers and musicians who were to play a part in the anti-fascist campaigns attests to the importance of this generation on the left.

  After Powell’s 1968 speech, the International Socialists had issued an appeal to other left groups calling for unity against what was termed the ‘Urgent Challenge of Fascism’. ‘The outbreak of racialist sentiment and activity since Enoch Powell’s Birmingham speech marks the beginning of a new phase in British politics,’ IS warned. ‘The ready response to his speech has revealed the prevalence of racist ideas among workers, which had been inculcated by centuries of capitalism and imperialism.’30 The move was ignored, however, by the rest of the left.

  From the early 1960s, Tony Cliff had argued that the coming force in society was the shop stewards’ movement. From 1970, IS began to make inroads among unionised workers, recruiting the likes of Micky Fenn among the London dockers, or the stewards in the Birmingham engineering works who took up the call to mobilise at Saltley Gates. During the 1972–1974 strike wave, Cliff’s ideas appeared to be vindicated. Yet after 1974, as the strikes ebbed, he sought to reorient the IS towards a new emphasis on younger workers without an established political tradition.31