by David Renton
The plan to set up the Anti-Nazi League was formulated by Jim Nichol, the SWP’s national secretary and a key part of the group’s leadership but on its more cautious wing. Nichol was a product of the monolithic Labour left of the North East. His father was a miner who had worked in Walbottle Colliery near Newcastle and his mother had arrived in the North East from Ireland. Nichol left school at age 15 and was hospitalised for months with tuberculosis. He joined IS in his teens. A previous chapter has described how in 1968 he rode with a fellow International Socialist Terry Barrett to leaflet the London dockers against Powell.
Widgery names Nichol as the man who took the decision to form the Anti-Nazi League and suggests that a first informal meeting to discuss the idea was held at Nichol’s Stoke Newington home, two weeks before Lewisham. Afterwards:
Nichol went first to the late Douglas Tilbey, Quaker Labour Party member, magistrate and OBE, ‘a really nice guy, very principled on the question of race and always had a bit time for the SWP.’ Tilbey thought it was an excellent idea. Then Nichol put the scheme to Tassaduq Ahmed, a middle-of-the-road Bangladeshi who had been in Britain since 1963 . . . Tassaduq relayed to him the concern he also felt about the number of factions that existed within the black communities. The next barometer was Michael Seifert, the lawyer and Communist Party member, because of his links with trade-union bureaucracy people like Ken Gill, George Guy and Alan Sapper – whose blessing was also going to prove essential. Nichol recalls, ‘I said, “Mike, this is only really going to work if it gets the support of the CP and the left TU leaders. What do you think?” Mike said, “I think it’s a bloody great idea. But I’m sorry, the CP won’t, they’ll crucify you. So I’ll not mention it to anyone.”’10
The most important of these moves was the approach to Michael Seifert. Short, squat and bespectacled, but with eyes that lit up when he laughed, the solicitor may have been a loyal Communist but he was the opposite of a sectarian. A roll-call of Seifert’s clients in the 1970s covered almost the entire spectrum of the extra-parliamentary left, from Angry Brigade proponents of the propaganda of the deed to the Stalinist General Secretaries mentioned by Widgery.11 He was of Jewish heritage and proud of the part his comrades had played in the Battle of Cable Street. An ecumenical anti-fascist, he had even on one occasion addressed a meeting of the IS in Tottenham, speaking on the politics of the black radicals, Angela Davis and George Jackson. If Seifert was unable to persuade his comrades, no one else could.
In the aftermath of the fighting at Lewisham, Jim Nichol again proposed an alliance against the Front: ‘We were going nowhere with the CP, IMG, Workers Fight . . . Any meeting [restricted to the left groups outside Labour] would have been a meeting of four people in a darkened room.’ Nichol was clear about the politics of the campaign, ‘It would have to be a complete single issue that excluded nobody. If you were for fighting Nazis that was it.’ He was struggling, however, to find the right name: ‘I was toying with calling it the League Against Nazis and Racists.’
Nichol asked another member of the SWP, Paul Holborow, to lead the campaign. Holborow was a former public schoolboy – dry, hard-working and ambitious, and without Nichol’s modesty or self-deprecating humour. It took some time for the idea to sink in: ‘I said we needed a Secretary for this new campaign. At first, Paul wasn’t interested, he thought by Secretary I meant someone who could type.’
Holborow’s first task was to recruit a fellow leader from outside the SWP. A member of the Labour Party was needed, preferably with trade union connections. In 1977, Peter Hain was a trade union official in his late twenties. He had arrived in Britain some eleven years before, an exile from apartheid South Africa. He had been one of the best-known campaigners in the Stop the Seventy campaign against the touring South African rugby side. He had also been for several years a leader of the Young Liberals. In September 1976, he had begun working as a research officer for the postal workers’ union. The following year he joined the Labour Party and it was soon after this move that Hain was invited to help launch the Anti-Nazi League. ‘If I hadn’t joined the Labour Party,’ he reflects, ‘I doubt I would have been approached.’
After Peter Hain, the next contact was Ernie Roberts of the engineers’ union and an SWP ally in campaigns against youth unemployment. According to Holborow:
[Roberts] had been assistant general secretary of the engineering workers’ union for 30 years. He had always been interested in the political dimension of building the rank and file. He had cut his teeth in the Coventry tool-room disputes of the 1940s. He had an immense following on the left. For years, he had been editing Engineering Voice, which functioned as the broad left in the industry. He was never in the Communist Party and never identified with the Soviet Union but worked closely with the Communists.12
A launch meeting was held in autumn 1977, at the House of Commons. An ad hoc steering committee was elected and the three executive positions of organiser, press officer and treasurer were taken by Holborow, Hain and Roberts.13 Other members of the committee included four MPs, Martin Flannery, Dennis Skinner, Audrey Wise and Neil Kinnock, a former Young Liberal Simon Hebditch and Maurice Ludmer the editor of Searchlight, as well as Nigel Harris of the SWP and the actress Miriam Karlin, who had made her name playing working-class Jewish women in comedies.14 A seat was also reserved in case the Communist Party came on board later.15 Peter Hain describes some of the individuals who joined:
Neil Kinnock had a very non-sectarian approach – he didn’t want to spend ages debating racism. He wanted the movement to work. Dennis and Martin brought the Tribunite MPs. Audrey completely threw herself into the movement. Miriam was very important in the Jewish community. She was completely frustrated by the sectarianism – you don’t just see it in the left parties, it was there in the Labour Party, in the Jewish community.
Mike Barton was a member of the 7/84 theatre group. Shortly after the launch of the Anti-Nazi League, he was invited to work for the League full-time: ‘Soon we were having so many calls for leaflets that it became a kind of despatch room, packing leaflets, tying them together with string.’
Nigel Harris was tasked with signing up prominent left-wingers. Among other targets, Harris wrote to Edward Thompson and John Saville, the two formerly Communist historians who had launched the first New Left in 1950s Britain: ‘Thompson wrote back saying, “This whole thing is a front for the Socialist Workers Party and you must think I’m an idiot to ask me.” Saville wrote back, “Of course it’s a front but it’s a good cause and it’s alright by me.”’
The League also approached a number of figures from the arts world. The writers Arnold Wesker and Keith Waterhouse agreed to sponsor the League, as did Warren Mitchell, who played Alf Garnett in Till Death Do Us Part and Bill Owen who played Compo in Last of the Summer Wine. Other early supporters of the ANL included actors Alfie Bass and Prunella Scales, comedians Dave Allen and Derek Griffiths and authors Iris Murdoch and Melvyn Bragg. Crystal Palace manager Terry Venables joined, along with Nottingham Forest’s manager Brian Clough.16 A few years before, the latter had described an African team at the World Cup as ‘a load of spear-chuckers who still eat each other’. But according to one League supporter Bev Bennett, ‘signing up Brian Clough was seen as a terrific coup. I remember SWP comrades being more excited about this than any number of politicians who joined.’
For Hain, part of the League’s success can be credited to a decision by the SWP which agreed to moderate its politics, toning down the street violence which had proved counter-productive at Lewisham: ‘The publicity around [Lewisham] was very negative. That made the more thoughtful SWP people, like Paul Holborow, think, “We’ve got to do this in a different way.”’17
Jim Nichol, the man who had first conceived of the Anti-Nazi League and sent Holborow to his meeting with Hain, believes that if Hain or other Labour MPs told themselves the SWP had given up on physical confrontation they were deceiving themselves:
It didn’t work like that at all. One of the most
basic positions of the Anti-Nazi League was, Keep the Nazis off the Streets. You couldn’t do that without force. The people who were in the Labour Party knew full well that the Anti-Nazi League was going to mean more confrontations. They were the ones who kept silent.
Meanwhile, the launch of the Anti-Nazi League was met by other groups with scepticism. Danny Reilly of the All London Anti-Racist Anti-Fascist Co-ordinating Committee was wary of SWP involvement in the new campaign. ‘You’ve got to remember that lots of lefties were already alienated.’
The Race Today Collective were equally sceptical. According to Leila Hassan, ‘We knew about the ANL and we thought it was a front for the SWP.’
The magazine CARF was cautious in its welcome:
There have been certain fears expressed by local anti-fascist campaigns that such a large national body might swamp local activity and initiative. But since the Anti-Nazi League is specifically geared towards fighting fascism at elections and will most probably dissolve after the next general election, the aims of local campaigns seem to complement rather than compete with the aims of the Anti-Nazi League . . . Campaigns can in fact take this opportunity to make full use of the propaganda available from the Anti-Nazi League. It is after all the local campaigns which will have to stand the test of time.18
The libertarian Marxists of Big Flame distrusted the Anti-Nazi League, fearing both the top-down instincts of the Labour MPs and the prospect of the group’s domination by the SWP. But the link with RAR eased fears a little. Big Flame’s Max Farrar spoke at a national conference of Anti-Racist Anti-Fascist Committees, where he proposed that the Committees should affiliate to the League. The veteran black theorist Ambalavaner Sivanandan opposed affiliation, noting Farrar’s enthusiasm for RAR and describing him as ‘a young punk’. The motion was however passed.19
The first squaddists
While the main response of the SWP to Lewisham was the decision to launch the Anti-Nazi League, other and quite different plans were also canvassed. In summer 1977, in response to National Front attacks on SWP paper-sellers at Lewisham, John Deason of the SWP’s central committee sounded out a group of people to discuss self-defence. A meeting was held at a pub in Southwark. According to the docker Micky Fenn, the local SWP group was ‘in a state of disintegration’. The NF ‘slung bottles of paraquat at them, slung bricks at them, iron bars at them . . . They were very, very frightened . . . But we tried to calm them down.’20 In Fenn’s memory, a plan was made to establish five groups each composed of five SWP members, with these squads based around SWP groups in north London, inner east London and outer east London. They were then used to protect Socialist Worker sales in Hoxton and Newham.
Deason was a charismatic organiser, a former engineer from Newton-le-Willows in Greater Manchester. He had come to London after his employer had announced a wave of redundancies. The workers in the factory had occupied the plant in his defence and remained on strike for seven weeks before admitting defeat.21
To what extent was his meeting with Fenn and others sanctioned by the rest of the SWP leadership? The SWP’s then national secretary, Jim Nichol, is best-placed to know. He pauses however before answering. ‘If it happened,’ he says, ‘it was Deason going off by himself. You have to remember that on the Central Committee, we didn’t discuss everything, we each had our own areas of responsibility. We were freelancers.’
Nichol acknowledges that by summer 1977, SWP members on the docks22 had taken on an unofficial role as the security team for a number of events, and not merely the RAR gigs whose security arrangements are described by Widgery. In Nichol’s words:
There is no doubt that left-wing dockers took it upon themselves to confront the NF. In particular there was an individual Tony Delaney;[23] he was a docker at Jamaica Street, East London and he would take no nonsense. I talked to Delaney many times and I would smile and not take too close an interest.
From summer 1977, Micky Fenn, Micky O’Farrell from Hatfield SWP and others were being referred to informally as members of an SWP ‘squad’. At this stage and for several years afterwards, the term carried no negative connotations.
Plans to Hyde
After the decision had been taken in London to establish the Anti-Nazi League, but before the campaign had been formally launched, the nascent campaign encountered an early challenge with the news that the Front was proposing to march through Hyde in Manchester. According to Geoff Brown, ‘[Martin] Webster was trying to regroup the Front after Lewisham. That’s why they put so much effort into Hyde.’ Brown walked around Hyde for a day planning a counter-protest
It would be easy to block any march. The main road goes through a series of underpasses, we would have four opportunities to block the road. [Manchester Chief Constable James] Anderton must also have done the same [walk-around] and thought it through like us.
Home Office papers in the National Archives show that Brown’s hunch was correct: Anderton had scouted the route and judged it impracticable, ‘unnecessarily long’ and too close to building sites which would provide ‘arsenals’ for anti-fascist protesters. He travelled to London, where he met Labour’s Home Secretary Mervyn Rees. On his return, Anderton announced that the Front would not be allowed to march through Hyde after all. This ban was publicised, receiving the full support of the national press and high-profile politicians including Lord Hailsham for the Conservatives.24 Behind the scenes, the decision was taken that the National Front would be allowed to march and receive full police protection, on what Anderton promised Rees would be a different and ‘strictly limited’ route.25
On the morning of Saturday, 8 October 1977, anti-fascists divided into three groups. The largest contingent of anti-fascists, marshalled by the SWP’s Jim Nichol, headed for Stockport. Press reports seemed to suggest that if there was going to be a Front march, it would begin there. Another smaller section of about two hundred people remained in Hyde, in case the Front decided to defy the supposed police ban. Another group, of about the same number, waited in Manchester town centre. They were to be kept in reserve, in case either of the other two contingents were caught out.
These three groups of anti-fascists were to have very different experiences. The first group in Stockport found themselves waiting all day for a march that never took place. The second group were no more successful. In Hyde, Martin Webster of the Front conducted a one-man march, defended by over 2,500 officers. Ramilla Patel of the Asian Youth Movement walked in front of him the whole way with a placard which read, ‘This man is a Nazi.’ Anti-fascists were able to heckle Webster and disrupt his parade but could not prevent his demonstration.26
The third group of anti-fascists, the reserve, clashed repeatedly with the Front. Seven hundred members of the National Front assembled in Levenshulme. There were scuffles the whole way along Kirkmanshulme Lane, but the Front contingent was able to reach its destination intact.
For Owen Leeds, this was the first time he had seen the Front’s steel-pointed Union Jack Dr Marten boots and shaved heads up close:
I had shoulder-length hair and was busy growing my first beard . . . when this NF guy made eye contact with me and shouted, ‘You’re the next Kevin Gateley, you’re gonna die you long-haired communist bastard.’ Needless to say I found this quite disturbing.27
Naming the Front Nazis
The Anti-Nazi League’s founding statement was sent to the press in November 1977:
For the first time since Mosley in the thirties there is the worrying prospect of a Nazi party gaining significant support in Britain . . . The leaders, philosophy and origins of the National Front and similar organisations followed directly from the Nazis in Germany . . . They must not go unopposed. Ordinary voters must be made aware of the threat that lies behind the National Front. In every town, in every factory, in every school, on every housing estate, wherever the Nazis attempt to organise they must be countered.28
From the perspective of the Labour Party, one of the attractions of the Anti-Nazi League was that it was a centr
al source of anti-fascist knowledge which could be drawn on at election time. An early test for the League came in November 1977, with a by-election at Bournemouth East. Some 25,000 ANL factsheets were distributed, mainly (according to Jim Nichol) by Benny Grower, a Jewish member of the Labour Party and a local councillor: ‘We could do posters but he [i.e. Grower] was the one running the show.’ Two east London businesses donated paper to the campaign: it showed up by the lorry-load. In the election, Kenneth McKilliam of the National Front came fifth with just 725 votes, a mere 3 per cent of the total.29
In Bournemouth and afterwards, ANL materials exposed the fascist politics of the Front. The strategy of the ANL was to focus on the most extreme expressions of racism, in order to demonstrate that racism of all sorts was wrong.
To that end, John Tyndall was shown on Anti-Nazi leaflets wearing a Nazi uniform. Tyndall and Martin Webster were exposed through the words they had used. Martin Webster’s article, ‘Why I am a Nazi’ was used against him. ‘Mein Kampf is my doctrine,’ Tyndall had said. Other ANL leaflets described the history of Nazi Germany and what life was like under fascism for women or for Jews.