by David Renton
The NF leadership protested that they were being criticised for things they had written a decade or more before. Martin Webster had long complained about the ‘printing and distribution of criminally libellous “smear” leaflets attacking the National Front’, warning that if the police failed to prosecute, ‘the National Front will make such arrangements as circumstances indicate are necessary to secure its survival in what will have proved to be an unfree, undemocratic, unfair and violent society’.30
An anonymous Front defector explained to the East End local press in 1977 that the first time she began to reconsider her membership was ‘when she saw a picture of the NF’s leader John Tyndall wearing jackboots and sporting a swastika. “I won’t stand for any of this ‘Zieg Heil’ nonsense,” she said.’31
Workers against the Nazis
During its first year, the Anti-Nazi League won the endorsement of a large number of trade unions. Twenty national union executives voted to back the alliance. Six hundred workplace organisations affiliated to the League. Among them were ANL groups of workers in large factories such as British Leyland’s Longbridge plant and Ford at Dagenham, as well as Yorkshire miners, civil servants and local government workers. Bill Keys, general secretary of the print union SOGAT, addressed League rallies in northern England as well as marches in London. There were also ANL groups set up for printworkers on Fleet Street and for technicians and TV journalists.
In Manchester, Larry Aitken and other members of the Fire Brigades’ Union from New Mills Fire Station helped to raise funds for the campaign. Elsewhere, the technicians’ union ACTT worked with the Anti-Nazis in arguing that the National Front’s TV broadcasts should be banned. One journalist, Francis Wheen, rang Alan Sapper, general secretary of the ACTT, and asked him whether silencing the Front would prove counter-productive. ‘Democracy is threatened,’ Sapper replied. ‘We can discuss democracy until the concentration camps come in.’32
Rail Against the Nazis included members of the rail unions RMT, ASLEF and TSSA, with supporters in London and the North West. Their banner showed a high-speed train knocking over a gang of Nazis. Members of King’s Cross ASLEF played a leading role. King’s Cross had not always had a reputation as a left-wing depot. In recent years, NF supporters had worked there. But now, the depot was younger and more mixed. One member of the ASLEF branch, Leno Carraro, was arrested at Lewisham in 1977. The branch voted to pay his fine for him.33
Rail Against the Nazis supporters in the North West included Paul Salveson, a member of the Labour Party and Declan O’Neill, a long-standing Irish socialist, then working in a booking office on the Altrincham line: ‘We organised fringe meetings at union conferences and tried to isolate self-declared Nazis in the union.’
John Robson was an ASLEF activist on the London Underground. He had been in his depot for six months and in all that time the branch had not succeeded in holding a single quorate meeting: ‘We never had more than six.’ One or two of the train drivers were seen wearing racist badges: ‘One day, I put up a poster saying that at the next meeting we would affiliate to the ANL. About fifty people came and there was a big row but we affiliated. After that the branch never looked back.’
Mike Beaken was an unemployed engineer. He worked briefly as a full-time organiser for the ANL in Preston and then in Nottingham. In Preston, the firefighters’ union and the postal workers’ union backed the League, as did the joint shop stewards’ committee at Leyland Motors. The convenor at Leyland’s, Len Brindle, backed the League. In Nottingham, the League also received support from the white-collar union ASTMS and the teachers’ union.
In Manchester, members of the Communist Party ran the engineering union. Consequently, Communist support was essential if a mass movement was to be built. The Trades Council and the divisional council of the engineers’ union AEU both passed resolutions of support. The Manchester Teachers’ Association, white-collar workers in ASTMS’s Central Manchester branch and nurses in COHSE at Ladywell Hospital also gave their backing to the League, as did the rail workers’ NUR union.
John Walker was then an ‘ageing hippie’ living in the south of the city:
I remember we did one cleaning of paint from buildings. The Nazis had been putting up slogans for some time . . . One local factory, there were about twenty people inside. We came in and spoke to the local steward. He was known locally as a strong Communist. He said, that was fine, he’d already been trying to get management to paint it out. The union provided a ladder. Several workers took badges. They all supported what we were doing.
Under the pressure of the anti-fascist campaign, even some of the Front’s former strongholds began to weaken. Mark Dolan was working as a postman from the North Delivery Office in Islington:
When I started, the NF ran the branch committee. They used to collect openly on the shop-floor. The collections paid the deposit so that the NF could stand in elections . . . One day, soon after I started, I was in the toilets. This old guy came in and asked me for 50p for the NF. I’d come from a school in Hackney, it was black, Asian, Greek, Turkish. I thought he was joking, he was having a laugh. He cornered me.
Dolan pushed the older man back. In the weeks after this confrontation he could see the balance of power change: ‘Outside affected the inside. The Anti-Nazi League, the marches, Rock Against Racism, it had its weight in the workplace. Within a couple of years, the NF had gone altogether.’
Perhaps the most striking example of Anti-Nazi League success came on the docks. Early on, socialist dockers set themselves the task of undoing the defeat they had suffered in 1968, when they had marched in support of Enoch Powell’s racist ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The port of London shop stewards’ committee voted to affiliate to the League. Numerous left-wing dockers contributed to this shift, including Bob Light, Eddie Prevost and Micky Fenn.
Fenn, who was for several years a key figure in defending RAR gigs and other left-wing events, is the subject of a story told by Mike Barton:
There was one guy Johnny, a lightweight boxer. His brother Micky [Fenn] was an anti-fascist docker. One day, Johnny came on a demo, with his face half covered in bandages. There was a skinhead watching him, all the time. Finally the skinhead shouts, ‘It’s you!’ Maybe they’d fought together in the ring. ‘You race traitor!’ So Johnny starts pulling his arms out and back, as if he was wearing braces. What he meant was ‘Me, sir? A race traitor? No, sir. I’m Irish.’ That was important. The Nazi could only think in terms of race and Jimmy turned it on its head.
University, schools, football
Dozens of Anti-Nazi League groups were set up, including Aardvarks Against the Nazis, Skateboarders Against the Nazis, Vegetarians Against the Nazis and more.34 Patrons of a pub in Rusholme, Manchester, organised their own group, The Albert Against the Nazis, with a badge and banner. Many of these groups were little more than a badge, while others met regularly and had a periphery of supporters. Some of the most visible were groups for students and football fans.
Eighteen colleges or university students unions affiliated to the League: Bedford College, Bradford University, Bristol University, Ealing College of Higher Education, Edge Hill College, Essex University, Exeter University, Liverpool Polytechnic, Loughborough University, Manchester Polytechnic, Newman College, St Peter’s College in Oxford, Central London Polytechnic, the Polytechnic of Wales, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of Surrey, Sussex University and Teesside Poly. Twelve national student societies also affiliated, including the Union of Jewish Students,35 and the national bodies for Labour and Liberal students.
David Rosenberg was a member of Leeds Students Union: ‘I worked on the ANL stall which we put on frequently in the Union building. Our main job was to sell badges and promote the ANL literature. Students were generally very receptive.’ Students from Leeds University helped to leaflet Leeds United’s ground, Elland Road.
Einde O’Callaghan, a veteran of the Lewisham protest, was on the executive of the City University Union So
ciety:
We won affiliation of CUUS to the ANL right from the beginning, despite opposition from some of the Broad Left members of the executive and some leading members of the Jewish Society – they weren’t happy about the SWP’s anti-Zionist position.
City was seen as an apolitical university:
It was a predominantly a technological university with a large number of traditionally apolitical engineers and scientists and a much smaller number of social scientists who tended to be more progressive. There was little overt hostility, except from the real right-wing Tories, who were dyed-in-the-wool racists anyway.
John Diamond was studying in Manchester. ‘At one meeting of the Poly branch of the Anti-Nazi League, members of the International Marxist Group showed up.’ In a shift from their group’s previous positions, the IMG supporters were critical of the Anti-Nazi League, insisting that the group was wrong in principle to emphasise anti-fascism at the expense of anti-racism:
The debate was had. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion. It was important to understand why the Anti-Nazi League and not something broader. There is a need to oppose all forms of racism but when the far-right are organising you must do something about that.
Aware of these manoeuvres, the Front made some efforts of its own to recruit students, with supporters at Manchester University publishing two single-page copies of a leaflet, ‘Phoenix: Voice of the Anti-Communist Student’.36
The Front had noticeably more success among school students. Joe Pearce established a youth paper, Bulldog. Youth NF leaflets included one titled, ‘How to Spot a Red Teacher’. The press ran a series of articles about his activities.37
School Kids Against the Nazis (SKAN) was formed to counter Pearce’s efforts. Its magazine claimed a sale of 8,000 copies per issue, with readers’ groups in Sheffield, Enfield, Reading, Canterbury, Brighton and High Wycombe.38 Its letters included one from Cathy, a 15-year-old former NF supporter from Derby:
I do not like their violent ways of dealing with people and their rules set down. I wouldn’t like to see everyone in uniform or going into the army upon leaving school. I like people who like to be individuals, in clothes and mind. If everyone followed the NF Nazis we would be like cabbages, doing everything the same as everyone else . . . .39
The NME ran a piece about School Kids Against the Nazis, reporting on a victory when six supporters of the National Front had tried to hold a meeting at Barton Peveril College in Hampshire and fifty other students had occupied the room, covering it in Anti-Nazi stickers and preventing the meeting from going ahead. The following month, Women’s Voice conducted a series of interviews with Josie, Karen and Doreen, three school students who had set up a SKAN group in Walthamstow: ‘Our school may not have different sexes in it, but we do have different races and we all got along well together. There was no way the Front were going to destroy that.’40
The National Front had long been targeting football supporters. ‘I think there’s a lot you can do with soccer hooligans,’ Martin Webster told BBC’s Panorama. ‘People do like to identify: they do like to associate themselves with something which is big and glorious and noble with which they, the little individual, can associate themselves and feel proud that they somehow belong.’41
John Berry of the Leveller described attending Spurs home matches and hearing chants of ‘TYN-DALL . . . TYN-DALL’ – ‘a regular feature on Saturday afternoons’. Berry interviewed Martin, a young supporter of the National Front:
Martin H is twenty-one. Half of that time has been spent in children’s homes, detention centres, community school and Borstal. His parents are divorced. He never went to school except when he was in care and [is] barely able to read. Most of the time he reads war comics in which gigantic and heroic British army sergeants single-handedly decimate battalions of Huns to whom they frequently refer as ‘Nazi scum’ . . . In his own words Martin joined [the NF] because ‘the Front stands up for English people. The socialists want more niggers and Pakis here because they vote for them. We kick the fuck out of the wogs. The reds are always stirring up trouble. Someone’s got to stop them.’42
Spurs was also home to the first Football Fans Against the Nazis group, Spurs Against the Nazis (SAN). Richard Atkinson recalls seeing a group of Front supporters already leafleting outside White Hart Lane when the first anti-fascist leafleters arrived: ‘There were a lot more of them . . . We had all these old Jewish men walk up to us and say, “You’re doing a really good job, lads” and then walk off.’ Worrying as it was to be left alone, ‘We then saw a crowd of about fifty teenagers, quite young, running towards us. We were really scared. But they ran right past us, charged into the National Front lot and kicked them off their pitch. After that, it was fine.’43
Spurs Against the Nazis’ first public meeting was attended by sixty people. The Hornsey Journal supported the campaign, even when Spurs’ directors attempted to sue the group for using Spurs’ symbols on the leaflets. Spurs Against the Nazis celebrated the arrival of Oswaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa (‘You’re Welcome Here’) as a victory against immigration control. The group organised a five-a-side football competition which involved some forty-four teams, including one from the band Aswad and which was won by a team of drivers and conductors from Tottenham bus garage, with the comedians Peter Cook and Bill Oddie of the Goodies refereeing.44
At Sheffield Wednesday, anti-fascists painted out NF graffiti which was left for a season beside the players’ entrance. Football Fans Against the Nazis (FFAN) groups were formed at around twenty further clubs including West Bromwich Albion, Swansea, Oxford, Barnsley, Coventry, Everton, Norwich and Arsenal.
Campaign – or front?
The growth of the Anti-Nazi League was not universally welcomed, even on the left. After all, the League had begun as a cautious alliance between the Labour Party and the SWP. Even after the League had been launched, these two parties still had different politics and different approaches to confronting the NF. In the aftermath of Lewisham, Labour’s Home Secretary Mervyn Rees had criticised both the Front and the SWP as ‘extremist political factions . . . intent on violence’, and hinted at a more robust use of the Public Order Act to ban Front demonstrations. Over the subsequent months, the focus of mainstream Labour opinion was on persuading the Home Secretary to use his powers to prohibit Front’s marches, with Labour MPs Norman Atkinson, Ian Mikardo and Joan Lestor among the most insistent advocates of a ban.45
The continued distrust of the SWP expressed itself in the decision of Joan Lestor, Labour MP and former editor of Searchlight, to launch a Joint Committee Against Racialism (JCAR) in December 1977.46 JCAR also attracted support from the Liberal Party, the British Council of Churches. and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Stan Taylor described JCAR as an ‘alternative to the ANL for moderates’.47
The presence of the pro-Palestinian SWP within the Anti-Nazi League was a particular source of tension with the Board of Deputies. Writing in The Times, William Frankel described the Board’s hostility towards the League’s demonstrations, ‘which, they say, [lead] to “punch-ups” and to the publicity on which the National Front thrives’.48 According to Leveller magazine:
Officially non-partisan, the Board is inherently conservative – even if only with a small c – and strongly Zionist. The formulation ‘Zionism equals racism’ has led to campaigns on some campuses which, Board leaders believe, has spilled over into anti-Semitism. On top of that the belief of the left that racism is built into capitalism this has meant a general political stance unacceptable to many of the Board’s supporters in the Jewish community. Both sides in that particular row have, after much anguished discussion, agreed to peaceful co-existence. SWP supporters, like ANL full-timer Paul Holborow, play down their anti-Zionism in ANL public meetings while Jacob Gerwitz, director of the Board’s Defence and Group Relations department says: ‘We have a sincere feeling that the public argument wasn’t very healthy. We accept that they are there to fight the Nazis. Our sole worry is the SWP control.’49<
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The New Statesman magazine, a voice of the Labour left since the 1930s, ran a front page article, ‘In defence of the Anti-Nazis’:
[The Anti-Nazi League’s] National Secretary, Paul Holborrow [sic], is a member of the SWP. But most of the other members of the steering committee, Peter Hain, Neil Kinnock, MP, Audrey Wise, MP, Ernie Roberts et al. are scarcely Trots, whatever else they may be. Suppose that Mr Holborrow and his SWP friends were, with manipulative cunning, to try and turn the ANL away from its simple anti-racialist platform and towards some sinister purpose of their own – nationalising the mustard-factories perhaps or substituting Vanessa Redgrave for the Queen – is it really plausible that they should succeed?
‘It is a long time’, the magazine concluded, ‘since the Comintern days when “fronts” really were marched and counter-marched with clockwork precision.’50
Notes
1 D. Widgery, Beating Time: Riot ’n’ Race ’n’ Rock and Roll (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), p. 64; T. Parsons and J. Burchill, ‘Dedicated followers of fascism’, New Musical Express, 20 August 1978; T. Picton, ‘What the papers said’, Camerawork, Lewisham, p. 7; T. Ali, ‘The lessons of Lewisham’, Socialist Challenge, 1 September 1977; The Times, 15 August 1977. Anti-fascists also received a sympathetic treatment in T. Gopsill and S. Haywood, ‘Law without order’, Time Out, 19–25 August 1978, and ‘Our day of shame’, Hornsey Journal, 19 August 1977.
2 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 50.