Never Again

by David Renton

  The day began with a march to Victoria Park, starting at Trafalgar Square and going via the Strand, Fleet Street, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green Road and Old Ford Road. According to Dave Widgery, ‘At 2 a.m. a group of RAR stalwarts . . . began to hear crowds chanting through the downpour. And by 6 a.m. the following morning there were already 10,000 people in Trafalgar Square.’23

  The organisers avoided placing the Carnival in London’s Hyde Park, the traditional destination of left-wing protests, choosing instead Victoria Park, midway between central Hackney and London’s East End. The march came close to Brick Lane, scene of repeated clashes between left and right. The area also had a resonance with the anti-fascism of the 1930s, going back to the 1936 Battle of Cable Street. Indeed the Carnival coincided with the republication of Phil Piratin’s classic account of Cable Street, Our Flag Stays Red.24 The Front’s John Tyndall had already announced that at the next election he would contest South Hackney, a constituency that included the park. On the day, left-wing Labour MP Ian Mikardo explained why Victoria Park had been chosen: ‘In the East End, fascists have done their traditional work of dividing one group of workers from another group of workers. There are too many people in the labour movement who believe if you leave it, it will go away.’

  David Rosenberg travelled from Leeds: ‘The first [Carnival] was brilliant but the most exciting bit was the march to Victoria Park where we were reclaiming the streets of the East End, which had been swamped by fascists.’

  Chris Nicholas was gigging in the evenings as a guitarist for punk band the Need. Coming from an Anglo-Burmese family, ‘I believed that every black person I met was my comrade’. But the East London was off limits: ‘If there was any other occasion, I wouldn’t dare go to Bethnal Green, there was just too much danger.’

  Rock Against Racism produced a special issue of Temporary Hoarding. Inside was a poster of Steel Pulse, Poly Styrene and Tom Robinson with anti-Front quotes, including one from Mick Jones of the Clash: ‘I’m half Jewish so I suppose the NF will try to send half of me back to Lithuania.’ Another article asked:

  How did race hate happen? . . . When vote KKKatcher Thatcher makes speeches about the ‘threat’ of alien culture; when Labour MPs sign a parliamentary report which recommends identity cards for all black citizens; when a Ku Klux Klan gang leader can shoot his mouth off on TV – race hatred becomes respectable. Don’t let’s be fooled. Race hate divides us when we most need to stand together – against the real enemy.25

  Dave Widgery’s article for the Carnival special edition of Temporary Hoarding was directed at the MPs and the press. Its message was upbeat:

  How many of them have ever lived in the inner cities they are always deploring? If they did they might find that deplorable human beings are getting along with each other much better than reported. That Jamaicans like Guinness, Greeks listen to reggae, the Irish go to tandoor restaurants, we all eat doner kebabs and smoke as much dope as we can get our alien hands on. That people like the mix and clash of cultures, want to be citizens of the world not 8 the Railway Cuttings. They might even realise that the ‘the black problem’ is really the white problem and get to the root of that one . . . You don’t change reality’s pain by submitting to it. We’ve stopped waiting for the Good Samaritan and crossed the road ourselves. In fact, it’s pathetic that it’s taken the Front to bring us together. Tens of thousands of unknown unfamous people have worn a badge or won an argument or moved a resolution or put on a gig. Roots, radicals, rockers, reggae: We came together today. Let’s stay together.26

  At Trafalgar Square, there were giant papier-mâché models of John Tyndall and Adolf Hitler built by Peter Fluck and Roger Law, the caricaturists who would later make Spitting Image, while the Tower Hamlets Arts Project provided clowns, stilt-walkers and street theatre. There were dozens of banners, ranging from old-style union signs that took four people to carry, to home-made spray-painted sheets: ‘Karen, Kate, Anna and Jill Against Racism, Fascism, Sexism’. There was a steel band and thousands of people carried the Anti-Nazi League’s distinctive yellow lollipop placards. ‘They were so different from the usual placards you would see on demos,’ remembers Geoff Brown from Manchester. ‘At the first carnival we were giving lollipops away; by July you could sell them.’ Alongside the ANL lollipops were many more conventional Socialist Worker placards, blocks of text in Helvetica, against a background of green and purple swirls: ‘Stop the Nazis, No Immigration Controls’.27

  The march was due to depart at 1 p.m. but long before then Trafalgar Square was full, the sun was out and the marchers set off without waiting for the organisers’ approval. Mike Barton was given the job of carrying the puppet heads of Tyndall and Hitler to the front of the demonstration: ‘We had to run through the crowd.’

  Einde O’Callaghan was planning to meet friends on the Strand:

  When we got there, it seemed that tens of thousands of other people had also arranged to meet at the same corner. Eventually enough of us found each other and we unfurled our banner along with the thousands of other banners . . . We looked like a bunch of hippie desperadoes, to be quite honest – how could we wear such dreadful clothes? It was a glorious day and despite the long walk to Victoria Park I wouldn’t have missed it, one of the most enjoyable demonstrations I ever attended and the music was great, too.

  According to the report in the next Monday’s Guardian, ‘Police spokesmen said they were “astonished” at the size of the event. The tail of the march had still not left Trafalgar Square as the front reached journey’s end at Victoria Park.’28

  Syd Shelton paused as the march proceeded along Cambridge Heath Road. He knew that a local tobacconist Mrs Grier had been part of the crowds against Mosley, forty years before: ‘She stood outside her shop on Cambridge Heath Road for three hours. I saw her the next day and she said it made her incredibly proud.’29

  In Victoria Park, the organisers were willing the crowd to arrive. To enable communication with the contingent leaving Trafalgar Square, the organisers had had the idea of hiring radio telephones. But on the day they were useless. Kate Webb recalls standing at the back of the stage and swearing to herself: ‘Nobody’s coming’.

  The least known of the acts was Patrik Fitzgerald, a punk-poet who had built up a following playing in smaller venues. Seemingly nervous as he came on, he brought an acoustic guitar and was soon being heckled by the crowd: ‘I went down terribly. There were the skins down the front throwing darts at bands. They didn’t like me.’30 According to Billy Bragg, a 20-year-old member of the audience who was just in the process of forming his own band, Riff Raff, ‘I remember thinking, “You fucking idiot. All that solo-songwriter stuff is dumb.” If [Fitzgerald] had come out with a Telecaster and cranked it out he would have gone down a storm.’ Another member of the audience, Chris Nicholas, recalls hearing Fitzgerald say, as he left the stage, ‘If you hate the Nazis as much as you hate me, they’ve got no chance.’

  X-Ray Spex took the stage at 1.30 p.m., with singer Poly Styrene dressed in a tweed twinset, a black Margaret Thatcher, the effect subverted by an African headscarf and lurid coloured socks. Now, at last, the park was full.

  Red Saunders compered. He had grown enormous sideburns and wore a cap covered in badges with a ‘Mr Oligarchy’ cape (based on a character from a recent Kartoon Klowns show) and a RAR t-shirt. In photographs of the event, he looks like nothing so much as a left-wing John Belushi:31

  The first carnival took place just a day or two after my daughter was born and I was horrified that my beloved Nina wouldn’t be able to make it. The equality of the sexes, wasn’t that what we were supposed to believe in? Laurie Flynn, to his credit, made sure that all that day, whenever Nina wanted anything or needed anything, there was always someone from the SWP on hand . . .

  I saw the first coaches arrive and disembarking these dusty-eyed punks. Where are you from, mate? Liverpool. It would be big, then, I knew! We had 10,000 whistles we gave out free, thanks to Tom Robinson. We had the papier-mâché m
odels of Tyndall and Webster – we stuck them by the lions at the bottom end of Trafalgar Square. The weather was lifting. By the time people were sitting off, it had lifted.

  At Victoria Park, we had the stage. It was very amateur compared to the ones you see these days – put up by a whole bunch of comrades working through the evening . . . You could see big Rastas chatting to very straight St John’s ambulance men, all sorts of dialogues. The park began to fill up. I ran on and the first thing I shouted was ‘This isn’t Woodstock. It’s the Rock Against Racism carnival!’ and there was this huge cheer.

  Steel Pulse played their song ‘Ku Klux Klan’ complete with white Klan hoods.

  ‘This one’s for anyone who’s come down to London today,’ Joe Strummer shouted, leading the Clash into ‘London’s Burning’. The crowd began to ebb and flow and such was the pressure of the numbers against the stage that it seemed at any moment the scaffolding might give way.

  When their time was up, the Clash refused to leave. ‘I was at my wit’s end,’ Tom Robinson recalls. ‘It was my favourite band stealing my set.’32 The power was pulled out before the Clash’s Johnny Green fixed it back in. After the main Clash set, Jimmy Pursey came onto the stage, joining the band in singing ‘White Riot’.

  Chris Nicholas remembers the excitement of seeing X-Ray Spex, the Clash and above all, Tom Robinson: ‘Anyone who got up and was brave enough to sing “Glad to be Gay”, he was one of us. He was great, people loved it.’

  The bands returned for a last song, “We Have Got to Get It Together”.

  The Carnival was the lead story on that evening’s ten o’clock news.33

  Richard Atkinson was ‘flabbergasted’ by the size of the event: ‘We expected 10 or 20,000 people, which would have been excellent, a big rise in the numbers who came on the marches and the demos. But, on the day, there were tens of thousands of people there.’ John Shemeld was ‘utterly amazed at how big it was’.

  Tony Benn, one of the two Labour MPs to speak, described the Carnival in his diary:

  There was a lorry with a steel band playing and there were tens of thousands of young people. The average age was about twenty to twenty-five and there were banners and badges and punk rockers, just a tremendous gathering of people.34

  According to Rock Against Racism’s Sharon Spike:

  What was amazing was all the different people enjoying it; skinheads, punks, teds, Rastas, some old hippies, Greasers, disco-kids and loads of middle-aged people and all. There were quite a few dogs. There was such a big turn-out that people at the back felt it hard to hear what the bands on stage were singing. But it didn’t matter too much because it was all so interesting just to walk around. It is very hard to describe what it felt like. Not Love and Peace and all that rubbish. It was more than music. Feeling all together. Not being scared of one another. Making you feel strong in a good way.35

  Photographs of the crowd at the Carnival show that it had a mixed audience. The people there had their arms raised, clapping the bands or in single or double clenched-fist salutes. Perhaps the most striking single demographic was the youth of the crowd, with very few faces older than their mid-twenties. Hair was scruffy, mid-length. If punk means suspenders and thick eyeliner and messages scribbled by hand on someone’s shirt then this was not a punk crowd but an audience of Grange Hill fans.36

  The report in Socialist Worker was little short of ecstatic:

  At dawn on Sunday in Victoria Park, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism put the final touches to all their hard work. A young park-keeper watching the stage and tents and stalls going up said, ‘We’re expecting five thousand but we’re ready for ten.’ And more came. Fifty thousand stretched from Trafalgar Square to Hackney. The kids had joined the march . . . Eighty thousand thronged the park, celebrating the rise against the fascists. ‘We’re black, we’re white, we’re dynamite,’ they sang. They stood in the sun together. Eighty thousand. No trouble. Magic. The next day the National Front held a walk through London’s East End. Nearly two hundred attended. It was secret. It rained all the way. Even God has joined the Anti-Nazi League.37

  The historian Raphael Samuel describes Victoria Park as ‘the most working-class demonstration I have been on and one of the very few of my adult lifetime to have sensibly changed the climate of public opinion’.38

  John Stockwood, a teacher, had been arrested at Lewisham and sentenced to three months in jail. There he heard reports of the Carnival:

  As the news came through of the numbers assembling in Victoria Park, our wildest expectations were exceeded. Ten thousand, then twenty, then thirty, then forty thousand. Earlier one of the fascist screws had jeered through the cell door, ‘Where’s your nigger friends now then, Johnny?’ Now he was quiet. The other cons on the wing didn’t support my ideas but they knew that something was happening against the system that crippled their lives. Radios were our contact with the real world. Everyone was listening and with every new announcement they cheered. As the final numbers came through, we were told that 100,000 people, black and white, had marched from Trafalgar Square to east London. All the cons on my wing, many of them racist, cheered and banged on the pipes. It’s a memory I will take to my grave.39

  Whose Carnival?

  The decision to call the event a ‘Carnival’ raises questions about the relationship between black and white in both RAR and the Anti-Nazi League. As the Black Marxist magazine Race Today pointed out, Carnival is a Caribbean tradition:

  The Carnival festival is peculiarly Trinidadian, held annually on the Monday and Tuesday immediately preceding Lent . . . On the two days, small groups and individuals would disguise themselves and parade through the streets, mimicking their masters. The symbols of the event were the Calypsonian, the radical poet whose words would provide the event with its radical edge and the steel band that accompanied them.40

  In England, the word is associated with the Notting Hill Carnival that had been founded in London by the black American Communist Claudia Jones.41 In using the name, was the anti-fascist campaign replicating the ways in which white society has learned from black people, stealing their ideas and taming them?

  The Carnival was criticised from various sides. The first set of critics came from the British left, several of whose smaller groups responded to the campaign with a proprietorial indignity: how dare the League or Rock Against Racism launch a campaign when it could have been them? This critique could perhaps be ignored were it not for the tendency of later historians to repeat these sources in their own works.42 The criticism from the nano-left was, in any event, more than capably answered at the time by such writers as Ian Walker of the Labour left Leveller magazine:

  ‘No politics at Carnival’ was the puke-making headline in Newsline, daily organ of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Where were they looking for the politics? If they didn’t see it in any of the bands or the 80,000 people, they could have tried looking in one of the dustbins where leaflets distributed by the Workers’ Socialist League were there for takers. This leaflet denounced the Anti-Nazi League, denounced Peter Hain (who’s he anyway?) and denounced the petty bourgeois reformism which had diseased the enterprise. The WSL issued a call for ‘workers’ defence squads’ to replace the ANL. To be organised by who? The massed ranks of the WSL? Wakey, wakey.

  Walker’s article explains why punks loved the Carnival. They were in charge. ‘Victoria Park,’ it was titled, ‘What did you do there? We got high. We touched the sky.’43

  A second source of critique came from individuals who were early enthusiasts for the anti-fascist campaign but, as the Front went into decline, chose to move away from it. In 1976 or 1977, they accepted that the Front was indeed (as it saw itself) the ‘spearhead’ of a broader right-wing attack. Where the Front was, black people suffered. Even by the time of the Carnival, this was no longer as clear. The Front was concentrating on elections. Meanwhile, an increasing number of activists were taking up campaigns to protect families from deportation, mobilising against pol
ice attacks and so on. There were a whole generation of anti-racists who went from an ‘anti-fascist’ perspective to an ‘anti-racist’ one as the 1970s wore on.44

  The third and most important source of critique was a number of black-led campaigns. In the mid- to late-1970s, Tariq Mehmood was a member of IS in Bradford. He describes being invited to address a meeting on the politics of racism, a subject he knew from day-to-day experience, but which he lacked the vocabulary to explain:

  I must have been one of the few non-whites in Bradford in the organisation . . . I just had no idea how to articulate what racism was, I knew how to fight it because I didn’t have a choice, I couldn’t articulate the theoretical concepts.45

  In Mehmood’s autobiographical novel, Hand on the Sun, the gap between black and white socialists is expressed in the figure of Hussain who joins IS. Over time, Hussain finds their discussions patronising. Hussain realises that he identifies more with his Asian friends than with the white left. Hussain’s frustrations are brought out in friendship with another youngster, Jalib, who has none of his political contacts but responds more easily to events:

  Whenever Hussain talked to people, he always talked about politics and about struggles that were taking place in various parts of the world. He felt that Jalib, unlike himself, did not gloss over the reality of black people’s lives with empty phrases.

  In the novel, a breakaway group is established for Asian socialists, ‘Somage’, and Hussain joins that instead.46

  This incident is hardly fictional. There was a split from IS. The new group published a paper, Samaj, later Samaj in’ a Babylon. Other papers formed by Black activists who left majority-white socialist groups included Black Struggle and Mukti. A Black Socialist Alliance briefly brought these groups together.47