by David Renton
In a short story collection, East End at Your Feet, written by Farrukh Dhondy of the Race Today Collective, the same theme of failed solidarity informs the story ‘KBW’, narrated by a teenage boy whose friend Tahir Habib is repeatedly confronted by racists. KBW stands for Keep Britain White, the graffiti daubed on Tahir’s parents’ front door. At the book’s conclusion, a gang of twenty white youths attack the Habibs’ home. The narrator’s father, a white radical, has always promised the Habibs his support but in the moment of their need he refuses to help, with his wife shouting, ‘Why don’t you help him? What kind of bloody Communist are you?’48
The most sustained criticism of the Anti-Nazi League can be found in Paul Gilroy’s book, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Gilroy argues that the Anti-Nazi League was a retreat from the earlier politics of Rock Against Racism. For Gilroy, the 1976 or 1977-era incarnation of RAR was a transgressive space which took the radical ideas of reggae and taught them to white punks, who responded by mocking the Union Jack and royalty. Rock Against Racism was, in his account, rare and precious and of unique value: ‘Something like a radical populism that was tied to and perhaps, for a moment, even captured the unruly, demotic momentum of opposition.’49
The ANL, Gilroy argues, was different from RAR. It was happy to compromise with nationalism. In labelling the Front as ‘Nazis’, it portrayed them as foreigners, suggesting that racism could be defeated by drawing on Britain’s imperial history:
The ANL deliberately sought to summon and manipulate a form of nationalism and patriotism as part of its broad anti-fascist drive . . . This may have led to the electoral defeat of the NF, British Movement and their allies [but the League’s victory] was achieved ironically by reviving the very elements of nationalism and xenophobia which had seen Britannia through the darkest hours of the Second World War.50
While Gilroy writes that the ANL relied on the mythology of the benign Second-World-War ‘Britain’s darkest hour’, such language is hard to find anywhere in the Anti-Nazi League’s publications. League materials did call the Front ‘Britain’s new Nazis’ and reproduced images of the 1930s, such as German soldiers carrying out the Holocaust, but the references in League material to the heroes of the Second World War, the positive descriptions of ‘Britannia’, are not there. The League did use Nazi Germany as a negative example of why fascism should be fought, invoking the memory of the Holocaust as the result of untrammelled fascism, but the League’s publications did not maintain that the alternative was a return to Britain’s wartime spirit.
Even among local ANL leaflets, which were written in different areas by members of the Labour Party, the Communist Party,51 or the SWP, and would reflect the politics of their author, you do not find this language. Far more common is the sort of argument that you find in, for example, ANL leaflets in Hornsey, warning readers about institutional racism, the history of slavery and the exploitation by Britain of her Empire. ‘The reason’, the NF can grow, the authors wrote, ‘is because it is a racist party and we live in a society where racism is firmly entrenched’.52 The language was often earnest or pedestrian, but it was hostile to institutional racism.
Of course, a message does not need to be explicit for it to be felt. Some of what Gilroy is describing is not the formal content of leaflets, but the subtle rearrangements that took place in early 1978 as RAR joined up with the ANL: the choice of speakers, the emphasis on certain campaigning priorities over others.
A recurring trait of 1970s anti-fascism was its insistence on reproducing photographs of John Tyndall from the early 1960s. For Gilroy, this is clear evidence of the League falling into the trap of opposing benign British patriotism to the foreign Nazism of the Front: ‘Pictures of the NF leaders wearing Nazi uniforms was produced as the final proof that their Britishness was in doubt.’53
A different assessment of this manoeuvre emerges, however, if you focus on the tactics’ success or otherwise among its target: the right. Numerous Front sources point to the morale-sapping consequence of their public association with fascism. Previous chapters have given examples of National Front supporters who were ashamed of the accusation of Nazism: John Bean suffering nightmares in memory of the prank he had played in belittling the Holocaust, articles in Spearhead in 1974 complaining about the libellous reproduction of Tyndall in uniform, Front defectors who in 1977 gave Tyndall’s photograph as their reason for leaving.
By 1978, the factions within the National Front were again at war and one theme of the conflict was the vulnerability of Tyndall to accusations of Nazism. Critics of the leadership blamed ‘Martin Webster and John Tyndall [and] their antics . . . in the days before they joined the National Front’. In principle, Martin Webster or John Tyndall should have sued for libel, except that
In their case it turns out that some of what the media prints is literally true – they did play the fool in the days when they should have been taking their British nationalist politics seriously – and neither they, nor anyone else for that matter, can sue anyone or any institution if what is said or written is literally true . . . A smear is only useful if it can be made to stick and unfortunately for the Party smears can be made to stick to Martin Webster and John Tyndall.54
It is possible to imagine a far-right party whose members and voters are proud and loyal fascists (say, the Italian fascists in the early 1920s). To tell members of such a group ‘But you are all fascists’ would be a pointless tactic. Of course we are, they would answer, that’s what we call ourselves. It is also possible to conceive of a far-right party whose members all see themselves as anti-fascist (think a pub of EDL members in the late 2000s singing about blowing up German bombers). To say to the supporters of such an organisation ‘But you are all fascists’ would be equally silly. The allegation would seem baseless to them and they would laugh it off. The Front was in neither of these positions. Its members were neither secure in their fascism, nor were they beyond it. They behaved as if their fascism was a source of ongoing shame to them. It was their incomplete disavowal of fascism which rendered them vulnerable to their opponent’s accusations that they were simply a party of Nazis.
In other words, it was not the sham patriotism of seeing Tyndall in uniform which disturbed the Front, it was the allegation of fascism – an ideology which many NF supporters wanted to junk without having anything coherent to offer in its place.
Indeed, there was a dual purpose to the accusation that the Front were ‘Nazis’, an allegation aimed as much at onlooking voters as it was at the Front themselves. Dennis Potter’s television play, Brimstone and Treacle (1978), employs a similar method albeit in a different, literary, form. A suburban family, Mr and Mrs Bates, are visited by a stranger, Martin, who claims to have known their daughter. The husband Tom Bates (played by Denholm Elliott) dwells longingly on the England he used to know, the England he remembers as a younger man. Bates objects to the ubiquity of drugs, pornography and admits to having recently joined the Front. Martin responds by suggesting, almost innocently, that blacks should be placed in special camps. Mrs Bates answers, ‘like Butlins’. Martin agrees before continuing:
Millions. Rounded up from their stinking slums and overcrowded ghettos. Driven into big holding camps, men, women, piccaninnies . . . You’ll see England like it used to be again, clean and white. They won’t want to go . . . They’ll fight, so we shall have to shoot them and CS gas them and smash down their doors . . . Think of all the hate we’ll feel when they start killing us back. Think of all the violence! Think of the de-gra-dat-ion and in the end, in the end, the riots and the shooting and the black corpses . . . .
Bates begs Martin to stop, promising to leave the Front. Uncomfortable, confronted by the racist end-point, he is compelled to rethink what he believes.55 Not in literature but in life, this is how the League’s message was intended to work.
Gilroy’s key criticism is of omission. For a RAR activist in 1976 or 1977, he suggests, the social movement was a campaign not just against the Front but ag
ainst racism in its totality. By the time of the 1978 Carnival, he argues, RAR functioned as the musical wing of the Anti-Nazi League. The ANL was in this account a movement of the old, of Communists, of trade union general secretaries, of those who looked back with nostalgia on 1939–1945. It was a campaign also of the SWP which, while younger than these other parties, was, Gilroy insists, no less bureaucratic and no more capable of a lasting commitment to anti-racism.56 Given the ANL’s sharp focus on fascism, by allying with it, was RAR giving up its hostility to state racism?
Younger activists tended to be more forgiving. Gurinder Chadha had been born in Nairobi and had come with her family to Britain only to encounter the racial hostility directed at Kenyan Asians. A decade later, she had just turned age 18 at the time of the first Carnival and when she had told her parents she wanted to attend, they warned that it would be attacked by the Front. She pretended that she was going shopping in central London. Arriving at Victoria Park, she saw the Clash doing their sound check but no crowds, nothing. Convinced that the event had been a flop, she was preparing to leave when from outside the park came a strange, high-pitched buzz, getting successively louder. Finding an old box to stand on, she saw
[h]undreds and hundreds of people marching, side by side in a display of exuberance, defiance and most important victory . . . marching, chanting to help me and my family find our place in our adopted homeland . . . I had found my tribe, my kindred clan.57
John Siblon was also an Asian teenager, living with his family in a white area in Eltham. Through the 1970s, John recalls, he was routinely attacked at school, called names and beaten. The growth of the Front encouraged an atmosphere of hatred: ‘The day after one of their broadcasts, I decided to bicycle to school. Even then I could hear them calling me names.’ Siblon describes hearing about Lewisham on the news: ‘It was the first time we heard of people fighting back.’ He later became an active supporter of both the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism: ‘I didn’t understand it all at the time but we needed something and something happened.’
There were other activists beside Paul Gilroy who believed that something precious was being lost. Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson is another long-time supporter of RAR who began to disengage from the campaign in 1978. In interviews since then, he has complained that ‘sections of the white left in this country were trying to exploit the conditions that blacks found themselves in and trying to win us over to their various ideological positions. They saw us as victims.’58
RAR’s Dave Widgery welcomed Gilroy’s critique. After the first Carnival and in a letter to the journal Radical America, he too warned that anti-fascism could not be a substitute for anti-racism:
Racism in Britain is much more widespread than the present fascist base and represents a species of thwarted working class reformism. To tackle this physical blockade of the organised fascists is necessary but insufficient and can consume far too much of the revolutionary left’s still small resources.’59
Ten years later, on reading Gilroy’s book, he insisted that his fellow activist had been correct to point out ‘The obvious limitations of a campaign against the growth of the National Front rather than racism as a whole’.60
Storming sexism
Three weeks after the Carnival, RAR supporters organised a concert at Brighton Polytechnic ending with a set by the Fabulous Poodles, who were later to play in the US and even open for the Ramones. The Poodles opened with their song ‘Convent Girls’, about a grown man driving his car to follow underage girls: ‘You look so cute in your short white socks. I follow you for blocks and blocks . . . The shadow in my mirror screams, am I too old to hold these dreams?’ A minority of the audience responded with visible dismay, heckling the band, speaking to the organisers to ask them to make the band stop, trying to pull out the band’s equipment or knock over their microphone. Rather than respond sympathetically to their critics, the band followed it with another similar number, ‘Tit Photographer’s Blues’, whose chorus went, ‘I got the Tit, Tit, Tit Photographer’s Blues’. Challenged by the women in the audience, the Poodles responded, ‘You’re too narrow, baby.’ ‘They called us Killjoys, Mary Whitehouses,’ recalls Heather de Lyon, one of the band’s principal critics and a drummer for local anti-racist, anti-sexist punk band Devil’s Dykes.
In the forty years since, the song ‘Tit Photographer’s Blues’ has not aged well. No doubt intended to be satirical, it portrays the relationship between photographer and subject from the perspective of the photographer. The cameraman suffers ‘the blues’, in that he photographs women and is aroused by them only to suffer humiliation in that they refuse to sleep with him. But the situation is seen from his perspective, not theirs; it is a commercial relationship with nothing unusual about it.
Seven of the women who were at the Brighton Poly concert decided to take the matter up with RAR in London and wrote a letter to complaining about having been patronised:
It would have been great if our complaints that night had been heard and people had been curious to discover what were our objections. But it seemed that politics are not appropriate for Saturday nights . . . What we learnt is that a concert cannot be a ‘political’ concert just by hanging a banner over the stage.61
The members of the Rock Against Racism committee were not at the Brighton gig, so all that the likes of Saunders, Webb, or Widgery had to go on was the audience’s response to the band. There must have been voices within the collective urging caution. Even Heather de Lyon and the other authors of the letter of complaint acknowledged that the songs had been meant as a joke.62 But the editors of Temporary Hoarding insisted on publishing the letter of complaint, together with an apology:
We hope that all the bands who do gigs for RAR will take note of this letter. RAR is very sorry that the Fabulous Poodles’ set was so offensive to women it is not enough to make a stand against one form of repression – the exploitation of blacks – if they are going to contribute to another – the degradation of women.63
In isolation, the apology comes over as superficial. What is much more impressive is the extent, after this gig, that Rock Against Racism took on board the criticisms the women in the audience had made and set out to change its relationship with its bands. RAR drafted a performer’s contract.64 It insisted that bands were expected to be make known their anti-racism, e.g. by wearing RAR badges. In addition:
Although we are called Rock Against Racism we support liberation from other forms of oppression (e.g. sexism, anti-Semitism, fascism, Irish oppression,[65] etc). We neither expect nor tolerate any group which supports such oppression during gigs. If they do, we reserve the right to stop groups from playing.
Lucy Whitman (Lucy Toothpaste), a writer for Temporary Hoarding and a member of the magazine’s editorial committee, helped to set up a RAR sister-organisation, Rock Against Sexism and a new fanzine for RAS, Drastic Measures. The main article of Drastic Measures 1 was titled, ‘Love sex, hate sexism’:
Women in music are under constant pressure from the record companies to flaunt their bodies, both in performance and in adverts, in order to sell more records. If they succumb – and after all they have got a living to earn – hypocritical rags like the NME who think it’s hip to pay lip-service to feminism, while making sure there’s a neat snap of Debbie Harry in every edition, accuse them of exploiting their sexuality.66
In an article entitled ‘Sex vs fascism’, published in Temporary Hoarding 7, Lucy Toothpaste drew on the work of Wilhelm Reich, the radical anti-fascist psychologist, and argued that his diagnosis of authoritarian misogyny could be applied equally well to contemporary Britain::
In case all that lot seems a bit far-fetched to you, we couldn’t resist giving you some living proof of the connection between authoritarianism in the home and in the state. ‘Love and discipline went together. My father sometimes took his pit belt off and leathered me. I shed tears but I knew he was right and I was wrong.’ That’s what James Anderton said in an interview in the Observer in F
ebruary. It was a belief that right and wrong were as distinct as black and white that reinforced his one and only ambition ‘to be a policeman and if possible the biggest policeman of all’.
By the end of the 1970s, Anderton’s goal had been achieved, as Lucy Toothpaste insisted: ‘Well, he grew up to be a policeman alright, the chief constable of Greater Manchester to be exact, the second most powerful cop in the country.’67
Among its supporters, Rock Against Sexism soon counted Carol Grimes, the Mekons, Gang of Four, Crass, Tom Robinson, Pam Nestor, Oxy and the Morons, Spurts, Tronics, Jam Today, the Raincoats and the Resisters. RAS groups were established in Edinburgh, south east London and York. A typical Drastic Measures centre-page spread showed photographs of men in official uniforms (morning dress, business suits and bowler hats). Against a photograph of a chief constable was the message, ‘Deliciously sexy uniform with seductive side-slits in pure dark cotton ravishingly adorned with glittering silver sequins. Matching overcoat and belt tying in front. Prices start from £230. Also available in pink.’68
Over the following weeks and months, Rock Against Racism supported Rock Against Sexism. At RAR conferences, a portion of the time was devoted to publicising RAS.69 A number of local Rock Against Racism groups booked RAS events, the south east London RAR group becoming a Rock Against Sexism collective. Red Saunders leant his studio to RAS to make banners. Dave Widgery attended RAS events. When Rock Against Sexism needed security, they went to RAR for support.
Nazi funk
While RAR was having to deal with these issues, one sign of the success of the anti-fascist campaign was the coverage increasingly given to it in the Front’s press. Bulldog, the Front’s youth paper, explained to its readers that ‘The reason why the communists hate anyone who loves Britain, including the National Front, is simply because they are essentially NOT British.’ Another article in the same magazine reported that, ‘a mere 500 degenerates’ attended a Rock Against Racism carnival in Harwich. The organisers of the event claimed four times as many. Whichever figure was right, it was still the biggest political event the town had ever seen.70