by David Renton
In 1977 and 1978, the NF attempted to make recruits at the F-Club in Leeds, where one young fascist Eddy Morrison produced his own fanzine, Punk Front and NF supporters attacked gigs by the Mekons and Gang of Four.71 Morrison wrote to Sounds: ‘What really should be organised is a Rock for Racism concert, with all-white bands, all-white music’.72 The fascists found it easier to disrupt left-wing events than organise meetings of their own. Paul Furness was the main organiser for Leeds Rock Against Racism:
My parents’ house had a KKK slogan painted outside (we know where you live of course) and a Young Communist Party . . . meeting was savagely attacked. I had to take off my badges and alter my bus routes into town to avoid where Nazis lived but still managed to get beaten up by them.73
In his memoirs, Joe Pearce, the founder of Young National Front, concedes a surprising degree of admiration for the anti-fascist campaign:
Rock Against Racism was a huge success. In early 1978, an estimated 100,000 people marched the six miles from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park in London’s East End in an event jointly organised by Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. Many of the biggest punk bands played in the free festival which followed. In an act of defiant opposition, I was among a group of Young National Front activists who heckled the march as it wended its way past the Bladebone [sic] pub . . . Nonetheless, the huge size of this anti-racist demonstration illustrated the power of rock music to lure tens of thousands of youngsters to active participation in the political struggle.74
In April 1978, Pearce watched the procession to the Victoria Park Carnival from the Blade Bone pub at 185 Bethnal Green Road, where he and his friends, looking rather less than cheerful, were spotted by Dave Widgery:
There were a few Fronters with their mates, the sort of beer-gut and Page Three brigade who have an I love virgins sticker in the back of their off-brown resprayed Rover saloon and two kids whom they hit. They had come for a good laugh at the do-gooders. Three hours and 100,000 demonstrators later, the smiles were well and truly wiped off their faces.75
Despite such setbacks, Pearce was not yet ready to admit defeat. Pearce’s brother Stevo was a young punk on the fringes of the music scene and later a significant manager and promoter who played an important part in the early history of bands including Soft Cell, The The and Depeche Mode. Pearce attempted to copy him, and indeed RAR, by setting up Rock Against Communism (RAC), to ‘fight back against the left-wingers and anti-British traitors in the music press’.76 Over the following months, Pearce recruited around half a dozen racist bands, including Damaged, White Boss, Phase One, Beyond the Implod and the Raw Boys.
Carnival two
The first Rock Against Racism carnival was followed by local events in many areas. Five thousand attended the next in Cardiff, 8,000 took part in an event in Edinburgh77 and 5,000 went to RAR’s Southampton carnival. It was also in the aftermath of the first Carnival that the Communist Party finally gave its official support to the Anti-Nazi League, hushing in retrospect its criticism of the Socialist Workers Party’s militant tactics at Lewisham.78 The largest Carnival outside London saw Manchester’s 35,000-strong event in July 1978.
Half a dozen flatbed trucks led off an anti-fascist march from the middle of Manchester to Hulme and Moss Side. The Mekons and the Gang of Four played. Some 15,000 people were on the march with another 25,000 joining once the Carnival began, to hear Steel Pulse, China Street and a newly revitalised Buzzcocks. The New Manchester Review ran interviews with local activists and with reggae band Steel Pulse: ‘The umbrella of the Anti-Nazi League thus embraces an almost unheard of cross-section; from the Church to the Communist Party, trade unions to the Tories, an alliance that is heart-warming in its camaraderie.’79
‘After the Carnival,’ John Walker remembers, ‘things were much easier. Some of the NF’s periphery went to the Carnival. We could see them talking to people, dancing. After the summer of 1978 they were not a threat.’ Geoff Brown agrees, ‘At the Carnival, there were kids from every single school in Manchester. These kids would then go back into the school and say, “Where were you?” to the local Nazi.’
The May 1978 local elections were a considerable setback for the National Front, which secured disappointing votes in areas of previous strength, including Bradford and east London. Christopher Husbands notes that in the 1978 London Borough council elections, the Front fell sharply compared to the party’s success in the same areas a year before. The Front continued to obtain relatively high votes in its heartlands; however, these had narrowed to a relatively small area of Hackney South and Tower Hamlets: in Wenlock, De Beauvoir, Moorfields, Haggerston, St Peters and St James wards, the Front vote scraped above 15 per cent.80
The NF responded to its setback with violence. On 4 May 1978, the night of the elections, a 25-year-old machinist, Altab Ali, was murdered on his way back from his work on Brick Lane to his home in Wapping. He was crossing Whitechapel Road when he was attacked by a group of racists who stabbed him in his chest with a knife. On 14 May 1978, around 7,000 young Bengalis took part in a protest carrying Ali’s coffin from Brick Lane to Downing Street. Placards asked, ‘How many more racial attacks? Why are the police covering up?’
The huge marches following the murder of Altab Ali did not receive any coverage in the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, or The Express. The Times gave the protests thirty-five words on page 4, the Financial Times just thirty-one words.
Askan, one of the march organisers, was interviewed by Dave Widgery:
These racial attacks, they are getting worse all the time. Worse since National Front on the scene. Worse still since Mrs Thatcher. We’re not getting co-operation with the police. Mr Callaghan and his colleagues, do they realise what is happening all the time to our people?
Thatcher’s ‘alien culture’ speech was a recent memory. ‘Single-handedly,’ Widgery wrote, ‘she had recuperated overt racism into the Parliamentary tradition.’81
Working as a doctor in the area, Widgery observed countless examples of petty racism – an elderly Asian porter sacked for looking ill, a Bangladeshi woman sectioned in the seventh month of pregnancy, a white trade unionist driven to insomnia by window bashing, after he defended his Asian neighbour. For Widgery, the death of Altab Ali threw ‘into harsh relief the general level of racial violence in the East End, the indifference of the police and the prejudices of the non-Asians’.82
The attacks, Widgery maintained, had been planned by the Front: ‘For the fascist tacticians active in the area – older men steeled and schooled in the street fighting of the Mosley revival – it became part of a calculated plan whose aim was to force the Asians to retaliate blindly.’83 By tacticians, Widgery no doubt had in mind the likes of Derek Day senior, who was recorded in the Sex Pistols film, The Filth and the Fury, pointing his finger at his chest and at the Hoxton tower block where he lived: ‘Yes, I am a racist and why? Who’s made me a racist? This government, the Conservatives and every standing, stinking councillor.’ As Day delivers his tirade, two black women in their late twenties can be seen leaving the same block, walking in a completely natural and ordinary way around the bigot.
Ken Leech was the Anglican priest for Brick Lane. ‘Between 1976–8,’ he writes:
there was a marked increase in racist graffiti, particularly NF symbols, all over Tower Hamlets and in the presence both of NF ‘heavies’ and clusters of alienated young people at key fascist locations, especially in Bethnal Green. There were several murders, many incidents of violence against person and property and on 11 June 1978 a mob of several hundred skinheads rampaged through Brick Lane, attacking the hones of the Bengali community.
Led by Derek Day junior, the son of the Front leader, the mob attacked a 55-year-old man Abdul Monan and knocked him unconscious. Later, Monan was taken to hospital where he required five stitches to his face. The police were slow to arrive. They made numerous arrests but charged just three of the white youths, all with the most minor of public order offences.84
O
n 18 June, 4,000 people joined an ANL solidarity march through the East End. The following weekend, however, the Front were back. Over the remainder of the summer, there were repeated large anti-fascist mobilisations, several of which were harassed by police officers led by Chief Superintendent Wallis, who boasted that Brick Lane was ‘the most heavily policed area in Britain’.85
While, in racist myth, the ‘Asians’ were a vulnerable presence in Britain and an easier target than African or Caribbean youth; the Bengali community had been toughened by several years of struggles. Over the previous few years, Tower Hamlets had witnessed an extraordinary campaign during which several hundred Bengali families had squatted vacant homes. Squats were set up in Matlock Street, Varden Street, Walden Street and Old Montague Street, in Jubilee Street, Adelina Grove, Lindley Street, Redmans Road, White Horse Road, Aston Street, Flamborough, Westport and for a time Arbour Square.86 Homes were connected to gas, water and electricity. The council meanwhile was determined to force the families out, cutting off electricity supplies. Eventually, an amnesty would be declared,87 but not until after Tower Hamlets Council had gone public with widely criticised plans to create a Bengali-only ghetto in the Spitalfields district.
Sybil Cock had recently moved to east London:
There was a body of knowledge about housing – how to get the electricity on, how to pay rates to give yourself legitimacy. How to ‘open’ a squat. Many of the buildings we lived in had belonged to Jewish families and people were being moved out as they got too old to cope with the lack of bathrooms etc. Often an elderly couple would hand their keys to their flat to a known ‘sensible’ squatters’ leader so that families could just move in after they moved out to Essex or an old people’s home . . . The former tenants thought the buildings would be warmer and safer if they were inhabited rather than boarded up.
Tassaduq Ahmed, an educational worker in the East End, commented on the growing self-organisation among young Bengalis living around Brick Lane:
The bare facts of assaults and killing of Asians in the East End by the National Front’s bully boys are known; what is not being sufficiently stressed is the strong multi-racial response that these acts have evoked, in particular among the Bengali youth, who have joined enthusiastically with their white friends in combating a menace which in its ultimate form will spell the death knell of a democratic Britain.88
On 15 July 1978, the Indian Workers Association, the Standing Conference of Pakistani Organisations and the Federation of Bangladeshi Organisations issued a call for the setting-up of Asian self-defence groups. The campaigns also invited all their members to join the ANL; it was a huge compliment to that campaign.
On 17 July, some 8,000 workers in factories and restaurants and at Ford Dagenham struck against the racist murders in the East End. Many schools also witnessed walkouts by their students. The strikes and their supporters then marched along Bethnal Green Road. Sybil Cock was among them: ‘There was a sit down outside Bethnal Green cop shop when a few of us were arrested. Several hundred or more people refused to move until the prisoners were released.’
‘The impact of the anti-racist strike’, Alok Biswas wrote, ‘has a special meaning for the Bengali people who live in East London’s Spitalfields . . . What I saw this weekend was a whole community expressing itself against injustice.’89
The strike was widely supported in the East End with groups such as the Gay Activists Alliance, then based in a squat on Redmans Road, also calling on east London gays and lesbians to join the pickets.90
On 18 July, records Stan Taylor, ‘Bengali youth took control of Brick Lane and refused to allow anyone apart from IS/SWP and ANL representatives into the area.’ Six weeks later, after a further mobilisation sponsored by the ANL, the Bengali Youth Movement Against Racism and IWA, the Front appeared to concede defeat, promising to relocate its main London presence to Islington’s Chapel Market.91
The same day, there was a RAR Carnival in Cardiff and a large anti-fascist presence at the Durham Miners’ Gala. Jim Nichol made it up from London to Durham for the service but was late and sat at the back of Durham Cathedral, a silent observer. Every year the service follows a set ritual; when the services finishes, the miners collect their banners and raise them aloft and their own brass bands strike up. At first, Nichol thought the event was proceeding exactly the same as it did every year but then he looked more closely: ‘As they turned to go down the aisle of the Cathedral, a majority of the miners were wearing Miners Against the Nazis stickers. I’m getting pins and needles even now as I remember it.’
A second national Rock Against Racism carnival took place in Brockwell Park on 24 September 1978, with Sham 69 intended to headline. A march set off from Hyde Park. Numerous bands, including Crisis, Charge, Eclipse, Inganda, RAS, the Derelicts, the Enchanters, the Members, the Ruts and the Straights, played from floats along the route. Photographs from the stage show a larger audience even than the first carnival, with the organisers claiming that 150,000 people attended. According to Joe Garman, chair of the North Manchester Campaign Against Racism:
The ‘Queen’ waved to us, all dressed up as she sat on the throne perched on the top of a bay window. There were lots of kids, some in pushchairs, some perched on dad’s shoulders. There was a Notts collier in pit clothes, his enemy was the National Front even tho’ his ‘blackness’ washed off.
At the end of the march from Hyde Park to Brockwell Park, Garman described his aching feet – ‘yet another reason for hating the Nazis’.92
Colin Fancy took part and recalls a huge banner hung outside Brixton station, ‘Brixton Gays Welcome the Carnival Against the Nazis’. The workers in the Ritzy cinema had changed the letters on their display to give a similar message of support.
Red Saunders was the compere again, in a ‘more thought-out’ uniform: ‘Yellow boiler suit covered in RAR stencilled slogans with a huge stove pipe hat with the Love Music, Hate Racism slogan all over it. Plus shades, of course.’
The proposed headliners Sham 69 had been put off by a series of death threats and it was Belfast punks Stiff Little Fingers who opened. Bernie Wilcox was standing by a RAR stall when he found a backstage pass that had been left unattended. He sneaked backstage and saw Elvis Costello playing Nick Lowe’s song, ‘What’s So Funny about Peace, Love and Understanding?’. Lowe was himself working at the Carnival as Costello’s producer and watched the performance, tears in his eyes.
Mark Steel attended the Carnival with a friend, Jim. It was their first demonstration and ‘neither of us had any idea what would happen when we got there. What is a march, we pondered?’ They soon found out:
All the scenes which would become so laboriously familiar, the hordes of leaflets thrust at you from all angles, the flamboyant but awful drumming costumes, the chanter screaming into a megaphone and becoming increasingly, thankfully hoarse, it all seemed so thrilling. And there was Aswad and Tom Robinson and Elvis Costello and instead of feeling angry I felt jubilant because now I was doing something.93
Geoff Brown of Manchester Anti-Nazi League felt a similar sense of elation. At the time of the first Carnival, he recalls, it was not clear whether the National Front would be defeated but ‘the second was a victory march’.
Sham declined to play, but the band’s frontman Jimmy Pursey took to the stage, telling the audience that
All this week you’ve probably read a lot of things about me and Sham 69. We’ve been dictated to. Last night I wasn’t going to come. Then this little kid said to me, ‘You’re not doing it because your fans are NF.’ They said I ain’t got no bottle. But I’m here. Nobody’s going to tell me what I should or should not do. I’m here because I support Rock Against Racism.94
For many of those who took part, this second Carnival was every bit as exciting as the first, a view not discouraged by the press, with ANL-supporter Keith Waterhouse telling the Daily Mirror:
What the Anti-Nazi League is, it seems to me, a manifestation of the new social class I once identified as the Pol
yocracy. It transcends all the old boundaries of accent, upbringing or postal district, laughs at the supposed difference between one shade of skin and another . . . If it is all a Trot conspiracy, tough luck on the conventional political parties who play it all so safe and down the middle that they have the popular appeal of yesterday’s gravy.95
Yet the success of events in Brockwell Park was partly clouded by an attempt by the Front to regain the initiative after weeks of being outnumbered. Hearing the date of the Carnival, the Front called a London-wide mobilisation on the same day at Brick Lane. The Tower Hamlets Defence Committee warned that with anti-fascists in south London, the population of Brick Lane was in danger. ‘Far fewer attacks have taken place in Brick Lane over the last few months,’ the Committee explained, ‘which the local people attribute not to the increased police presence but to the active defence which is being carried out by black people and anti-racists.’96
In the build-up to the Carnival, any number of anti-fascists warned the ANL leadership of the need to make sure that the NF was prevented from marching. ‘For weeks before,’ another SWP member Andy Strouthous recalls, ‘lots of us were trying to make sure that Brick Lane was covered. The ANL wanted to keep an eye on just one thing, the carnival. They didn’t think we could spare people but we could.’
Throughout the day, Paul Holborow was repeatedly asked about Brick Lane. Before the march to Brockwell Park had even set off, at the Hyde Park assembly point, he gave a speech urging the crowd not to worry about east London. Speaking with his usual confidence, he assured his listeners that the Anti-Nazis had sent supporters to protect Brick Lane and the area was safe. There was no Front presence there and, if there had been one, it had been smashed. Ian Birchall recalls Holborow descending the platform, having made his speech and then quietly asking another of his SWP comrades if they could drive to Brick Lane and find out what was really happening.