by David Renton
Morale, Doyle wrote, was ‘at an all-time low, many previously dedicated activists have told me they will resign’. The only solution would be if the Front could rid itself ‘of all the National Socialist diehards, [and] this will not be easy with the Directorate in the hold of many of John Tyndall stooges’.15
John Tyndall blamed Martin Webster, Tyndall’s lieutenant since the early 1960s, for all the Front’s difficulties. Webster had been the target of a series of press reports identifying him as gay.16 Tyndall, who had been complaining privately for several years about Webster’s homosexuality,17 took to Spearhead to object to Webster’s ‘filthy language, bizarre gestures and frequently total loss of control’, accusing his erstwhile colleague of ‘reducing working relations to a shambles and creating an atmosphere of rancour and network’, which Tyndall blamed for the National Front’s derisory general election vote.18
At a meeting of the NF Directorate in October 1979, Tyndall tried to force Webster to resign as the Front’s national organiser. He lost the vote there and at the Front’s Annual General Meeting later the same month, before resigning at a Directorate meeting in January 1980. Tyndall then formed a New National Front, which in due course would become today’s British National Party (BNP).19
Within eight months of the 1979 general election, the National Front had split into three hostile parties, with separate groups led by Andrew Fountaine, John Tyndall and Martin Webster. The latter remained in control of a much diminished organisation, with the NF’s Wandsworth’s branch publicising a speech by Webster with the title ‘Why the Establishment Condones Red Violence Against the NF’.20
The few parts of the Front to retain any vitality were its youth and music wings. Rock Against Communism had its first public outing in August 1979, at London’s Conway Hall. Around a hundred and fifty NF supporters turned up, to face anti-fascist protests. The Dentists played their songs ‘White Power’ and ‘Kill the Reds’.
Joe Pearce hoped Skrewdriver would also play the Conway Hall event, as the band’s singer Ian Stuart Donaldson had by now joined the Front. The difficulty was that Skrewdriver, almost alone among the far-right bands, still had hopes of a wider audience. The band had once been reviewed in Sniffin’ Glue and still had a record deal with a non-fascist label, Rough Trade. As late as summer 1979, Ian Stuart and his band were still afraid to declare openly for the Front and failed to show up at the Conway Hall gig. The repeated rumours of the band’s new loyalties were enough, however, to alert Skrewdriver’s distributors, Rough Trade, who smashed every Skrewdriver disk they possessed and dumped the pieces in bags outside the venue.21 Over the following months, Stuart would write to Melody Maker and even telephone Searchlight magazine, claiming the stories about him were false.22
Several of the Front’s younger supporters defected to the British Movement, whose long-term hostility to electoral politics now appeared to have been vindicated. Over the following decade, all sections of the British far right would agree that there was little point in campaigning in any sustained way for seats in Parliament and accepted that there was no nationalist majority to which the right could appeal. Even John Tyndall could be heard arguing that the NF was ‘never going to make it through the ballot box’.23 New individuals came to dominate the far right, like Nicky Crane, the British Movement’s North Kent organiser, who appeared naked to the waist on the front cover of Decca Records’ album Strength Through Oi!. Crane was given a suspended sentence for affray, after attacking a black family. Then, after a second racist attack, he received a four-year jail sentence.24 As this new generation of far-right supporters turned to violence, so did the BNP and the British Movement. All three groups were shaped by the National Front’s election defeat.
Rock Against the Tories
After the election, both left and right attempted to evaluate the new situation. ‘For the rest of 1979’, recalls Pete Alexander,
there was actually very little Nazi activity to be ‘anti’; the big focus for them – and us – of the general election had come and gone. The ANL centre still functioned for a while, mainly I suppose because of the Blair Peach campaign. Sometime in 1979, Paul Holborow, Jerry Fitzpatrick, Mike and Joan, the four ANL full-timers, all moved on.
Not long after, they were joined by Ernie Roberts who resigned as treasurer. Others from the original steering committee remained, however, including Miriam Karlin.
According to Jerry Fitzpatrick, ‘The key organisers were in a state of physical exhaustion; it had been the most intense period of our lives and we were tired. Also with Thatcher coming in, she was a more sophisticated and determined threat.’
In Merseyside, Ronnie Williams also recalls the movement slowing down:
I moved to Runcorn and the Anti-Nazi League was winding down then. We had one disco in Netherley which got around thirty people where the previous one that summer had sold four hundred tickets. I know this because I wrote them out by hand on pre-cut cardboard.
The anti-racist movement was both larger and more passive.
Of course, the Front had not altogether gone away. On 29 June 1979, supporters of the Front attacked black and white dancers at a rave at Acklam Hall, Ladbroke Grove, in west London. The black street-poet Benjamin Zephaniah was there and dedicated his poem, ‘Call It What Yu Like’, to the young punks who fought off the National Front that evening: ‘Outside is a shout / De Punks are about / A shout / Nazis out, Nazis out / O Punk, O Punk, de fight nu long / Yu battle well’.25
On 8 July 1979, RAR-supporter Alan Vega of Suicide was attacked by Front supporters while supporting the Clash at Crawley.26 According to Roddy Radiation of the Specials, ‘They got a real beating, a lot of dodgy Skins . . . I saw [Alan Vega] backstage afterwards, covered in blood.’ Roddy’s colleague, Jerry Dammers, a former mod who could remember watching skinheads in the 1960s dancing to black music, was later to cite this gig a decisive moment in the development of the Specials and therefore of Two Tone: ‘I thought, “We have to get through to these people.”’27
Sham 69’s final concert was held that September at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. Some forty or so far-right skinheads forced their way in, twice invading the stage. According to Val Hennessy, writing in The Guardian:
A faction of BM toughs (exclusively male) form a procession, chanting, thumping and shouting Sieg Heil. By Sham’s fifth song they had clambered on stage and halted the show. In the ensuing imbroglio beer cans were hurled and bottles flung. A girl got a cigarette end in her eye, another had her glasses smashed.
A tearful Jimmy Pursey was just about able to force his way to the microphone where he gave a last and final farewell. ‘I fucking loved you. I fucking did everything for you. And all you wanna do is fight.’28
Deprived of their heroes, Sham’s audience sought other bands which they could support. One was two-tone band Madness, who were performing at Camden’s Electric Ballroom from 16 to 18 November. Refurnished just the year before, the Ballroom was one of London’s best venues, with a huge stage, concealed by a tiny shop-front entrance on Camden High Street. An NME interview with Madness in November saw the journalist Deanne Pearson clashing repeatedly with the band’s Cathal Smyth about the presence of Front supporters in the Madness audience, with Smyth insisting there was no problem:
You just don’t understand, do you? They’re just a group of kids who have to take out their anger and frustration on something. NF don’t really mean much to them. Why should I stop them coming to our gigs, that’s all they’ve got.29
On stage in Camden, Madness’s warm-up act Red Beans & Rice were fronted by Lavern Brown, a black singer. Skinheads in the front row made monkey noises and gave the Nazi salute. Skrewdriver’s Ian Stuart Donaldson later claimed to have been a Madness roadie and said that Suggs was his friend,30 but Suggs’ response to the attacks on Lavern Brown was to confront the racists. He ran onto the stage and grabbed the microphone, which he used to fight the skinheads, hospitalising two of them.31
Winter 1979 saw the arrest of an
ti-fascists at Chapel Market. According to Anna Sullivan, ‘The chief superintendent wanted to put an end to all our protests.’ Anti-fascists responded by setting up a Chapel Market 11 defence campaign. Not all officers were equally opposed to the anti-fascists. Anna recalls one man, Inspector Barker, watching her sell papers. A small group of fascists set upon them, kicking with steel-capped boots: ‘Suddenly Barker leapt out of his car and chased this fascist down Upper Street. I remember him saying to his colleagues, “We’ve got a chap in there and he’s just attacked that lovely lady from the Anti-Nazi League.”’ This was not a usual occurrence. At the next conflict, the police tried to arrest Sullivan. ‘You could tell they were the Special Patrol Group, they didn’t have numbers, just initials on their epaulettes. “You’ll have to move,” one said, “you’re obstructing the highway. Move on or I’ll arrest you.” They weren’t interested in anyone else.’ The scene degenerated from high drama to domestic farce. Sullivan’s daughter and her comrade Unmesh Desai tried to protect Sullivan from arrest. The contents of her bag were strewn all over the ground: ‘I was shouting at him, “Unmesh, whatever you do, pick up my make-up!”’
In November 1979, Southwark National Front organiser Kenneth Matthews was caught trying to attack the Union Place Resource Centre near Oval with a firebomb. Over the next year and half, twenty-four further physical attacks were recorded by supporters of the Front or the British Movement on buildings associated with the left, including the News from Nowhere bookshop in Liverpool, Community Press in Islington and the Brighton Resource Centre.32
In 1980, the Thatcher government announced its intention to introduce tougher immigration laws, a decision widely interpreted as a sop to former NF voters.33 The result was the British Nationality Act 1981. The trend was to swap anti-fascism for a different anti-racist strategy. In Manchester, Greg Dropkin ‘came to the conclusion that those who saw the fight against fascism as the conclusion were mistaken. I tried to read about the rise of Hitler . . . My conclusion was that we weren’t in a parallel situation.’ Dropkin argued with the Longsight CARF group that the priority was to fight state racism rather than the Front.
Elsewhere in the North West, there were protests against threatened deportations: of Saeed Rehman, Abdul Azadand and Nasira Begum. Protesters also challenged a Home Office decision refusing to allow Anwar Ditta to bring her children from Pakistan. Lawyer and author Steve Cohen was another former anti-fascist now campaigning full-time against immigration controls.34
The Anti-Nazi League sponsored the Campaign Against Racist Laws. Several leading members of the League joined CARL’s executive committee and there were attempts to build a new anti-racist movement, opposed not just to fascism but to institutional racism as well. Jerry Fitzpatrick of the ANL became the treasurer of the Campaign Against Racist Laws and Dave Cook from the Communist Party was national secretary. There were joint chairs, one from each of the big Indian Workers’ Associations: Avtar Jouhl and Prem Singh. The CARL group in Bradford was central to several Yorkshire campaigns against threatened deportations.
In spring 1980, Peter Hain, still seen as a member of Labour’s hard left as a result of his role in the Anti-Nazi League, agreed to chair ‘the debate of the decade’, between the Labour Party and the revolutionary left; it was held in Central Hall and attended by over 2,000 people. Hain’s introduction to the published form of the discussion began by contrasting the mood of the late 1960s, when such militant unions as the engineers’ AUEW had seemed capable of transforming society, and of the early 1980s, when the left of all descriptions lacked popular appeal. In his words:
The trade union movement as a whole is in political disarray, unsure of its grass roots base, uncertain about its national direction; the left outside the Labour Party is weaker in terms of its political base; the student movement is passive and middle-of-the-road in its politics; and the Labour Party, whilst moving significantly leftwards, still has not shaken off a dominant right-wing leadership. Above all, socialism patently lacks the appeal and allegiance in the working class which it once had.35
An anti-Front protest was held in Lewisham in April 1980. Christine Collette wrote up the protest for West Lewisham Labour Party:
Notice was taken that the Anti-Nazi League was assembling at Lewisham Town Hall at 1 p.m. and it was decided to maximise support by calling ALCARAF supporters to rally in the same area . . . Permission to use the car park having been refused, the rally was held outside Eros House. Anti-Nazi League demonstrators joined the rally and there were speakers from Lewisham Council and the Trades Council. Hundreds of local men and women, black and white, turned out to demonstrate against the National Front.36
Stuart Hall told the Communist Party’s magazine Marxism Today that Thatcher represented ‘authoritarian populism . . . a weakening of democratic forms and initiatives, but not their suspension’. Hall sought to explain Thatcher’s success as a cultural project, using family values and Conservative morality to place its imprint on political, economic and ideological life. If Thatcherism was a form of cultural politics, then it followed that the Tories could best be resisted in the cultural sphere. Hall praised RAR in particular as ‘one of the timeliest and best constructed of cultural interventions, repaying serious and extended analysis’.37
Yet the victories which Hall praised all pre-dated the general election. A July 1980 article in the Morning Star newspaper criticised the way the ANL had developed in recent months. Dave Cook complained that ‘Despite the significance of its past role, the ANL has tended to become submerged in [the Campaign Against Racist Laws] and the Blair Peach Committee. It [has] only come to life in response to a fascist mobilisation.’ What was the alternative? Cook sought ‘a perspective to redevelop the ANL, enabling it to play a more general propaganda role’.38
In autumn 1980, the SWP appointed Pete Alexander to replace Paul Holborow as the secretary of the Anti-Nazi League. The focus of opposition was no longer the Front, but the more violent ultra-Nazis of the British Movement.39
Anti-fascists called protests in Brighton and Hove. There were three National Front rallies there at the Level, a piece of ground in the town centre where the left and trade unions had traditionally met, as Tony Greenstein describes:
At the first demo, large numbers of people met at the Level while the fascists mobilised and marched from Hove towards Brighton. Those of us who went up to confront them were outnumbered and there were large numbers of arrests, including myself, as groups of us took them on. On the second march we occupied their meeting place (Norfolk Square) and fooled both the police and the fascists who had an initial pre-meeting on the beach. We gradually drained people from Norfolk Square down to the beach where we confronted them . . . By the time of their third demonstration they had lost all credibility among their own followers and they could only hold a meeting at the Level because the police surrounded it in a ring.40
Rock Against Racism meanwhile were approached by an Irish Republican political prisoner, Felim O’Hagan, who sent the group a note handwritten in pencil in block capitals on stuck-together pieces of cigarette paper, warning them that unless there were protests in England Bobby Sands would be dead in just a few weeks. ‘After Southall in 1979 and 1980,’ Jerry Fitzpatrick recalls, ‘I organised with John Dennis and John Ellis a Rock Against Racism tour to Belfast and Derry in support of the H-Block prisoners who went on hunger strike for political status.’ Mainland bands to join the Rock Against Repression and Sectarianism tour included Oxy and the Morons. Meanwhile RAR spawned any number of mimetic offshoots, Rock Gegen Rechts in West Germany, France’s Rock Against Police, Rock Against Racism USA and Rock Against Racism groups in Sweden, Norway, Belgium and Holland.41
Annie Skinner recalls three RAR gags in Oxford in 1980, played at different venues along Cowley Road, with bands including Criminal Damage, the Stereotypes and Alien Kulture. The last of these were an Asian punk band42 named in response to Thatcher’s speech warning that Britain was being swamped. Ausaf Abbas, Azhar Rana and Per
vez Bilgrami played with ‘token white’ Huw Jones. ‘When I was at school,’ Rana recalls, ‘I had to hide every playtime because there was a gang of twenty boys going around Paki-bashing.’ With songs such as ‘Arranged Marriage’, ‘Asian Youth’ and ‘Airport Arrest’, the band played some thirty gigs dressed in kurta and Dr Marten boots. John Peel repeatedly played their single ‘Culture Crossover’, with its message of ‘first generation, illegal immigrants, second generation juvenile delinquents’.43 In 1981, Alien Kulture would disband. ‘No matter how much we railed against Thatcher, she was winning,’ Ausaf Abbas recalls, ‘RAR was fading and Thatcher was unstoppable.’44
‘As Thatcherism ground on,’ Widgery recalls:
meeting precious little effective resistance, RAR became rather less fashionable in the fickle world of rock . . . RAR was also a victim of its own success in another way. There was now Rock Against Everything, inner city ring roads to politics.45
According to Ruth Gregory, after the release of the Rock Against Racism album with Virgin Records, John Dennis and Saunders decided that RAR should become a limited company, with themselves as directors controlling the funds: ‘John just wanted to make RAR a business and himself the boss. John always wore a suit. It was a moddish suit, two-toneish, but still a suit.’ Gregory, Shelton and Widgery made a bid to save RAR’s elected committee from becoming, in effect, a board of directors and argued ‘It is vital to the grassroots movement that the workers in RAR’s central office continue to operate as a collective.’ They were subsequently denied the right to put their position to conference, leaving them no option but to resign. Webb and Minter resigned from the office and from the committee, leaving only Dennis and Saunders.
The campaign was splintering, with its former advocates travelling in all sorts of different directions. In a few cases elsewhere, former leftists ‘flipped over’ all the way to the far right. The former Socialist Worker journalist Gary Bushell became a Sun journalist.46 Members of the punk band and former RAR-act Crisis, committed anti-fascists in the 1970s,47 would join the Front (Tony Wakeford) or spawn spin-off bands fascinated with the look and style of interwar fascism and seemingly sympathetic to it (Wakeford’s Sol Invictus, Douglas P’s Death in June).48