by David Renton
Those born later
On 2 January 1981, Monday Club supporter and Tory MP Jill Knight called for bans on ‘noisy’ West Indian parties, suggesting that white families would be entitled to take direct action to bring such events to an end. Two weeks later, on 18 January, a fire broke out at a birthday party being held at 439 New Cross Road in Deptford and thirteen people aged between 14 and 22 died. All were black. Campaigners including Darcus Howe and John La Rose demanded the truth of the deaths and justice for the victims. It was widely believed that the building had been attacked by white supporters of the National Front: other buildings in the vicinity to have been burnt down included the Moonshot Youth Club, which had been a base of the left four years earlier, and the Albany Theatre, which had been a popular venue for Rock Against Racism gigs. The coroner’s ultimate decision of an open verdict was widely blamed on poor forensic investigation and a hostility to black witnesses. The protests culminated in a Black People’s Day of Action on 2 March. Some 25,000 people marched, chanting, ‘Thirteen dead, nothing said’. According to Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘The New Cross fire had happened in London but the mobilisation was national: Manchester, Birmingham Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Derby, Leicester . . . a lot of the mobilisation was done through sound systems and local radio stations.’49 It was the greatest black-led demonstration against racism the country has ever seen.
On 6 April 1981, the police launched what they said was an exercise to arrest burglars and robbers in south London: ‘Operation Swamp’. It manifested itself in very large numbers of arrests and searches of black youths and very few arrests for robbery. Four days later, crowds of black youths gathered to protest in Brixton. They were attacked by the police. Fighting between the police and a mixed crowd of black and white youth saw 82 arrests, 279 police officers injured and 56 police cars damaged or destroyed. Lord Justice Scarman’s later Report called the events a ‘spontaneous reaction’ against ‘a hostile police force’.50
In spring 1981, one veteran Rock Against Racism campaigner, Colin Fancy, moved into a squat on New Cross Road, on the very street where the fire had broken out. In June, he helped to start a walk-out against youth unemployment with over a thousand pupils leaving their secondary schools to protest. In July, he was at Thames Polytechnic, playing a Right to Work benefit with his punk band. The week before he had been due to play at the Hambrough Tavern but the management had cancelled the gig. That Friday, 3 July 1981, while Fancy was at Thames Poly, a gig featuring 4 Skins, the Business and the Last Resort, saw skinheads coming into an area which had previously witnessed numerous racial conflicts.51 Asian youth set the pub ablaze. The tabloids warned of fighting between black and white: ‘Terror in Southall’, ‘Race Riots’. The historian of black struggle, A. Sivanandan, puts this incident squarely in the context of the police riot that Southall had witnessed two years before and the criminalisation of those who had protested against the National Front: ‘Southall . . . would not be lightly invaded again, as 3 July 1981 was to prove.’52
The next morning, Colin Fancy travelled to Leeds to see the Specials play RAR’s Northern Carnival at Leeds. There he learned that Toxteth, too, was burning.53
The Leeds carnival was RAR’s last significant event. Misty in Roots, the Specials, Joolz the Poet and the Au Pairs played,54 with the event ending in Potternewton Park, the venue for Leeds’ West Indian Carnival. Some 20,000 people joined in, picketed by just forty-two Front supporters.55 Among the people in the anti-fascist crowd was Khadijah Ibrahim:
There were the Specials and I just remember pushing through this crowd under the feet of people to get to the front. Oh my God, you don’t see these people, you see them on Top of the Pops on TV and they were live and direct in front of me.56
Her poem ‘Rock Against Racism’ recalls the scene.57
The Specials were in the charts for their greatest single, ‘Ghost Town’, a lament for industrial Britain, the world of their youth that was now under attack from unemployment, poverty and Thatcher’s government. When the Specials took to the stage, the song was number two at the charts. The next week, on the same day that Merseyside’s senior policeman said that his city’s black population was ‘the product of liaisons between white prostitutes and black sailors’, the song reached number one. Yet the Specials themselves were exhausted. In the middle of ‘Ghost Town’, the band’s trombonist Rico Rodriguez declined to play his usual solo. According to the guitarist Roddy Radiation, ‘We were a band in name only.’58
Pete Alexander was the chief steward at the Leeds Carnival:
When we went past shops, kids would peel off and steal things, so I stopped the march and held a short meeting with the main local stewards to discuss the problem. We agreed that this was our march and we weren’t having it spoiled by crime, so after that we sent our stewards, local youth, out to every shop we passed and there were quite a few of them and we stopped the pilfering.
The Leeds event was Rock Against Racism’s farewell party, as Red Saunders recalls: ‘There were splits on the committee. There were arguments about money, bidding for grants.’ Part of the problem was RAR’s very success: ‘When we had first started, our first editorial said we wanted crisis music, rebel music. Well, try listening to the Specials’ “Ghost Town”. There hadn’t been music like that when we started.’
The next Saturday, there were riots in over thirty British towns and cities, including both areas associated with anti-fascist protests such as Handsworth and Southall and others with no such history: Blackpool, Fleetwood, Kettering. That weekend, twelve young Asian men – including the writer Tariq Mehmood – were arrested in Bradford, accused of making explosive substances with an intent to endanger property and life. Their defence was to admit having the weapons, but to insist that they had prepared them ‘to be prepared should the need arise, to protect themselves and their community against fascists’. The trial which followed has gone down in popular and legal folklore, both for the manner in which it was conducted and for the outcome. Defence advocates picked up the supposed weapons at court, even on one extraordinary occasion throwing one of the bombs at the judge’s desk, in order to illustrate its uselessness as a weapon. They pointed to the number of racial attacks in Britain, which were running at the rate of 15,000 per year.
The defendants were members of the United Black Youth League, a successor to the previous Bradford Asian Youth Movement. In campaign materials, the UBYL insisted that at the time of their arrest they were part of a growing anti-racist movement, they had campaigned for the children of Anwar Ditta to be brought to the UK. They had supported the demand of the Harrogate College Students Union to remove the National Front’s Andrew Brons who was lecturing there.59 They drew on the thirteen deaths in New Cross and other recent racist murders. They insisted that their preparation had been spurred by credible rumours that the Front was planning to march again through Bradford. The UBYL had received threats from fascists and in July, at the time of the arrests, it had been organising joint patrols with the local IWA to keep the community safe. While the police and local press reports insisted that the group’s ambition had been aggressive – to confront and attack the state – the defendants held together, insisting that their weapons had been assembled for no purposes other than defensive ones. A campaign was established outside court, with open planning meetings and meeting of up to eight hundred people in support of the arrested men. Bradford 12 Support groups were also established in London, Leicester, Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham. On the opening day of the trial, over five hundred people demonstrated their support for the defendants.60
The acquittal of the Bradford 12 was an extraordinary triumph but, as with the last RAR Carnival in Leeds, it marked the end of a period of anti-racist victories.
Squaddism
‘By late 1981,’ Pete Alexander insists, ‘it had become pretty clear that the BM threat had passed.’ The SWP leadership decided that the ANL should be wound down:
There was no big announcement about the
office closing or the staff declining to just me or us no longer sending out mailings and so on. In fact, nominally, the ANL continued to exist and nominally I continued to be its organiser. Letting things run down like this meant the BM couldn’t take advantage and, indeed, if they or some other Nazi group did revive, so could we.
Before May 1979, anti-fascism had been a mass movement, with widespread support. By 1980 or 1981, it had become something different – a residual cause around which different people grouped locally, in response to far-right mobilisations. As the structure of the campaign atrophied, so the character of its supporters changed. Whereas once they might have been Labour or even Liberal voters, young and new to politics, by 1980 or early 1981 these fresh faces had drifted away. Anti-fascism was reduced down to the permanent cadres of the far left.
In winter 1981–1982, the SWP decided to disengage from the physical clashes with the right. The leadership turned sharply, deciding that the anti-fascist squads which had grown up in Hackney, Manchester and Hatfield needed to be shut down and that any members of their party who would not accept their decision had to be expelled. This move was justified by an argument that the Front had been decisively routed. But the Front and its split-offs were still very much alive. In February 1981, Peter Hain’s house was firebombed, days later his home address and the addresses of other anti-fascists were published in South London News, a Front paper.61
Throughout 1981–1982, fights continued between fascists and anti-fascists around Chapel Market in Islington.62 In December 1981, nine anti-fascists from Manchester were jailed for between six and fifteen months, for possession of offensive weapons. The problems began with a phone call from a student, Michelle Mole, complaining of attacks by skinheads. They were stopped by the police, arrested and ultimately agreed to plead guilty to weapons charges. Michelle Mole became a prosecution witness. The anti-fascists, including John Penney who was seen as the leader of the Manchester squad, received sentences of between six and fifteen months. On their release in summer 1982, the SWP disowned them and refused to support any but two of the arrested men, drawing on other incidents where the squaddists had clashed with their erstwhile comrades, including at the SWP’s Easter camp at Skegness and even at the Leeds Carnival.63 Andy Strouthous was sent by the SWP Central Committee to Manchester to isolate the supporters of the squad within that district.
Something like thirty SWP members were ultimately expelled for squaddism, with around a hundred people leaving the group in sympathy with them.64 Those who were expelled attempted to challenge the politics of the parent organisation, before forming their own organisation, Red Action, which later sponsored Anti-Fascist Action, the main anti-fascist campaign on the left between 1985 and 1992.
In north London, Anna Sullivan felt like a mother to the young men who sustained the fight against fascism. She could not understand the complaints against them from within the SWP:
If you are involved in a movement that engages in conflict with violent opposition, then unfortunately as well as all the good comrades, you will attract people with the excitement of the conflict. For me, it was an ideological battle but it became a physical conflict for survival.
Mark Steel recalls going home after one demo, only to find the organisers being condemned for failing to smash the Front from the streets:
All this was to miss the point of the Anti-Nazi League. The exuberant school kids who distributed the badges, the tenants who formed groups to wash off the graffiti . . . were the real army that defeated fascism in 1979. It should be celebrated that most people who attended the counter-demonstrations weren’t hardened brawlers and were probably secretly frightened. For it proves that thugs can be beaten by ideas.65
Mick O’Farrell wrote an open letter to his former SWP comrades:
[I]t is on the estates and in the pubs, in the youth clubs and in the schools that the real damage is being done . . . How can anyone claim that the [NF’s] active support had not risen? How many more fire bombs and racial attacks will it take? How many more times will dedicated comrades be derided as mindless thugs no better than the Nazis for fighting them where they operate?66
Thinking about the expulsions since, O’Farrell insisted that in turning on the squaddists, the SWP leadership was cracking down on a generation of working-class activists who were independent of the supposed leaders of their party:
I’m not privy to the inner machinations of the central committee so I can only go on my own political analysis [which] was that the Squads had developed a certain autonomy which they [i.e. the SWP leadership] could not control. In my experience the concept of working class autonomy or spontaneity is something they celebrate when they talk in the abstract but not when it occurs within their own organisation.67
Alan Gibbons supported the expulsions. In his view, the SWP had been dragged into a cycle of tit-for-tat struggles with the Front’s remaining members. The battles were depoliticised, he argued, and cut off from any mass audience. On one occasion, he had been sent as part of a group to attack a Front meeting in Blackburn. This was not a positive experience. ‘It was not a mass activity. We were a group of about twelve men, beating people up. I didn’t like the feel of it. It felt sad and squalid.’ He was glad to see the squads wound down: ‘The people who come on anti-racism demonstrations are working, they’ve got families. We can’t train people for violence in the way fascists can. Their thugs will always be better than our thugs.’
Matthew Caygill recalled Andy Strouthous travelling to a meeting in Leeds to justify the new line:
One comrade got very emotional about what a betrayal this was. Comrades really had put their lives and souls into the Anti-Nazi League and it was hard to break from the memory of the high-points and the routines of activity, especially as Leeds remained a hot zone for Nazi activity.
Meanwhile, most anti-fascists were thinking in a different direction. Former RAR or ANL supporters took up different radical causes, including anti-deportation struggles, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the revived movement against youth unemployment. There was the rise of Tony Benn and later there was also Livingstone in London and the Militant Tendency in Liverpool. There was never any particular date on which the League’s office was formally closed, although in practice the movement was run down between summer 1981 and the end of that year. The ANL badges were packed away and the movement entered into memory.
In autumn 1981, Temporary Hoarding published what was to be its final issue. Sheffield RAR admitted to having
packed up around the beginning of 1980, partly through exhaustion, partly through the temporary trailing off of activities after Thatcher got in. But also because we were fed up of grovelling to musicians in bands who were only interested in RAR as a way of getting gigs.
In Brighton, Rock Against Racism joined together with No Nukes Music to set up a group, Revolutions per Minute, raising money for CND, RAR, ANL, the Child Poverty Action Group, the Gay Switchboard and the New Cross Defence Fund. Bradford RAR was now one of the older groups, boasting of continuous existence since early 1979:
Fortunately we have always managed to get a lot of support from the student unions at the university . . . At the moment we’re supporting CND’s No Nukes Music Tour with the Thompson Twins and a benefit for CND’s Easter Trans Pennine March.
As late as July 1981, Rock Against Racism organised an event in Hackney’s Clissold Park promising to Funk the [royal] Wedding. The bands playing – Tribesman, Movement, Monkey Business – were a step downwards even from that spring’s Leeds Carnival.68
From her vantage point of Chapel Market, Anna Sullivan recalls that ‘Even the fascists were being exhausted and turning public opinion against them . . . Committed passionate resistance wore them down. They couldn’t best that.’
The historian of British fascism, Richard Thurlow writes that
At the time of the 1979 general election [NF] membership was around 10,000. With the poor performance in the 1979 general election and the split between T
yndall and Webster, the numbers collapsed . . . After the removal of Webster, membership slumped to reach 3,148 on 1 October 1984 and fell precipitously to just under 1,000 in January 1985.69
An organisation that had shed nine-tenths of its membership in a little over five years was evidently far less of a threat than it had been.
Notes
1 ‘1967–1977, The way forward’, Spearhead 103 (March 1977), pp. 9–10.
2 There were protests against the broadcasts and pickets of Broadcasting House: Camden and West Hampstead ANL leaflet, ‘No Free Ads for Nazis’, April 1979.
3 T. Simms, Match Day: Ulster Loyalism and the British Far-Right (London: Create Space, 2016), p. 77; National Front to Maxine Coe, September 1979, copy in Searchlight Archive, University of Northampton, BRI/02/035.
4 Martin Guy Webster and Richard Hugh Verrall (On Behalf of Themselves and the National Front) v. Newham London Borough Council 2 All ER 7 [1980].
5 R. Hill with A. Bell, The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network (London: Grafton Books, 1988), p, 88.
6 A. Mackinnon and C. Shaar Murray, ‘RAR: it’s number one, it’s top of the Agitprops’, New Musical Express, 24 March 1979.
7 Merseyside Anti-Nazi League, Bulletin 4 (June 1979), p. 3
8 D. Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), p. 205.