by David Renton
9 Hornsey Journal, 29 April 1977; East Ender, 11 August 1977; Leicester Mercury, 29 April 1977; The Labour Party, ‘Statement by the National Executive Committee: Response to the National Front’, September 1978, p. 3; J. Tyndall, The Eleventh Hour (London: Albion Press, 1988), p. 230; N. Copsey, A History of Anti-Fascism in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000).
10 J. E. Richardson, ‘The National Front: the search for a “nationalist” economic policy’, in N. Copsey and M. Worley (eds), “Tomorrow Belongs to US”: The British Far Right since 1967 (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 48–68, 54.
11 Some of the female candidates are listed in M. Durham, Women and Fascism (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 103–105.
12 Manchester branch of the National Front, members’ bulletin, spring 1979, Searchlight Archive, University of Northumbria, BI/02/023.
13 C. Holmes, A Tolerant Country: Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 63.
14 ‘Manifesto’, 4 November 1979, Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/16.
15 Jenny Doyle to Richard Verrall, 8 July 1979, Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/6.
16 ‘Those naked Nazis’, Zipper, 24 October 1980. A number of Front supporters had also been targeting Webster with a homophobic campaign. For example, ‘Special exclusive’, undated, Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/6, where it is claimed that a magazine Gay Nationalist, containing anti-Webster smears, was being sent to Fuse, Private Eye, etc.
17 NF Birmingham Branch, meeting at the Shakespeare [pub], 20 June 1975, Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/29.
18 J. Tyndall, ‘Why we had to act’, Spearhead 140 (June 1980), p. 13.
19 N. Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the quest for legitimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 20–22.
20 National Front Wandsworth branch bulletin, July 1980, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, BRI/02/029.
21 D. Brazil, ‘Spittin’ hate at the future of rock ’n’ roll’, Leveller, October 1979; RAR leaflet, ‘Nazi nurds wreck Sham’s last stand’, September 1979.
22 ‘Who me?’, Melody Maker, 29 September 1979; ‘Skrewdriver reject NF’, Searchlight, October 1979; ‘Interview: Ian Stuart’, Terminal 14 (1982–1983); K. Dyck, Reichsrock: The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), pp. 13–33.
23 Hill with Bell, The Other Face of Terror, p. 161.
24 ‘Racists worse than animals’, Bexleyheath and Welling Observer, 27 March 1980; ‘Nazi gang leader is jailed’, Daily Mirror, 17 June 1981.
25 B. Zephaniah, City Psalms (London: Bloodaxe, 1992), p. 41.
26 C. Salewicz, The Clash: Photographs by Bob Gruen (London: Vision On Publishing, 2001), p. 56.
27 D. Thompson, Wheels Out of Gear: 2-Tone, the Specials and a World in Flame (London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 2004), p. 52.
28 V. Hennessy, ‘21 September 1979, a wimp’s-eye view of punk rock gigs’, Guardian, 21 September 1979; G. Bushell, Sounds of Glory: Volume Two, The Punk and Ska Years (London: New Haven, 2016), p. 53; RAR leaflet, ‘Nazi nurds wreck Sham’s last stand’.
29 D. Pearson, ‘Nice band shame about the fans’, NME, 29 November 1979.
30 R. Forbes and E. Stampton, The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement: UK and USA, 1979–1993 (Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2015), pp. 34, 40, 54. Suggs’s biography makes no mention of this supposed friendship, remarking that even at the age of 16 he had been subject to a great deal of tale telling by others and reproducing graffiti ‘Suggs is our leader . . . Suggs is everywhere’, from this time: Suggs, That Close (London: Quercus, 2013), pp. 116–117.
31 J. Reed, House of Fun: The Story of Madness (London: Omnibus Press, 2010), pp. 121–126; G. Bushell, Dance Craze: Rude Boys on the Road! (London: Countdown, 2011), p. 33; Suggs’s own account goes no further than saying that gigs at the Electric Ballroom ‘could get a bit lively. They certainly did at those three gigs’: Suggs, Suggs and the City: My Journey Through Disappearing London (London: Headline, 2009), pp. 57–58.
32 Morning Star, 31 July 1980.
33 C. T. Husbands, Racial Exclusionism and the City (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 20.
34 S. Cohen, It’s the Same Old Story: Immigration Controls Against Jewish, Black and Asian People, with Special Reference to Manchester (Manchester: Manchester City Council Public Relations Office, 1987), p. 4.
35 P. Hain (ed.), The Crisis and Future of the Left (London: Pluto, 1980), p. 7.
36 ALCARAF report, West Lewisham Labour Party, 24 April 1980.
37 ‘The great moving right show’ (1978), reprinted in S. Hall (ed.), The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 39–56, 40, 42.
38 N. Anning and B. Ballard, ‘The elusive firebombers’, New Statesman, 28 August 1981.
39 C. Bambery, ‘Euro-Fascism: the lessons of the past and current tasks’, International Socialism Journal 60 (1993), pp. 3–77, 67.
40 ‘Reports of events at National Front march, 14 November 1981’, Searchlight Archives, BRI/02/029; also Brighton Anti-Nazi League Newsletter, November–December 1981.
41 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, p. 236.
42 ‘There was no involvement of Asian bands in RAR’, John Hutnyk writes, inaccurately. J. Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry (London: Pluto, 2000), p. 156.
43 S. Mansoor, ‘Whatever happened to that Asian punk band?’, Observer, 10 January 2010; ‘Alien Kulture’, BBC Art Asia, 29 September 1980.
44 S. Manzoor, ‘Whatever happened to that Asian punk band?’.
45 D. Widgery, Preserving Disorder (London: Pluto, 1989), p. 120.
46 M. Collins, Hate: My Life in the British Far Right (London: BiteBack, 2011), pp. 124–126, 137–138, 141, 147, 166, 180, 191, 201 and 216.
47 See, for example, the account of a Crisis gig in High Wycombe, where the band was interrupted so that the audience could chase off an intended NF attack, in Socialist Worker, 3 March 1978.
48 Tony Wakeford of Crisis and later Sol Invictus explains his membership of IS (‘I think they were one of the best around at the time or the best of a bad lot. They were quite easy going and had a sense of humour and it wasn’t dogmatic’) and subsequent joining of the NF (‘as I got disillusioned with the left then that became an interest . . . I’m ashamed to say, you go out on the piss or to a party and you realise it’s for some dead genocidal maniac’s birthday or something’) in P. Webb, ‘Interview with Tony Wakeford and Reeve Malka’, Evening of Light, February 2008. For the politics of Douglas Pearce, an IMG member when in Crisis and later founder of Death in June: S. Home, ‘We mean it man: punk rock and anti-racism, or, Death in June not mysterious’, Datacide, summer 2000.
49 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, pp. 124, 344.
50 The Brixton Disorders 10-1 12 April 1981: report of an Inquiry by the Rt. Hon. the Lord Scarman, OBE (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1981), p. 45.
51 The guitarist Tom McCourt insists that 4 Skins were anti-fascist and that he had been involved in fighting between West Ham supporters and the BM Honour Guard.: I. Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984 (London: Cherry Red Books, 2010), pp. 295–298. For the perspective of those setting fire to the pub: A. Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movement (London: Pluto, 2013), p. 122; also T. Gopsill and R. Andersen, ‘Fascists and the fightback’, Leveller, July 1981, p. 10. Afterwards one of the bands, 4 Skins, offered to perform a benefit for RAR in Southall under the title, ‘Oi Against Racism’; RAR, however, were wary of the offer: J. Street, Rebel Rock: The Politics of Popular Music (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 77–78.
52 A. Sivanandan, ‘From resistance to rebellion’, Race and Class 2 (31) (1981), pp. 110–152, 146.
53 ‘C. Revolting’ (C. Walker), ‘“You can’t organise a riot”: racism, riots and arrests in 1981’, RS21, 30 December 2015.
53 ‘Northern Carniv
al for Leeds’, Socialist Worker, 30 May 1981.
55 R. Denselow, When the Music’s Over (London: Faber, 1989), p. 152.
56 Thompson, Wheels out of Gear, p. 176.
57 K. Ibrahim, Another Crossing (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2014), p. 39.
58 ‘Rock Against Racism’, film, Leeds Music Sound Bites, August 2017.
59 ‘Self defence is no offence: the day a black community rose up’ (Leeds: National Mobilising Committee, 1981). Also Anti-Nazi League, ‘Defend the Bradford 12’, leaflet; ‘Anti-Fascist blame Burns in Yorks’, Leeds Other Paper, 3 July 1981; ‘Beating the Brons Brigade’, Manchester Anti-Nazi League 3 (August 1981).
60 Ramamurthy, Black Star, pp. 120–145.
61 ‘NF start “war of nerves”’, Searchlight, April 1981.
62 ‘The battle for Chapel Market’, Fighting Talk 19 (1998), pp. 20–21; M. Testa, Militant Anti-Fascism: A Hundred Years of Resistance (London: AK Press, 2015), p. 140; ‘NF factions combine forces in campaign of violence against left’, Searchlight, October 1981, p. 4.
63 S. Birchall, Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action (London: Freedom Press, 2010), p. 61; M. Hayes, ‘Red Action – left-wing political pariah: Some observations regarding ideological apostasy and the discourse of proletarian resistance’, in E. Smith and M. Worley (eds), Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 229–246, 230.
64 There is a list of the initial expellees and their supporters in The News that Socialist Worker Forgot (London: Deacon Press, 1982).
65 M. Steel, Reasons to be Cheerful (London: Scribner, 2001), pp. 41–42.
66 M. O’Farrell, ‘Letter from Brixton Prison’, The News that Socialist Worker Forgot (London: Deacon Press, 1982), pp. 3–6.
67 D. Hann, Physical Resistance. Or, a Hundred Years of Anti-Fascism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013), p. 317.
68 ‘RAR news’, Temporary Hoarding, August 1981; RAR poster, ‘Funk the Royal Wedding’, Bishopsgate Institute archive LHM 128.
69 R. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History 1918–1985 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 290.
10
CONCLUSION
The combined anti-fascist campaign was the largest mass movement in Britain since the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Between 1977 and 1979, around nine million Anti-Nazi League leaflets were distributed and 750,000 badges sold. Around 250 ANL branches mobilised some 40,000–50,000 members. On the strength of individual donations, the League raised £600,000 between 1977 and 1980. As for Rock Against Racism, in 1978 alone, RAR organised three hundred gigs and five carnivals. That year, RAR claimed to have ninety affiliated groups.1 By 1979, RAR had organised over two hundred gigs and thirteen local Carnivals. RAR’s 1979 Militant Entertainment Tour, advertised with the image of a giant rhino and the slogan, ‘Nazis are No Fun’,2 featured forty bands at twenty-three concerts, including the likes of the Ruts, the Specials and the Angelic Upstarts. The tour covered some 2,000 miles on the road beginning with Cambridge, Leicester, West Runton in deepest Norfolk3 and culminated in a six-hour final show at Alexandra Palace. Given that nearly a quarter of million people attended just the first two Rock Against Racism Carnivals, it seems likely that between half a million and a million people altogether were involved in anti-racist activity, whether attending gigs or demonstrations, handing out leaflets or painting out graffiti.
Fifty Labour parties affiliated to the ANL, along with thirty AUEW branches, twenty-five trades councils, thirteen shop stewards’ committees, eleven NUM lodges and similar numbers of branches from the TGWU, CPSA, TASS, NUJ, NUT and NUPE. By the end of the campaign, even Len Murray, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, could be heard addressing anti-fascist rallies in London’s Brick Lane.4
Even those who did not support either Rock Against Racism or the ANL regard the campaign as a part of their history. A previous chapter described how Danny Reilly had responded to the League’s formation with distrust, fearing that it would undermine existing anti-fascist networks which had been built with care. Speak to him now and he defends the League: ‘They made it fashionable to be Anti-Nazi.’ David Landau was then a young Jewish anti-fascist, active in the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism. He thinks that the anti-racism of the ANL was too narrowly conceived and that its partisans were simply wrong to spend the years campaigning solely about the Front, rather than moving on to fight immigration controls. Yet faced with the argument that Thatcher beat the National Front, David springs to their defence: ‘I don’t buy the argument that Thatcher pulled the plug on the National Front. People have said that and belittled the role of the movement.’
To insist that protests worked offends against the accepted narrative of these years, which is that Margaret Thatcher, by pulling the Conservatives to the right, simultaneously defeated the Front while allowing its values to inform the policies of the 1980s, such as the British Nationality Act. In that story, racism continued without ever so much as skipping a beat. Indeed, that narrative is not altogether without substance. Five days before the May 1979 election, Mrs Thatcher took part in a phone-in programme on Radio 4. Challenged by one listener to withdraw her allegation that Britain was being ‘swamped’ by immigrants with alien cultures, the future Prime Minister refused to back down. ‘Some people do feel swamped’, she said, ‘if streets they have lived in for their whole lives are really now quite, quite different.’
The press coverage of this exchange was enthusiastic with The Sun contrasting the ‘twisted little men’ of the Front with their ‘jingoism and odious racialism’ to the common sense of Tory proposals to reduce immigration. ‘No reasonable person’, The Sun concluded, ‘could quarrel’ with the Tories’ plans to tighten immigration controls.5 What was at stake in The Sun’s coverage was the interpretation of a mood of popular anti-NF sentiment which underpinned that party’s defeat in 1979. It was possible to be an anti-Nazi, The Sun was suggesting, and vote Conservative in good faith. Indeed, if you were serious about stopping fascism, there was no better insurance than the Conservatives who, acting on their anti-Front instincts, would implement not all but just enough of the Front’s proposals to satisfy their voters.
Yet those who explain the Front’s decline solely in terms on the Tories’ right turn on immigration cannot address the evidence that the Front had grown fastest in earlier periods precisely at the time when leaders of the Conservatives pushed themselves to the right. It was Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech that first dragged the NF into prominence and it was Conservative and press attacks on the Kenyan and Ugandan Asians that helped the NF in 1968 and again in 1972.
Indeed, the years since 1979 have seen countless examples of mainstream politicians in Britain and Europe seeking to outflank opponents to their right by promising to be ‘realistic’ about immigration or to allow a ‘debate’ about multiculturalism. More often than not, this move has failed with voters preferring parties which were consistent about their racism to ones which had adopted this politics only opportunistically. In the first decade of the new millennium, a Labour government was so frightened by the threat of the British National Party that Home Secretary David Blunkett insisted that the most authoritarian of anti-refugee policies were necessary to prevent what would otherwise be civil war. In 2006, Jack Straw told the Lancashire Evening Telegraph that he would not speak to his female Muslim constituents unless they removed their face veils and was backed by Prime Minister Tony Blair. None of these moves undercut the BNP which increased its number of elected councillors from forty-one before Straw’s speech to fifty the year after. As the sociologist Cas Mudde observes, ‘right-wing turns [by] mainstream parties, be they of the centre-left or of the centre-right, have at best only short-term success’.6
No doubt, centre-party emulation of a far-right party can, in the right circumstances, undermine it. But as ever in politics, timing is everything. If Thatcher’s comments did hurt the Front, then they did so only because the far right was alr
eady in retreat. Thatcher’s comments came after the Rock Against Racism campaign during which the National Front lost its potential audience among the young, and after anti-fascist opposition had made it impossible for the Front to hold meetings or public rallies and after its members had been demoralised by repeated protests. In a context where the Front was already demoralised and publicly despised, the Conservative pitch for its remaining votes had a high likelihood of success.
One way to see the politics of 1976–1982 might be as a cyclical phenomenon, in which a violent far right emerges every twenty-five years or so (in 1976–1979, 1993–1994 and 2007–2009 . . .) only to be confronted by the left which repeatedly and inevitably defeats it. The process might be difficult and arduous, but there is a path to victory and all we have to do is follow it. This, often enough, is what anti-fascists have told ourselves. In 1993, the British National Party’s Derek Beackon was elected as a councillor at Tower Hamlets, a success which had always evaded the Front. The Anti-Nazi League was relaunched and together with other forces (Searchlight magazine, Anti-Fascist Action and many others) confronted the BNP in its East End base, with the result that Beackon lost his seat in 1994. This second wave of the Anti-Nazi League sought to rebuild a similar alliance to its 1970s precursor, inviting Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey to play at the Astoria and holding an Anti-Nazi League Carnival at Brockwell Park in 1993 with the Levellers playing.7 For those who took part, it was easy to tell ourselves that this was a movement on the same scale as the events of this book. Yet the events of the 1990s were not the rebirth of a mass movement but lacked the creativity, the ambition, or the benign chaos of the original.
In the mid-2000s, I was for three years a member of the national steering committee of Unite Against Fascism, an alliance between the SWP and another small group Socialist Action, which attempted to replicate the model of 1970s anti-fascism but with less creativity than even that the ANL of the 1990s. I watched in dismay as the BNP won over fifty local councillors and two MEPs by 2009, before collapsing under the weight of its own incompetence, and the effect of competition from UKIP and the Conservatives. While there were a few areas where anti-fascists contributed heroically to the marginalisation of the BNP (Barking and Dagenham, Kent), they were the exception.