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1978: Fighting Fascism on Brick Lane

tim — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:03:31 +0000

The mid-to-late 1970s were something of a high point for organised fascists. The National Front could mobilise thousands of members for confrontational demonstrations. Their street stalls and paper sales littered the pavement, Their outspoken racism attracted sympathy, if not outright support. Violence, provocation and intimidation were the order of the day.

It was a time when the fascists must have entertained the notion that they were going places. Maybe soon a desperate and ramshackle ruling class would employ them to throw the final blows against a militant labour movement. It would give them free reign to “sort out” minority communities — to drive Asian, Afro-Caribbean and Jewish people out of Britain. It would rely on them to shore up — or perhaps replace — a rickety, failing government. These delusions ultimately came to nothing.

In some ways, the situation today for the BNP looks better than that for the NF thirty years ago.

In the 1970s the NF failed over and over again to get their members elected to local councils — let alone Parliament. The BNP today has something over fifty borough, district, town and city councillors. It has a member elected to the Greater London Assembly and an electoral base that puts them in a position to win seats in the European Parliament.

For their own reasons, the BNP have moved away from confrontational street politics. But this move does not negate, does not wipe from the record of history the actual aims and intentions of the violent, fascistic core of the BNP. For now, their methods appear distinct and far-removed from the tactics of the 1970s but they remain a real, political and physical threat.

A survey of the anti-fascist movement of the 1970s and that of today tells a similar — dispiriting but not totally disheartening — story. Take the Socialist Workers Party for example. For the SWP, their involvement in anti-fascism is a major point of honour. From the “Battle of Lewisham” to the current organising efforts against the BNP, the SWP has been “at the centre of struggle”. This is only part of the truth. The SWP’s record on anti-fascism is not as “honourable” as they would paint it.

The story of how UAF’s predecessor organisation, the Anti Nazi League, betrayed the local community of Brick Lane in East London is a warning from the past of the consequences of splitting anti-fascist activity:

Two large mobilisations were planned for Saturday 24 September 1978. One an enormous carnival in south London, called by the Anti Nazi League (ANL) — and the other a march through the East End of London by the National Front.

To be sure, both events took a long time to plan, coordinate and organise. Anti-fascists had been busily booking and trying to fill coaches from every part of the country for months. The fascists had been organising themselves for a massive show of force. Stuck between these two groups were the residents of Brick Lane and a small band of supporters from the local labour movement.

A few weeks before the planned fascist demonstration, the ‘Hackney and Tower Hamlets Defence Committee’ and a number of socialist and other campaign groups received definitive evidence that the NF planned to march through Brick Lane. The fascist march was almost certainly planned to clash with the “Carnival”.

Upon receipt of this information, the Defence Committee issued a wide appeal for a demonstration in opposition. This part of East London was — and remains so today — a predominantly Asian community, with a high concentration of Bengalis. The NF’s march was planned to do two things: to “celebrate” the opening of a new NF headquarters close by; and to physically intimidate the local community, to crush their confidence and to claim political territory. The tactic of opening fascist headquarters in or near minority-community areas was not a new phenomena. Before and after World War 2, the British Union of Fascists and its successor organisations opened offices in predominantly Jewish areas.

When the leadership of the ANL were warned of the NF march they responded: “No, there’s not much we can do, we’ve got a concert organised which mustn’t be spoiled”. This, just a year after the great battle of Lewisham in August 1977.

As Workers’ Action [foreunner of Solidarity] reported: “the National Front celebrated its greatest triumph in years. Unchallenged and unmolested, they marched 1,500 strong through the City of London to Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch, ‘within spitting distance of Brick Lane’, as the NF leader Richard Verrall gloatingly put it.”

Activists from Workers’ Action (forerunner of the AWL), the Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, and the Black Socialist Alliance joined the resistance, but, with the big-name anti-fascist organisation off at its carnival, mostly the community was left to organise its own defence.

Mobilised by the Defence Committee, up to 1,000 anti-fascists occupied Redchurch Street making it impossible for the NF to march into the heart of the community. Augmented by a small number of people persuaded to come over from the ANL carnival, the anti-fascists held their ground, but the counter-demonstration was nowhere big or organised enough to take the initiative, to widen protection or to halt the fascist march altogether.

Had the ANL called off their carnival, had even a fraction of the 100,000 concert goers in Brockwell Park, south London, made their way to the East End, the National Front would have faced a humiliating defeat. It was not to be so.

The results, as we reported them at the time, were as follows: “Already, the Bengali community in Spitafields is paying the price for this defeat. After the Nazi rally dispersed, groups of fascists began prowling the area. One gang of 50-60 thugs got through to Brick Lane and smashed up an Asian shop before being driven off. In several underground trains and stations, black people and anti-fascists were attacked by cock-a-hoop National Front bullies. The hugely boosted morale of the Front will mean an escalation of racist assaults in the area and a renewed push to control the Sunday market in Brick Lane. That is the price of the fun and games in Brockwell Park…”

What the leaders of the ANL did on that day — the leadership of the SWP in particular — must go down in history as a shameful display of sectarianism.

Too often, the SWP Central Committee put the narrow interests of developing prestige and advantage for their own organisation before the tasks of building, educating and mobilising the labour movement on the basis of working class politics. We should remind the SWP of their real history in the anti-fascist movement and win as many of their members as possible to a militant, working class anti-fascist politics.

Nothing is more important

JamieSW — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:03:38 +0000

There is a tangible shift occurring in British politics. Gone are the days of traditional class politics, when the working class voted en masse for Labour and the more privileged for the Conservatives. A new force is emerging, which will, if left unchecked, prove disastrous for both Labour and the left in general.

Magnus Marsdal’s article talks about the changing politics of Norway and finds comparisons with the rest of western Europe. It is a phenomenon that is also taking place in Britain, albeit a few years later than in some other countries.

The British National Party (BNP) was formed in 1982 out of an earlier split within the National Front and for many years it languished on the fringes of politics. In 1999 Nick Griffin became its leader and his more political and media savvy approach enabled the party to exploit rising racial tensions in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001. Since then, against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia, a growing eastern-European migrant workforce and New Labour’s fixation with Middle England, the party has risen steadily. It now has 55 councillors and last month secured a seat on the London Assembly.

And all this in a period of supposed economic success.

The BNP has long been dismissed as a cranky fascist party, made up of thugs, criminals and Nazis. While it is true that the leadership has its ideological roots in fascism, it is time we had a better explanation for the party’s rise and appeal.

Society in Britain, like much of the industrialised world, has become dislocated over the past few decades. Globalisation and the increasing dominance of international finance and corporations have shifted power far away from local communities. This, coupled with the loss of empire, Britain’s changing place in the world and even the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have all challenged the identity of many, particularly those towards the bottom of the economic ladder, who naturally are more concerned about change.

Politically, there has also been the growing divorce between the political parties and their electorates. The preoccupation with a small number of voters in a few key marginals has resulted in New Labour echoing the whims and prejudices of a mythical Middle England. Class has been removed as an economic and political category in Westminster discourse. Labour’s traditional voters feel ignored, taken for granted and even abandoned. At the same time, the Tories have for decades ceased to offer a real opposition in many traditional Labour areas, leaving a dangerous vacuum.

In 1968 US sociologist Don Warren described the emergence of the ‘middle American radical’ to explain the rise of right-wing presidential candidate George Wallace. He saw a radicalised group of voters, drawn largely from the skilled working class, who opposed the political and economic elites while simultaneously despising those who they regarded as undeserving poor. A white identity emerged that had no political articulation.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in today’s Britain. The Labour Party too often fails to articulate the concerns of large swathes of its traditional working class supporters. Over the past 20 years turnout has slumped in Labour heartlands. Suddenly, as the BNP has emerged as a political force, many are now turning out to vote for them. Towns like Stoke-on-Trent reflect this change. Only a few years ago Labour held every seat on the council. Today, it holds just 16 out of 60, with the BNP close behind with nine. The local ethnic minority population is comparatively small, suggesting that voters are flocking to the BNP for some far more fundamental reasons.

Nor is there much comfort for parties to the left of Labour. It is easy to blame New Labour for the rise of the BNP but few have questioned why the far-left parties fail to attract significant support from white working-class voters. If anything, the far-left vote has actually shrunk since 1997 and the occasional successes of Respect or the Greens have been based on specific ethnic minority communities or middle-class liberals.

Race is a prism through which many voters view their world but it is not the underlying issue. That is why immigration minister Liam Byrne’s attempts to quicken the introduction of the Australian points system will ultimately fail to deal with the political problem. He might hope to appease voters’ concerns over immigration but unfortunately he, like many others, is misunderstanding the rise of the BNP.

Britain might have been slower to see the emergence of a major far-right party than elsewhere but this could change very quickly. Next year’s European elections, contested under proportional representation, will give the BNP its greatest chance to break into the mainstream.

The rise of the BNP is not a passing phenomena. We must now debate new strategies for organisation and policy, counter- organise on the ground and deal with the material issues that lie behind its popular support. Nothing is more important for this movement.

Jon Cruddas is the Labour MP for Dagenham. Nick Lowles is editor of Searchlight magazine

This persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe

JamieSW — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:15:34 +0000

At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race – with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi’s new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies – Roma and Sinti people – whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.

The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy’s three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy’s highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that “all Gypsies were thieves”, rather than because of their “Gypsy nature”.

Official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps have been punctuated with vigilante attacks. In May, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of racist violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. The response of Berlusconi’s government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing? “That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies,” shrugged Maroni; while fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared: “The people do what the political class isn’t able to do.”

This, it should be recalled, is taking place in a state that under Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship played a willing part in the Holocaust, during which more than a million Gypsies are estimated to have died as “sub-humans” alongside the Nazi genocide perpetrated against the Jews. The first expulsions of Gypsies by Mussolini took place as early as 1926. Now the dictator’s political heirs, the “post-fascist” National Alliance, are coalition partners in Berlusconi’s government. In case anyone missed that, when the Alliance’s Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome in April, his supporters gave the fascist salute chanting “Duce” (equivalent to the German “Führer”) and Berlusconi enthused: “We are the new Falange” (the Spanish fascist party of General Franco).

So you might have expected that Berlusconi would be taken to task for his vile treatment of the surviving Roma of Europe at the G8 summit in Japan this week by those fearless crusaders for human rights, George Bush and Gordon Brown. Far from it. Instead, Bush’s spokesman issued a grovelling apology to the Italian prime minister on Tuesday for a US briefing describing his “good friend” Berlusconi as “one of the most controversial leaders of Italy … hated by many”.

It has been left to others to speak out against this eruption of naked, officially sanctioned racism. Catholic human rights organisations have damned the fingerprinting of Gypsies as “evoking painful memories”. The chief rabbi of Rome insisted it “must be stopped now”. Roma groups have demonstrated, wearing the black triangles Gypsies were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps, and anti-racist campaigners in Rome this week began to bombard the interior ministry with their own fingerprints in protest against the treatment of the Gypsies. But, given that the European establishment has long turned a blind eye to anti-Roma discrimination and violence in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, along with the celebration of SS units that took part in the Holocaust in the Baltic states, perhaps it’s no surprise that they ignore the outrages now taking place in Italy.

The rest of us cannot. There are particular reasons why Italy has been especially vulnerable in recent years to xenophobic and racist campaigns – even while crime is actually lower than it was in the 1990s (and below the level of Britain). The scale of recent immigration from the Balkans and Africa, an insecure and stagnant job market and the collapse of what was previously a powerful progressive and anti-fascist culture have all combined to create a particularly fearful and individualistic atmosphere, the leftwing Italian veteran Luciana Castellina argues.

But the same phenomena can be seen to varying degrees all over Europe, where racist and Islamophobic parties are on the march: take the far right Swiss People’s party, which on Tuesday succeeded in collecting enough signatures to force a referendum on banning minarets throughout the country. In Britain, as Peter Oborne’s Channel 4 film on Islamophobia this week underlined, a mendacious media and political campaign has fed anti-Muslim hostility and violence since the 2005 London bombings – just as hostility to asylum seekers was whipped up in the 1990s. The social and democratic degeneration now reached by Italy can happen anywhere in the current climate.

Italy has a further lesson for Britain and the rest of Europe. Berlusconi’s election victory in April was built on the collapse of confidence in the centre-left government of Romano Prodi, which stuck to a narrow neoliberal programme and miserably failed to deliver to its own voters. Meanwhile, centre-left politicians such as Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, pandered to, rather than challenged, the xenophobic agenda of the rightwing parties – tearing down Gypsy camps himself and absurdly claiming last year that 75% of all crime was committed by Romanians (often confused with Roma in Italy).

What was needed instead, as in the case of other countries experiencing large-scale immigration, was public action to provide decent housing and jobs, clamp down on exploitation of migrant workers and support economic development in Europe’s neighbours. That opportunity has now been lost, as Italy is gripped by an ominous and retrograde spasm. The persecution of Gypsies is Italy’s shame – and a warning to us all.

It's no surprise that the BNP's rise and New Labour's demise are linked

JamieSW — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:19:57 +0000

On Wednesday evening around 7pm, the Reverend Roger Gayler, vicar of St Marks parish, went to answer a knock on the door. It was the night before the Chadwell Heath byelection for Barking and Dagenham council in Greater London, and Gayler had recently written an open letter to his flock.

“I rarely enter the party political arena and do so very reluctantly, but as a matter of Christian principle I feel this time I must,” he wrote. “The [British National party] would divide our community, spread fear through lies, and reduce services to those in our community who most need them (they proposed huge cuts in services for the elderly and young people in their budget). They preach the politics of hate.”

The man at the door was Robert Bailey, BNP leader on the council. He was clearly agitated. “He asked me whether I’d written it,” recalls Gayler. “I said ‘yes’.”

“This goes against the democratic process,” said Bailey.

“It’s all part of the democratic process,” replied Gayler.

“You’re just a fascist,” said Bailey, and then scrumpled the letter and threw it at the vicar.

“There was no shouting or screaming but it was obviously a visit from a very rattled person,” says Gayler.

The next evening, in Dagenham’s council chamber, a multiracial team of council workers tallied the votes. The BNP had 12 seats on the council and was hoping this would be their 13th. In the end, a seat vacated by Labour was won by the Tories by a comfortable margin. Nothing strange there. The BNP candidate came third with 25% of the vote in a ward the party had never contested before. Sadly, there seemed to be nothing strange there either.

Terry Justice, the Tory victor, said he looked forward to working with all his fellow councillors. When I asked Margaret Mullane, the Labour candidate, what she made of the size of the BNP vote, she said: “You’ll have to ask the BNP about that really.” Leaving Dagenham civic centre, with the clock nudging closer to midnight, I felt I was heading back to the 30s.

Bailey is not the only one who should be feeling rattled. True, under the circumstances, the fact that they didn’t win could be regarded as a victory. But those circumstances are dire.

The BNP’s advances have been spotty – still limited to particular towns and regions. But over the last decade those spots have become larger and more widespread. Back in 1993, its gain of a single council seat in London’s Tower Hamlets produced a brief, but intense, moment of national introspection. Today it has more than 50 councillors in around 20 councils plus a member of the London assembly. By increments it has become an accepted, if contested, fact of British municipal life.

For all the talk of Islamo-fascism – that desperately belligerent phrase that some hurl about in the hope that it may one day land on a coherent meaning – plain old-fashioned fascism is the force truly making gains. Elsewhere in Europe, where the far right runs councils and holds cabinet seats, things are far worse. In Italy, the state recently started fingerprinting Gypsies, along with a promise to take Gypsy children not attending school into custody. In Switzerland, the far right is in government. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, hard-right, nationalist and anti-immigrant parties regularly receive more than 10% of the vote. In Norway, it is more than twice that; in Switzerland, the figure it is almost three times as much.

If our Enlightenment values really are under threat, then the primary challenge seems to be domestic – and far more familiar and entrenched than some would have us believe. This is not a handful of young, nihilist men with backpacks – it is marginalised communities with ballot papers.

None of this denies or excuses the rise in jihadism. Indeed, it is only possible to make an effective stand against either by recognising the potency of both. The “tolerant, liberal” society that immigrants – particularly Muslims – are being told to join has long been eroding. While multiculturalism has been under assault, nostalgic visions of a mythological monoculture have been given a new lease of life.

Just as there is more to racism in Britain than the BNP, the BNP’s rise tells us more about Britain than just racism. It is a canary in the mine – an early warning system signalling the complacency of our political culture in which our political class has been complicit. Trapped in a hopeless spiral of negativity, people will vote against anything – immigration, the Tories, Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Scottish nationalism, Gordon Brown or Europe, to name a few. But it seems a long time since large numbers of people voted for anything.

So the fact that the BNP has performed best in Labour strongholds should come as no surprise. Its rise and New Labour’s demise are linked. The government is failing even on its own modest terms. Child poverty and pensioner poverty are up. Economic inequality is now greater than under the Tories. Inflation is rising, house prices falling, and last week workers were again asked to tighten their belts. Never mind no return to boom and bust – many feel like they are about to crash and burn. People are desperate.

There is nothing inevitable about this shift from despondency to demagoguery. Black and Asian people are overrepresented among the poor and vulnerable, and they aren’t voting for the BNP. Nor are the overwhelming majority of white working-class people. Nonetheless, the trend has always been likely and logical. A party that has its historical roots and electoral base in the working class and then fails to advance the interests of that class will engender cynicism. New Labour’s electoral project is based in no small measure on the calculation that the poor have nowhere else to go. A small but determined minority have retreated into their laagers in search of solutions and solace.

However, New Labour’s decision to follow them there made no sense, either morally or strategically. Following the strong showing of the BNP in Burnley, Anthony Giddens, the architect of the third way, spoke of being “tough on immigration and tough on the causes of hostility to immigrants”. Tony Blair prioritised “crime and social behaviour” and “immigration and asylum”.

But these populist responses hold no sustainable answers to the particular and urgent material needs of the white working class. Incarcerating asylum seekers or bashing the niqab built no houses, created no jobs and educated no children. That does not, in itself, necessarily make them wrong – but as a response to the concerns of Labour’s base they were worse than useless. New Labour’s legislative shortcomings made a BNP revival possible; the government’s rhetorical excesses made it electorally palatable.

Given its huge majority, Labour could have made the case against racism and xenophobia. But rather than stand on principle, it has preferred to pander. Having ducked the major challenges, it has left it to the likes of Rev Roger Gayler to literally face the consequences of the failure head on.

BNP compares Auschwitz to Disneyland

JamieSW — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:30:56 +0000

Ken Booth, the North East region BNP organiser, objected to a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau by a party of 130 school children from the North East, accompanied by Phil Wilson, the MP for Sedgefield. On his return Wilson vowed to keep fighting the “Holocaust denying BNP”, which polled 8.9% in the by-election in which he was elected last July.

Booth, a recent recruit to the BNP from the National Front, told the Northern Echo, which had reported the trip, that the BNP did not deny the Holocaust but went on to make a mockery of his own statement by claiming that the party refused to believe the “official figures” or recognise the “authenticity” of the buildings at Auschwitz. He concluded by attacking Auschwitz as a money-making venture, saying “it’s become a Disneyland equivalent”.

To compare the indescribable suffering inflicted upon millions of people to an amusement park is an astonishingly malevolent outburst. But the BNP did not discipline Booth. On the contrary the party agreed wholeheartedly with his sentiments, publishing an article attacking not only the Holocaust Education Trust, which organised the visit, but also the whole concept of educating children about the Holocaust, on the grounds that it is “racist” because it omits other politically motivated atrocities.

But why would the BNP object so vehemently to teaching children about the Holocaust and not other shameful historical episodes? The reason is that the moral revulsion generated by the horrors wrought by Nazism and Fascism during the Second World War has been one of the principal factors keeping the far right in check since 1945.

The BNP may be removed from the perpetration of the Holocaust by a generation or two but it remains ideologically complicit in the denial of its horror and suffering. Nick Griffin declared in 1998, only a year before he became leader of the BNP: “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lamp shades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat … I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”

Similar views alongside other racist statements published in his The Rune magazine earned Griffin a two-year suspended prison sentence in 1998 for inciting racial hatred. Griffin has never clearly retracted or repudiated this statement. Although the BNP website claims “Nick Griffin has repeatedly stated that he has changed his views”, Griffin is on record earlier this year saying that he only believes the Holocaust happened because, “I believe what the law says I must believe”.

It is very telling that the BNP’s article attacking Holocaust education did not once mention the Nazis but only described Auschwitz-Birkenau as a memorial to the “horrors of the Second World War”.

Booth’s letter drew angry responses from Northern Echo readers. One wrote of the harrowing experience endured by his now deceased uncle who helped liberate the Belsen concentration camp, the first to be liberated by the British army. “What he saw, how for years afterwards every night he relived what he’d seen, how it damaged his health, are all matters of fact, not conjecture. The descriptions of what he saw at Belsen were not the product of fiction, but the words of an eyewitness who saw the truth the far right denies.”

The liberation of Belsen by the British Army in 1945 was a distressing but proud moment in the history of the British Army. The rescue brought to an end the inhuman suffering inflicted upon its emaciated inmates, although it unfortunately came too late for thousands of them who were sick with typhus or whose internal organs were irreversibly damaged from months of starvation. The contribution of the British Army to ending the Holocaust is worth bearing in mind for anyone thinking of joining either the BNP or its pitiful front group, the Association of British Ex-Service Personnel (ABEX), operated by Simon Bennett who runs an libellous website attacking Searchlight as a sideline.

“There are countless former British servicemen who … have more honesty, decency, courage and patriotism in one molecule of their body than the BNP has in its entire membership,” continued the same outraged reader. “And each can look any holocaust denier in the eye and call them what they are – liars.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.