by David Renton
3 A. Callinicos and A. Hatchett, ‘In defence of violence’, International Socialism 101 (September 1977), pp. 3–6.
4 P. Oliver, ‘Front “avengers” stop Labour MP’s speech’, Guardian, 8 September 1977.
5 L. Gill, ‘Left wing HQ gutted’, Evening Standard, 31 August 1977; ‘What the Nazis did to our HQ’, Socialist Worker, 10 September 1977.
6 Evening Post, 26 November 1977.
7 Nichol was among the pessimists. For the optimists, such as Steve Jeffreys, see I. Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time (London: Bookmarks, 2011), p. 426.
8 N. Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Routledge, Abingdon, 2017), p. 129.
9 Figures from Jim Nichol. He says that the SWP had 3,000 members in 1979. Ian Birchall suggests the decline was even sharper and that the organisation had just 2,000 members at the decade’s end. It should be borne in mind that in the aftermath of the first ANL Carnival, recruitment was said to be running at 150 a month or just under 2,000 a year. Perhaps the only way that these two sets of figures can be combined is if you think of an inner SWP core of about 500 people who were members of the group in both 1970 and 1980. Around this core, there was a fluctuating membership which was replaced almost in its entirety, first between 1970 and 1975 and then again between 1975 and 1979.
10 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 50.
11 J. Deighton, ‘Michael Seifert’, Guardian, 9 August 2017.
12 Roberts’ memories of this period are in E. Roberts, Strike Back (Orpington: Ernie Roberts, 1994), pp. 251–254.
13 New Society, 11 May 1978; Widgery, Beating Time, p. 49.
14 The ANL’s Founding Statement was reproduced in Searchlight, November 1977.
15 In 1977, the offer was declined, although Bill Dunn, the London district industrial organiser for the Communist Party, did join the ANL steering committee in spring 1978, following the first RAR carnival. From the same point, the CP as a whole turned towards support for the ANL with its publications celebrating ‘the magnificent ANL Carnival’, London Communists, 11 May 1978.
16 Various of Clough’s anti-Front statements are quoted in Socialist Worker, 17 December 1977.
17 D. Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), p. 124. The ANL’s launch is explained in similar terms in Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, p. 126.
18 ‘Anti-Nazi League’, CARF 3 (winter 1977–1978), p. 5.
19 M. Farrar and K. McDonnell, Big Flame: Rethinking Radical Politics (London: Merlin, forthcoming).
20 S. Birchall, Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action (London: Freedom Press, 2010), p. 38; D. Hann, Physical Resistance, Or a Hundred Years of Anti-Fascism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013), pp. 264–265.
21 J. Deason, ‘The broad left in the AUEW’, International Socialism, June 1975, pp. 8–16.
22 This is close to the account given by Jim Kelly: ‘The acknowledged leader within Inner East London was a PE teacher from Hackney John W. Micky Fenn, a TGWU shop steward from the Royal Group of Docks led the Outer East London squad, whose core was a group of fellow dockers’: J. Kelly and M. Metcalf, The Anti-Nazi League: A Critical Examination (London: Colin Roach Centre, 1995).
23 There are very few other accounts which mention Delaney. He is named however in Eddie Prevost’s recollections of the 1972 strikes on the docks: E. Prevost, ‘Vic Turner (1927–2012)’, Socialist Worker, 12 January 2013.
24 ‘Ban on the Front’s march but . . . will it stop the violence?’, Evening Standard, 21 September 1977. Lord Hailsham was interviewed on BBC2’s Nationwide, National Archives, HO 418/26.
25 ‘Note of a meeting held on 5 September 1977’, HO 418/26.
26 S. Taylor, The National Front in English Politics (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 135; J. Ball and C. Ryder, ‘Police foil bid to halt the Front’, Guardian, 9 October 1977.
27 D. Renton, ‘Anti-fascism in the North West 1976–1982’, North West Labour History 27 (2002), pp. 17–28.
28 ANL, ‘Founding statement’, leaflet, 1977.
29 ‘Nazis smashed in Bournemouth’, Socialist Worker, 3 December 1977.
30 M. Webster, ‘Red violence: will we have to meet force with force?’, Spearhead 76 (June 1974, pp. 4–5.
31 ‘Focus on a race hate march’, East Ender, 19 August 1977.
32 F. Wheen, ‘The National Front’s reptilian aspects’, New Statesman, 22 September 1978.
33 John Rose, Solidarity Forever: One Hundred Years of King’s Cross ASLEF (London: King’s Cross ASLEF, 1986), pp. 49, 73.
34 A spring 1979 Vegetarians Against the Nazis public meeting is reported in Beast, 1 June 1979.
35 For an example of UJS anti-NF materials: The National Front: From the Inside (London: Union of Jewish Students, 1976).
36 Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, BRI/02/023.
37 ‘National Front pupil paper worries schools’, Guardian, 24 October 1977; C. Cross, ‘National Front’s school campaign’, Observer, 8 January 1978; C. Lyte, ‘Help us weed out Red teachers, pupils urged’, Daily Mirror, 20 January 1978; ‘NF opens junior section’, Evening Post, 18 February 1978; ‘National Front Youth Movement’, Searchlight, November 1979.
38 D. Taylor, ‘Anti-Nazi League: perspectives for the coming period (great left headlines we have known, no. 94)’, Leveller, June 1978; also C. Coldman, ‘Reading school students drive out the Nazis’, Socialist Worker, 26 November 1977.
39 SKAN 6 (winter 1978), p. 10.
40 ‘SKAN rools OK’, New Musical Express, 3 June 1978; Women’s Voice, July 1978.
41 Webster was paraphrasing a passage in Mein Kampf in which Hitler speaks of the way demonstrations ‘bur[n] into the small, wretched individual the proud conviction that, paltry worm as he was, he was nevertheless a part of a great dragon’: I. Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936 Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 36.
42 J. Berry, ‘The National Front and . . . football’, Leveller, March 1978.
43 D. Renton, ‘Spurs Against the Nazis’, Fragments 2 (2000), pp. 27–30.
44 ‘Mitre B are the champs’, Hornsey Journal, 3 November 1978; ‘Spurs spurn Anti-Nazi group’, Weekly Herald, 16 November 1978; C. Nawrat, ‘Anti-Nazis cross the great divide’, Morning Star, 12 May 1979.
45 ‘Public Order – Home Office Statement’, 16 August 1977 and ‘Note of a meeting held on 20 September 1977’, both in National Archives, HO 418/26.
46 Labour Weekly, ‘The fight for our freedoms’, no date, January 1978?
47 Copsey, History of Anti-Fascism, pp. 148–149.
48 W. Frankel, ‘How real is the “threat” to Jews in Britain?’, The Times, 3 November 1978; also D. Leigh, ‘Jewish split on NF’, Guardian, 3 November 1978.
49 ‘Out of the gloom and into the summer’, Leveller, April 1979.
50 ‘In defence of the Anti-Nazis’, New Statesman, 6 October 1978.
7
WE GOT HIGH, WE TOUCHED THE SKY
The launch of the Anti-Nazi League came at a fortunate time for Rock Against Racism. By the end of 1977, RAR was approaching its anniversary and much of the organisers’ time was being taken up by efforts to woo Sham 69, the band most associated with the emerging skinhead scene. Sham 69 gigs at Kingston, the London School of Economics and Middlesex Polytechnic all ended in brawls. Security at RAR gigs was provided by the Royal Group of Docks shop stewards, with assistance from members of the construction union, UCATT.1 Red Saunders recalls one of the dockers carrying a club hammer with a hole drilled through the end of it with a big leather strap, so that if the hammer was dropped in fighting it could be recovered and used again. Saunders had a standard speech setting out how RAR supporters were intended to protect the stage:
If there’s fascists in the audience, let’s make sure people don’t get backstage. Then if you lose that it’s like a military retreat, then, whatever you do, protect the stage. Then if we lose the stage turn off the power so they can’t use the mic to go Sieg Heil.�
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The worst of the fighting was seen in the Sham 69 gig at Middlesex Poly. As the evening went on, those in charge of security became increasingly worried. At the back of the hall, a chant could be heard echoing, ‘What We Got? Fuck All. National Front’. At one desperate moment, NF- and BM-supporting skinheads invaded the stage and were able to briefly grab the microphone, shouting, ‘See you all up Ilford tomorrow’, a reference to a Front rally taking place the next day.2
Eventually the Front’s supporters were repulsed and the gig ended with Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey back on stage, singing with the Rasta group Misty in Roots.3 People were complaining afterwards that RAR had allowed the NF in. Saunders refused to apologise: ‘This is the fucking real world. This is Rock Against Racism. The white working class and a reggae band and we’ve brought them all together.’4
‘It was the most disturbing thing,’ Pursey recalls, ‘like being in a trench in the First World War . . . It was a battle I could only win by carrying on.’5
The physical conflicts were not limited to Sham 69 concerts; all around the country, violence between RAR-supporting bands and followers of the Front was becoming more frequent, with brawls breaking out at UK Subs and Ian Dury gigs. Andy Gill of the Gang of Four describes drinking at one Leeds pub, the Fenton, with a left-wing reputation, when about twenty Front supporters broke in: ‘It was like a Wild West saloon, chairs flying everywhere, people getting hit.’6
Rock Against Racism was also beginning to face a criticism from musicians, with members of the original punk scene resenting RAR as newcomers or complaining about the campaign’s attempts to politicise everyone around it, with Mark Perry of punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue complaining, ‘I don’t need to be told by a commie organisation to love blacks.’7 A number of the best-known punk bands, who had previously supported Rock Against Racism were beginning to disengage from the campaign. The anarcho-punk band Crass ceased to play Rock Against Racism events,8 as did including Ian Curtis’s Joy Division. Mark E. Smith of the Fall, whose songs had previously included ‘Hey Fascist’ (‘you’re going to get it through the head’) told the NME:
We did a lot of gigs for Rock Against Racism and what happens is before you go on they say, ‘Will you hold this poster up?’ – And it’s a picture of Belsen, “DON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN” . . . And I would say – we’re a political band, that’s what we sing about.9
The trend was expressed by the brief but considerable enthusiasm in winter 1977–1978 for the band Magazine, formed by Howard Devoto of Buzzcocks. In a gesture aimed at the likes of Rock Against Racism as well as the Front, Magazine’s first single was titled, ‘Shot By Both Sides’.10
What might once have felt like a sprint for the hearts and minds of young Britain was becoming something else: a nastier, longer and harder struggle.
Other signs were also pointing in the same direction. In January 1978, Margaret Thatcher’s advisor Nigel Lawson wrote to his leader, warning her that if their party was to strike a ‘populist note’, then she had no choice but to make a direct appeal to anti-immigrant voters.11 Later that same month, Mrs Thatcher gave an interview for Granada’s World in Action in which she echoed Enoch Powell’s warnings of the risks posed by immigration. ‘We are a British nation with British characteristics,’ she said:
Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened . . . People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.
Within days of her speech, the Conservatives had an eleven-point lead in the opinion polls.12
On 18 February 1978, the Front held a rally at the Digbeth Civil Hall in Birmingham. Five thousand anti-fascists protested, marching behind banners of the local Trades Council, constituency Labour parties, Christians Against Racism, Labour Party Young Socialists, Women’s Groups, as well as the SWP and IMG. One participant, Paul Gilroy, complained that anti-fascists
were treated with the ironic and highly significant experience of Labour Party stewards telling us not to be naughty and that we should stick to the route of the ‘protest march’ worked out with the police. They seemed to think it was Aldermaston 1963 not Birmingham 1978.13
In the Yorkshire Film Archive, there is a film of a protest in Bradford against the National Front, filmed in March or April 1978. The Front were due to hold an election meeting at Wellington Primary School in Eccleshill, with John Tyndall speaking, and protesters had gathered from the Anti-Nazi League and the Indian Workers Association. A member of the Asian Youth Movement in a green cap can be seen determinedly offering his magazine to everyone who passes. The police seem nervous and ill-equipped, just wearing black raincoats and helmets with chin straps. The anti-fascists are men and women in their twenties, with shoulder-length hair, gripping their hands against the cold. A teenage anti-fascist with shaved head, watching the police film him, dances back, showing off his new red t-shirt at the cops. Half a dozen National Front supporters walk towards their meeting, all of them men. One of this group, with thick sideburns and a camouflage top does his best to stride his arms and legs in time with the martial music playing in his head. By mid-afternoon, there are between five hundred and a thousand anti-fascists ready to oppose the main NF crowd. The arrests, when they come, seem diffident and English – almost polite.14
Matthew Caygill attended
the first very big and exciting [ANL] meetings in Leeds, a local Hyde Park area meeting crammed in a school in Brudenell with at least a hundred people attending and being very impressed by [the speakers] [Evening Post journalist] Pete Lazenby and [socialist historian] John Charlton.15
Caygill recalls ‘violent and scary confrontations in Leeds city centre’,16 and ‘a glorious Saturday’ in April 1978 when ‘several thousand people came out to surround an NF meeting in a city centre school’.17 Martin Webster was inside the hall, telling his supporters:
We have been put on the defensive today by raucous beer can-throwing stinking animals. They are in fact an insult to the animal kingdom. Coming to this meeting we had to go through spit, shouts of abuse, kicks, obscenities and filth from these people . . . The Anti-Nazi League is the new name of an old gang. Very few of them are British . . . The Anti-Nazi League is part of the Socialist Workers Party and its organiser Paul Holborow is a member of the SWP as are nearly all of the local organisers . . . [The SWP’s] organiser Tony Cliff is not the son of the English sod but an Israeli passport holder . . . .18
It was in middle of these events that the League approached the RAR collective with plans to put on a new and larger ANL event to take place around the time of the May 1978 local elections. Dave Widgery describes the negotiations:
The Anti-Nazi League, founded a year after RAR but usually, on the grounds of greater respectability, regarded as the parent organisation, was anxious to hold a joint demonstration with RAR. Although none of the London local councils would help, the GLC gave permission to use Victoria Park . . . There was obvious unity of purpose between RAR and the ANL but also creative tension: we were approaching the same question from opposite directions. We agreed on the format: a juxtaposition of a political meeting in Trafalgar Square and an open-air concert in Victoria Park would make the politics more fun and the music more political. But RAR’s unannounced ambition was to turn the piece into the biggest piece of revolutionary street theatre London had ever seen.19
Jerry Fitzpatrick was placed in charge of logistics:
I remember booking the event through the GLC. The form said that if you had more than 10,000 people, you needed portaloos and all that. So I booked a mini-festival, for 10,000, not more . . . We made a deal to book the PA; we paid three thousand there and then, four thousand on the day . . . There were scaffolders from Donegal who put up the stage. Red and Roger booked the bands. Tom Robinson, Steel Pulse. Tom Robinson got X-Ray Spex.
The question of which band would headline the propo
sed Carnival was far from straightforward. RAR wanted the Clash to perform. The band’s manager Bernie Rhodes was willing to agree, so long as his band had top billing. The RAR tradition was, however, that the final, most prominent, slot should usually be reserved for a black band. According to Chris Salewicz, biographer of the Clash’s singer Joe Strummer, the band agreed with their manager. Strummer, in particular, was desperate to headline the Carnival. His own brother was a former NF member who had killed himself several years before and by taking top billing the singer could atone for this past: ‘In Strummer’s mind, he would be head-lining the whole event, righteously opposing the National Front – the personification of positive punk’.20
Jerry Fitzpatrick was present in the negotiations. Neither RAR or ANL was willing to concede. But neither were Rhodes or his band:
Two weeks before the carnival, we started trying to book the Clash. I went to a meeting with their manager Bernie Rhodes, then one with the band . . . I remember Mick Jones flicking ash in my hair. Finally Joe Strummer spoke and said, ‘Fuck it, we’ll show them!’ That was just two weeks beforehand.
Such tensions were kept out of public view, with RAR’s advocates focusing on the politics behind the Carnival. Melody Maker interviewed Syd Shelton. ‘We try and use popular culture which we all enjoy to mobilise people . . . getting them to take a stand against the Front.’ Shelton insisted that RAR’s audience was not the already convinced but working-class kids: ‘There are no jobs for them, they’re living in cities and estates that are closing down . . . Conditions are right for the Front.’21
Coverage in the music press predicted that maybe as many as 20,000 people would join the Carnival, with anti-fascist journalist Martin Walker telling the readers of The Guardian that the event would be neither a march nor a concert but a ‘walking musical carnival’.22 A rather more effective piece of publicity came from Nicky Horne at Capital Radio, who told his audience the night before to get down to Victoria Park. ‘But arrive early,’ he continued, ‘a lot of marchers will be turning up.’