by David Renton
At Brockwell Park, the same questions kept on being asked: was Brick Lane safe? It is possible to imagine the relief of the likes of Saunders or Widgery at mid-afternoon, with the Carnival at its height, when Ernie Roberts of the engineers union took to the platform to break the news that yes the Front was at Brick Lane. But so too were anti-fascists in their tens of thousands, they had driven the NF away, and the streets were safe. Roberts concluded: ‘The NF’s feeble attempt to disrupt the carnival and invade Brick Lane is completely defeated.’97 The audience cheered.
It would have been a fantastic speech, had any of it been true. Indeed, while it would be tempting to criticise Roberts for misleading the crowd, he was very much ‘decoration’ at the head of an alliance which others controlled. No one would expect Roberts to have an independent source of information. He was relying on what others in the League told him, that is, its full-time leadership.
Two hundred and fifty Front supporters had been able to assemble in the East End. According to Steve Tilzley:
The National Front marched practically unopposed through the East End and held a rally in Curtain Road, off Great Eastern Street. There had been a small, token anti-racist presence in the area to protest against their presence but they were heavily outnumbered by the Nazis and the police.98
Mike Luft, a veteran anti-fascist from Preston, was at Brick Lane and remembers ‘the sectarian left’ criticising the League, while themselves ‘refusing to actually organise physically against the very young NF kids’.
Martin Lux recalls an apathetic crowd of anti-fascists in east London: ‘I could well understand the local youth defending their area against any Nazi incursion but the rest of us were confused, lacked the initiative to take the offensive.’ Fifty or so anti-fascists did break out of police lines but were too few to achieve anything.99
David Landau’s memories are Pythonesque:
There had been demos before along Brick Lane and lots of people came out when the NF were leafleting there. But this time it was much smaller. What I remember . . . was bizarre. The RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party] were out in force. But in all, the left was outnumbered roughly two to one. What I remember is the RCP starting a chant of ‘Police protect the Nazis’. Generally, that’s my analysis. But this time, the police were protecting us.
The League leadership did eventually instruct a group of several hundred people (i.e. SWP members) to leave the Carnival and make sure that Brick Lane was kept NF-free. But the decision was delayed and the group sent late, arriving in east London only at around 6 p.m., long after the National Front had dispersed.
Tariq Mehmood was now a member of the Asian Youth Movement. At Brick Lane, he joined up with local youth only to find them outnumbered. He feels bitter about the way in which the left let down the residents of Brick Lane: ‘Really, the Carnival should have been diverted as a historic gesture and wiped out the fascists but the SWP didn’t seem to work like that . . . [They] did a terrible disservice to the struggle against racism.’100
To this day, there are those who insist that no mistakes were made. One of them is Jerry Fitzpatrick of the SWP and the ANL, who maintains that the League’s leadership were right to focus on the Carnival to the exclusion of everything else. He has no regrets either about Ernie Roberts’s speech or Brick Lane’s isolation:
[T]he success of the march depended on us going through Brixton. That was more important than any stunt the NF pulled. Even if we had sent more numbers to Brick Lane, it couldn’t have been enough. The police always had it covered. The Front were contained. We were always going to be contained, which is in fact what happened. We had to keep our eyes on the prize.
Dave Widgery was rather less willing to accept that anti-fascists should have left the defence of Brick Lane to the police. In his account:
The transport logistics were not worked out and the anti-fascists who did attempt to block off the Front in Brick Lane were demoralised and easily pushed about by the belligerent police pressure. The Front were harassed but not stopped and by the time reinforcements had arrived by Victoria line from Brixton, the National Front had dispersed.101
Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council characterised the failure to protect Brick Lane as a significant defeat:
There has been a massive campaign to get the National Front out of their warehouse headquarters in Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch . . . [East End activists] were openly and bitterly critical of the ANL for their failure to divert sufficient help from the Carnival to block the NF march.102
Richard Pole was one of those sent to Brick Lane. It took him hours from Brixton and by the time he arrived it was too late. ‘I remember quite a lot of bitterness being addressed to people who had been at the carnival . . . Yes, we did mess up.’
After the Carnival, Socialist Worker published an apology. Unfortunately, the paper failed to state clearly what had been done wrong. The paper in fact repeated the deceit, claiming that ‘2,000 anti-racists . . . held Brick Lane throughout the day – an extremely arduous and frustrating task’.103 This was a perfectly good description of the steps the ANL should have taken, but not what they had actually done.
Notes
1 D. Widgery, Beating Time: Riot ’n’ Race ’n’ Rock and Roll (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), p. 80; B. Case, ‘Angels with dirty faces’, New Musical Express, 11 March 1978.
2 The Ilford demonstration had been banned under the Public Order Act: J. Dickinson, ‘NF march banned’, Evening News, 22 February 1978. The Front proceeded regardless, were confronted by anti-fascists and thirty arrests were made: I. Mather, R. Lustig and K. O’Lone, ‘Police arrests in Ilford clashes’, Observer, 25 February 1978.
3 G. Marshall, Spirit of ’69 A Skinhead Bible (Dunoon: S. T. Publishing, 1994), pp. 73–79; ‘High tension’, Socialist Worker, 11 March 1978; R. Huddle and R. Saunders (eds), Reminiscences of RAR (London: Redwords, 2016), p. 89.
4 D. Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), pp. 52–53.
5 A. Ogg, No More Heroes: A Complete History of UK Punk from 1976 to 1980 (London: Cherry Red Books, 2006), p. 512.
6 S. Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (London: Faber, 2004), p. 124.
7 R. Sabin, ‘I won’t let that dago go by: rethinking punk and racism’, in R. Sabin (ed.), Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London: Routledge, 1999) pp. 199–291, 207. Perry’s ally Danny Baker writes in his memoir, ‘You certainly won’t find any politics in Sniffin’ Glue nor nine out of ten punk records’, D. Baker, Going to Sea in a Sieve (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012), p. 139.
8 Crass’s 1979 album Stations of the Crass included the song ‘White Punks on Hope’: ‘All their RAR bands and their protest walk / Thousands of white men standing in a park / Objecting to racism’s like a candle in the dark’.
9 New Musical Express, 19 August 1978.
10 Interviewed by Lucy Toothpaste before the formation of Magazine, Pete Shelley opined, ‘The organised left is organised. It’s doctrinaire. Everybody’s a text-book lefty, it just gets rather boring. I’d rather people made up their own minds about things’: ‘Buzzcocks’, JOLT 3 (August 1977).
11 D. Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974–1979 (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 318.
12 A. W. Turner, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s (London: Aurum Press, 1978), p. 224.
13 NORMANCAR Bulletin 5 (spring 1978); G. Roy (P. Gilroy), ‘We united and out on the streets to smash the Front in B’ham’, Temporary Hoarding 5 (1978); I. Geffen (NCCL), ‘Civil liberty and public order in Birmingham’, spring 1978, Searchlight Archive, University of Northampton, BRI/02/29; G. Brock, ‘Police attacked at Front rally’’ Observer, 19 February 1978; M. Pithers, ‘National Front rally brings call for curbs on extremists’, Guardian, 20 February 1978. There is an NF account of the same rally in M. Webster, Lifting the Lid Off the ‘Anti-Nazi League’ (London: NFN Press, 1978), pp.
15–16.
14 Martin Webster speech, Leeds High School, 22 April 1978, Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/114.
15 ‘Meeting called to discuss NF in Leeds’, Evening Post, 19 April 1978.
16 ‘City-centre attack on youth’, Evening Post, 20 April 1978.
17 Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/114; ‘Hundreds pour in to oppose Front rally’, Evening Post, 20 April 1978.
18 Martin Webster speech, Leeds High School, 22 April 1978, Searchlight Archive, BRI/02/114.
19 D. Widgery, Beating Time (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), p. 82.
20 C. Salewicz, Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer (London: Harper Collins, 2006), pp. 75, 217–218.
21 C. Brazier, ‘Rock Against Racism’, Melody Maker, 5 November 1977.
22 M. Walker, ‘Rocking the Front line against intolerance’, Guardian, 25 April 1978.
23 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 85.
24 P. Piratin, Our Flag Stays Red (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978 edn).
25 ‘1950: start here’, Temporary Hoarding, special Carnival edition (April 1978).
26 D. Widgery, ‘Victoria Park. 30th April 1978 Planet Earth’, Temporary Carnival, April 1978.
27 New Musical Express, 6 May 1978.
28 M. Walker, ‘Huge support for rally surprises even Anti-Nazi League chiefs’, Guardian, 2 May 1978
29 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, p. 149.
30 Interview at https://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/patrik_fitzgerald_Part5.htm.
31 Saunders can be seen giving a clenched-fist salute in ‘Youth raises voice to stop the Nazis’, Morning Star, 2 May 1978.
32 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, p. 155.
33 C. Salewicz, ‘Carnival’, New Musical Express, 6 May 1978.
34 T. Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977–1980 (London: Hutchinson, 1990), p. 345.
35 Northern Hoarding, ‘Straight at the head of the NF’.
36 S. Shelton, Rock Against Racism (London: Autograph, 2015), pp. 30–31.
37 ‘Magic’, Socialist Worker, 6 May 1978.
38 R. Samuel, ‘Dave Widgery’, History Workshop Journal 35 (1993), pp. 283–285, at 283.
39 On 23 April 2004 We Remember Blair Peach (London: Ealing NUT, 2004), p. 9.
40 Race Today, The Road Make to Walk on Carnival Day (London: Race Today, 1977).
41 M. Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), p. 160.
42 Anandi Ramamurthy and Nigel Copsey cite the publications of the Revolutionary Communist Group in A. Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movement (London: Pluto, 2013), p. 48 and N. Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 135.
43 Leveller, June 1978.
44 Rahila Gupta describes a similar shift, from the anti-fascist politics of the 1970s to the anti-racism of the 1990s: ‘The race uprisings of 1979 and 1981 in Southall, Brixton, Handsworth and Bristol crystallised around dissatisfaction with the police or against the National Front (much like the Northern cities in 2001). But in the 1990s the same issues were raised to the forefront of public consciousness through individual cases involving racial justice, the most prominent being that of Stephen Lawrence’: R. Gupta, From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers (London: Zed, 2003), p. 3.
45 Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 37.
46 T. Mehmood, Hand on the Sun (London: Penguin, 1983), pp. 92, 126.
47 A. Sivanandan, Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain (London: Institute of Race Relations, 1986), p. 143; M. Farrar, ‘Social movements and the struggle over “race”’, in M. Todd and G. Taylor (eds), Democracy and Participation: Popular Protest and the New Social Movements (London: Merlin Press, 2004), pp. 218–247, at 225.
48 F. Dhondy, East End at Your Feet (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 85.
49 P. Gilroy, ‘Rebel Souls: Dancefloor justice and the temporary undoing of Britain’s Babylon’, in S. Shelton (ed.), Rock Against Racism (London: Autograph, 2015), pp. 23–29, at 25.
50 P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 131–134.
51 While you might have expected the decision of the CP to join the ANL in spring 1978 to have nudged the campaign in a left patriotic direction, there is at least some evidence of the same process operating in reverse, with the CP’s Young Communist League in particular starting to tail the visual and linguistic style of RAR and the ANL. See, for example, the YCL leaflet, ‘Unite Against Racism’, undated but probably 1978, with its warnings that ‘NF would ban punk, reggae, soul and rock’ and ‘NF would bring back the 11-plus, the birch, heavy discipline in schools’.
52 Hornsey ANL, undated leaflet, ‘Racism in Britain’.
53 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, pp. 156–157, 170–177, 172.
54 ‘Principles & Practises’, undated, Searchlight Archive, University of Northampton, BRI/02/16.
55 D. Potter, Brimstone and Treacle (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), p. 33.
56 P. Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 5.
57 R. Huddle and R. Saunders (eds), Reminiscences of RAR (London: Redwords, 2016), p. 45.
58 A. D’Ambrosio, Let Fury Have the Hour: Joe Strummer, Punk and the Movement that Shook the World (London: Nation, 2012), p. 216
59 D. Widgery, ‘Letter from Britain’, Radical America 12 (5) (1978), pp. 75–77.
60 D. Widgery, ‘Beating Time – a reply to Ian Birchall’, International Socialism 2 (35) (1987).
61 ‘Against sexism – not sex’, Temporary Hoarding 6 (summer 1978).
62 Many leftist men saw no problem with the songs. Four months later, in October that year, the Poodles recorded a session for John Peel’s Radio One show. His introduction placed the song within a tradition of sexual conquest: ‘One has always heard colourful stories about convent girls and I have in the past found some of these to be based on fact.’ After playing the song, his next words were a Humbert Humbert-esque joke, ‘Would you like a lolly, my dear? That’s a song written with me in mind’: J. Cavanagh, Good Night and Good Riddance: How Thirty Five Years of John Peel Helped to Shape Modern Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 2016), p. 240.
63 ‘Bloody furious’, Temporary Hoarding, March–April 1978; also Spare Rib, April 1981, and ‘Rock Against Sexism’, Temporary Hoarding 9.
64 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, p. 90.
65 The RAR band who best conveyed the overlap between anti-black and anti-Irish racism were Stiff Little Fingers from Belfast, whose song ‘White Noise’, goes step by step through the racist nonsense told about black people, Asians, before concluding with a blistering ‘Paddy is a moron. Spud thick Mick . . . Green wogs. Green wogs. Ain’t no Brit’.
66 ‘Love sex, hate sexism’, Drastic Measures 1 (no date). The title against Heather de Lyon and other’s letter to RAR: ‘Brighton against sexism – not sex’.
67 L. Toothpaste, ‘Sex vs. fascism’, cited in Women and Fascism Study Group, Breeders for Race (London: WARF, 1978), pp. 21–22.
68 For reports from the local groups, see Drastic Measures 4, p. 11. The centre-page spread appears in Drastic Measures 5 (Royal Wedding Special), 1981.
69 For example, at the Rock Against Racism Dub Conference on 9–10 December 1978, a session was dedicated to what was initially termed ‘RAR Against Sexism’, Agenda, December 1978.
70 ‘Why the Communists hate the National Front’, Bulldog 7 (May 1978); ‘The carnival is over’, Bulldog 10 (November 1978); also A. Birtley, ‘How to infiltrate – and learn from – the left’, Spearhead 123 (November 1978), p. 13; National Front, Lifting the Lid Off the ‘Anti-Nazi League’.
71 Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, p. 123; M. Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 153.
72 E. Morrison, letter, Sounds, 1 April 1977.
73 Huddle and Saunders (eds), Reminiscences of RA
R, p. 83.
74 J. Pearce, Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love (Charlotte, NC: St Benedict Press, 2013), p. 63.
75 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 86.
76 Bulldog, March 1979.
77 Rock Against Racism Edinburgh, Rare One, summer 1978.
78 ‘Punk rock supporters join march’, The Times, 2 May 1978; D. Cook, A Knife at the Throat of Us All (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1978), p. 20.
79 ‘Sit down, stand up!’, Socialist Worker, 22 July 1978.
80 C. T. Husbands, Racial Exclusionism and the City (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), pp. 12–14.
81 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 14.
82 D. Widgery, ‘Who killed Altab Ali?’, CARF 6 (autumn 1978), p. 8.
83 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 27.
84 K. Leech, Struggle in Babylon: Racism in the Cities and Churches of Britain (London: Sheldon Press, 1988), p. 68; Blood on the Streets (London: Bethnal Green and Stepney Green Trades Council, 1978), p. 41.
85 Leech, Struggle in Babylon, p. 88.
86 The pre-history of the campaign is described in T. Mahoney, ‘The squatters of Arbor Square: an obituary’, Idiot International, 9 October 1970.
87 R. Bunce and P. Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 159.
88 D. Renton, ‘Anti-fascism in the North West 1976–1982’, North West Labour History 27 (2002), pp. 17–28.
89 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 34.
90 GAA leaflet, ‘On July 5th’, July 1978.
91 S. Taylor, The National Front in English Politics (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 156–157; Hackney and Tower Hamlets Defence Committee leaflet, ‘Defend Brick Lane’, August 1978; Socialist Challenge, ‘Self-defence: the next step’, August 1978.
