Never Again

by David Renton

  92 NORMANCAR Bulletin 6 (summer 1978).

  93 M. Steel, Reasons to be Cheerful (London: Scribner, 2001), p. 15.

  94 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 93.

  95 K. Waterhouse, ‘Rock around the plot’, Daily Mirror, 25 September 1978; carnival two was also positively reported in ‘All summer long’, Gay News 152 (October 1978).

  96 Leech, Struggle in Babylon, p. 89.

  97 D. Hann, Physical Resistance. Or, a Hundred Years of Anti-Fascism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013), p. 284; D. Hann and S. Tilzley, No Retreat: The Secret War Between Britain’s Anti-Fascists and the Far-Right (Lytham: Milo Books, 2003), p. 33; Leech, Struggle in Babylon, p. 89.

  98 Hann and Tilzley, No Retreat, p. 34.

  99 M. Lux, Anti-Fascist (London: Phoenix, 2006), p. 73.

  100 Ramamurthy, Black Star, p. 51.

  101 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 94.

  102 Blood on the Streets, p. 61.

  103 ‘Still united!’, Socialist Worker, 20 September 1978.

  8

  SOUTHALL

  Through the autumn and winter of 1978–1979, conflicts continued between the left and right. Anna Sullivan recalls weekly battles at Chapel Market in Islington, the Front’s main London paper sale after Brick Lane.: ‘It got very bad . . . You’d see seven or eight Union Jacks on a great spike flag, a hundred fascists at a time.’ Anti-fascists ‘produced leaflets every week, on a Gestetner machine . . . We leafleted every estate. We knocked on every door. The clashes at the market were just at the end of that work.’

  Within Rock Against Racism, a conscious decision was taken that there would be no more mass Carnivals and the campaign would refocus on its local groups and smaller local events. Widgery explained the move to the NME:

  We don’t want to get locked into the alternative Harvey Goldsmith syndrome. Part of the reason we’ve separated from the ANL a bit is that we don’t want to go on producing bigger and bigger outdoor festivals. Some of us went through that all in the late ’60s. Instead we made a very conscious decision to try and build up RAR clubs as local get togethers away from the whole superstar and super-profit thing.1

  Anti-fascism in Liverpool meant protests, pickets outside NF-identified pubs, writers’ workshops and Rock Against Racism gigs. The largest of these was held in autumn 1978 in Walton Hall Park. According to a local paper Black Links:

  Walton residents and a few Tory councillors tried to ban the concert (are they racists or do they just hate to see the kids enjoy themselves?), fearing that we would wreck the park, terrorise the old ladies and frighten the cats; their complaints, however, wilted in the warm September sun as 5,000 people listened peacefully to eight groups rock against racism . . . People came to hear the music but also to declare their rejection of racism. There were speeches from Merseyside Anti-Racist Alliance, ANL and RAR and plenty of leafleting. Nobody is saying that all the white kids came because they were convinced anti-racists or that they were suddenly converted to anti-racism as a result of the concert. But at least they listened, they wanted to be counted.2

  It was also at this time that the squad tactic, once limited to London, began to spread to the North West. In autumn, the National Front established a whites-only football team, the Lilywhites and entered the team into the Hyde and District Sunday League. Tameside Campaign Against Racism and Fascism approached the local league council and County FA only to be told repeatedly that no action would be taken against the team.3 On 8 October 1978, anti-fascists called a further protest, to which some five hundred people came. Members of the anti-fascist squad attacked the Front’s van, smashing its windscreens and turning the vehicle over.4

  At the Front’s Annual General Meeting in January 1979, Chairman John Tyndall declared that the Front was in a war with ‘red mobs’. According to Joe Pearce of Young NF, still an enthusiast for Tyndall’s leadership, ‘Violence seemed to be woven into the very fabric of life for active members of the NF.’5

  In spring 1979, National Front News was also forced to report a series of bombings against left-wing targets, including an SWP bus driver and a milkman in High Wycombe, the Communist Party headquarters in King Street, the offices of the local government trade union NUPE and Housman’s bookshop. The author of the article claimed that the victims had planted the bombs themselves, in order to secure a ban on the NF before the pending election6 – a story which the groups maintained despite the trial in the following month of the Front’s Alan Birtley for stockpiling ingredients to manufacture explosives.7 ‘Labour created the Anti-Nazi League’, the NF claimed, ‘for the sole purpose of destroying the National Front.’8

  In Leicester, on 21 April 1979, an estimated 2,000 anti-fascists mobilised to oppose a smaller group of National Front supporters. The police re-routed the shaken Front demonstrators out of Leicester and then fought with the remaining anti-fascist crowd. The news showed police dogs chasing anti-fascists onto the Leicester University campus. Eighty-two people were arrested, including Balwinder Rana from Southall in west London, who was stopped by four plain-clothes officers and bundled into an unmarked car while on his way home. For Mike Luft, Leicester was a victory ‘even more clearly than Lewisham’. However another demonstrator, David Rosenberg, was less optimistic: ‘The police were completely out of control and I remember discussing that someone was going to be killed soon.’9

  The kids are innocent

  Southall, the focus of the next major protest, had a largely Asian population. Just under half of the local population had parents born in the Commonwealth or had been born there themselves. The Front had few supporters in Southall or anywhere in the borough of Ealing. As at Lewisham, their intervention was all about forcing their way into an area from the outside. The events began in spring 1979, when the Conservative council agreed to let the town hall to the Front to hold an election meeting. One local supporter of the ANL, Balwinder Rana, remembers reading about the Front meeting in the Ealing Gazette: ‘People felt very angry and insulted.’10

  The area had a large and diverse left. The best-respected anti-racist organisation was the Indian Workers’ Association. The IWA’s Southall leadership was provided by Vishnu Sharma, who was close to the Communist Party, and his deputy, Labour councillor Piara Khabra. Rock Against Racism’s local ally was Peoples Unite, a predominantly Caribbean group with its headquarters at 6 Park View. The International Marxist Group also had members in Southall and the IMG’s Tariq Ali was a Socialist Unity candidate for Southall in the May 1979 general election.11

  The news that the Front was planning to hold a meeting in Southall reached Vishnu Sharma, the IWA’s president, on 7 April 1979. An emergency meeting of the IWA’s local executive voted to petition the council to rescind its decision to allow the Front to use its hall. The IWA determined to hold a march from Southall to Ealing Town Hall on the Sunday before the meeting, where a petition was to be presented in support of the IWA campaign. Businesses in the area were asked to close from 1 p.m. on 23 April, the day of the meeting.

  On 11 April, a further public meeting took place in Southall, called by the IWA and with community groups, the engineers’, teachers’ and hospital workers’ unions and socialist groups attending. Two police officers asked to address the meeting, but a vote was taken to exclude them. Piara Khabra argued that the best tactic would be to call a stay-away. The focus should be on a demonstration before the Front’s meeting. Vishnu Sharma disagreed and called for confrontation. Other speakers suggested that the Front should be met with what its members termed a ‘wall of silence’. Over the course of the meeting, a consensus emerged that as well as the activities already proposed by the IWA, on the 23rd there should also be peaceful sit-down protest at 5 p.m. on the roads leading to Southall Town Hall. A coordinating committee was elected, with Vishnu Sharma as its convenor and community groups and the left represented.

  On Sunday, 22 April, the day before the election meeting, 5,000 people marched to Ealing Town Hall to hand in a mass petition calling for the National Front meeting to b
e cancelled. This was a huge demonstration, with all sections of the population represented, including older women in long white dresses and Sikh men in turbans and beards. But even this march did not pass without disagreements with the police. Rana recalls attempts to negotiate with the officer in charge:

  I asked him why there were so many police and horses. He said that they were for our protection. He had information that the Front might attack us. I said there’s five thousand of us here, there’s no way the NF are going to try anything. But he wouldn’t take them away.

  In an atmosphere of mistrust, trouble was always likely to break out:

  One young demonstrator was playing around. He flipped a copper’s hat off as a joke. But rather than taking it as a joke, they arrested him and dragged him away. I stopped the march, we all sat down in the middle of Southall, outside the police station and I went in to talk to the chief superintendent. They wouldn’t let him go. So I said, ‘If you don’t let him go, I can’t be responsible for what happens.’ They threatened to arrest me and I said, ‘Go on then’, and within five minutes, they’d let him go.

  On Monday, 23 April, police coaches were parked on each side of the town centre and officers on horses could be seen patrolling the streets. The IWA established a headquarters in central Southall. Supporters of the ANL set up a first aid centre at 6 Park View Road, the headquarters of Peoples Unite, which counted among its supporters Clarence Baker, the manager of reggae band Misty in Roots.

  The afternoon shutdown of local shops proved even more successful than the organisers had hoped. Not only was central Southall closed on the day of the Front meeting, but so were a series of local factories with mixed or majority-white workforces: Ford Langley, Sunblest bakery, Wall’s and Quaker Oats. Some of these were owners’ shut-downs, while others were full or partial strikes by the workers.

  Even with the shops closed, such were the police numbers that central Southall was under outside control as several thousand officers restricted civilian access to streets around the town hall. Cordons were set up on each side of the building.

  A rumour went round, warning that the police were planning to get around the sit-in by smuggling NF members into the town hall before the meeting was due to start. Members of the Southall Youth Movement (SYM) began to assemble outside Southall Town Hall from shortly after noon. Balraj Purewal of the SYM led a march of some thirty to forty people along South Road to the town centre. According to one participant interviewed by the BBC:

  This is our future, right? Our leaders will do nothing . . . our leaders wanted a peaceful sit down but what can you do with a peaceful sit down here? We had to do something, the young people. We don’t want a situation like the East End where our brothers and sisters are being attacked every day.12

  Passers-by joined along the way, so that on reaching the town hall the SYM contingent swelled to around two hundred people. Many of their members were arrested there.

  By 3.30 p.m., the entire town centre was closed and the police declared Southall a ‘sterile’ area, which was now free of anti-fascists. A hard rain was now falling, further dampening the protesters’ mood. Rana tried to raise morale, speaking on platforms, doing his best to keep anti-fascists together. There should be no repeat of the situation in mid-afternoon, when the SYM had been cut off from the other anti-fascists. Protesters were still anxious to block the town hall. Police officers, meanwhile, were refusing to negotiate with anybody. The diversity of Sunday’s protest was not reflected in Monday’s crowd. The older men had not appeared. There were fewer women and older people. Rumours of a fight were keeping many anti-fascists at home.

  The organisers had planned the protests to begin at 5 p.m. and to take the form of sit-downs occupying each of the surrounding streets. Through the course of the evening, large contingents of people came together, outside the police cordons. The SWP’s Pete Alexander conveys the geography of the protest:

  At the centre of Southall there’s a crossroads: one road going to the west (Broadway), one to the north (Lady Margaret Road), one to the east (Uxbridge Road) and one to the south (South Road). The town hall, where the meeting took place, is on the corner between the north and east streets . . . After the Southall Youth Movement’s abortive march, the cops took control of the crossroads and the whole area between it and eastwards beyond the police station. [There were] armoured cars, cavalry, the ordinary riot cops in large numbers and helicopters. The Indian Workers’ Association and others blocked the South Road; we – the Anti-Nazi League and others – blocked the Uxbridge Road. Blair Peach and others worked their way around to the Broadway.

  The group along the Broadway found themselves caught between two police cordons: one just beside the Town Hall and a second further to the west. Peter Baker was one of several hundred protesters caught between the lines:

  At about 7.30 p.m. the good humour of the crowd was shattered . . . a roar went through the crowd, emanating from the rear. People turned and looked westwards down the street. I saw, to my amazement, a coach being driven fast straight into the back of the crowd. It was a private coach, an ordinary 30–40 seat char-a-banc. At a cautious estimate, I would put the speed of it at 15 m.p.h., which is murderous when it is being driven into a crowd.13

  The coach was carrying police officers and some twenty members of the National Front towards the town hall. Joe Pearce, was among them: ‘On the scheduled day, I was shuttled to Southall town hall, the location for the meeting, with a large police escort. As I gave my speech I could hear a riot outside.’14 Other police vehicles followed the first coach and demonstrators failed to block them. Once the Front were inside the town hall, the police sought to stretch their lines wide and force anti-fascists further and further away from the meeting. Individuals ran into the park or sheltered in homes. According to a later National Council of Civil Liberties report, ‘Every time people tried to push through the police lines, mounted police on horse-back laid into the demonstrators, beating them to the ground and arresting some of them.’15

  According to Rana, ‘The police used horses. They drove vans into the crowd, and fast, to push us back. They used snatch squads. People rushed back with whatever they could pick up.’ Some people threw bricks at the police lines. Others ran into the park or sheltered in homes or in the Peoples Unite building.

  The police could see how that building was being used and determined to clear the anti-fascists out. Officers entered the building, occupied it and gave instructions to the people sheltering there to leave. They occupied the hall and the stairs and beat people as they tried to escape. Tariq Ali of the International Marxist Group was in the building, bleeding from his head. A solicitor, John Witzenfeld, was also inside:

  They kicked in the panel on the door to the medical unit and waving their truncheons told us to get out. I was pushed into the hall with the others behind me. Suddenly I felt a blow to the back of my head and I managed to half-turn and saw a hand holding a truncheon disappearing downwards . . . Whilst we were waiting for the ambulance, two police stood in the doorway with their backs to us whilst people were brought down from upstairs and I saw truncheons rise and fall and I heard shouts and screams from the women.16

  Annie Nehmad was the doctor in the first aid room. She described being at 6 Park View Road and working with an ambulance worker to treat the wounded, including one man, Narvinder Singh, who had a 3-inch wound in his right hand following a police attack. As the police came closer, she saw people running in the street outside and closed the windows and the door. The police demanded to be allowed in. Attempts were made to keep the door closed before the police succeeded in kicking the door in. She and a nurse, Richard Bunning, were forced from the room. The hallway was as busy as a tube train in rush hour and two officers were using their batons on protesters. Nehmad herself, although identified as a doctor, was struck on the back of her head. So heavy were the blows that she stumbled and had to be rescued by other demonstrators. Somehow making her way back to the first aid room, she found Bu
nning only to see that he too had been struck. Bunning was crying, later fell unconscious and for a time his body was worryingly cold.17

  To this day, Nehmad holds that this level of violence could not have taken place without having been authorised by a senior officer:

  Police in general are told to try to avoid hitting on the head, as any blow to the head is potentially fatal. The reason is not only the blow itself but the after-effects of it, which include bleeding into or around the brain, which may not be detected until it is too late. On 23 April, not only were heavier than normal truncheons used but police throughout the demo used these heavy truncheons to hit people on the head. Someone somewhere must have said this was OK. Someone somewhere was prepared to see people killed on a demo in Britain.

  Officers with batons smashed medical equipment, a sound system, printing and medical equipment. According to Jack Dromey, an official of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) and a veteran of Grunwick, ‘I have never seen such unrestrained violence against demonstrators . . . The Special Patrol Group were just running wild.’18 His view is echoed by Dialo Sandu, who was spat at by a police officer as she watched the riot unfold from her front garden: ‘It’s the first time I would ever speak against the police. But I saw what happened with my own eyes.’19

  Clarence Baker, the pacifist manager of Misty in Roots, was among those hit on the head by a police baton. He was so badly hurt that he fell into a coma.

  After the storming of Peoples Unite, Balwinder Rana was forced to escape by jumping over a garage and hiding from a street full of police horses. Anti-fascists had collected the numbers of all the phone boxes in central Southall and had thought that they would be able to keep in contact. But the police occupied the town centre, including the boxes. Angered and disorientated, the protesters attempted to regroup.