When I was a member of the National Front in the 1980s there weren't enough members to be holding outdoor "family" festivals, but if there had been they would probably have been something like the BNP's annual Red, White & Blue event. Not that I've ever been to one, nor am I ever likely to, but by all accounts they are weekend activities at which BNP members and their families pitch tents, visit stalls and listen to political speeches whilst drinking lots of beer.
This year reporters from the News of the World apparently gained access to the RWB and recorded for posterity the video reproduced above. In it a man who transpires to be a BNP council election candidate stages a mock "trial" of a golly, which is found guilty of "being black" and dropped onto a bonfire. A suggestion is made that those involved should venture into town and "find a real one". The person who releases the doll onto the flames is, we are told, a 12-year-old girl, presumably the daughter of one of the people attending the festival.
During my time in the Front I'm sure I witnessed far worse things. However what brought it home to me just how sick the whole far-right experience is was the thought that my own twin children are the same age as this young girl. I imagined for a moment either of them being involved in a ritual of this kind, being surrounded by and taking in all that hate and irrationality with the blessing, indeed encouragement of their parents and I found myself literally, physically shaking with fear and anger. Fear because there but for the grace of God go my kids, and anger at the thought that anybody could poison the mind of an innocent child like the girl in the video in this way.
Thankfully my kids do not think in this way at all but would that have been the case if, instead of leaving the far-right and in due course meeting Caroline, I had continued along my earlier path and instead settled down with somebody who shared my old allegiances? Had I not walked away when I did could that have been me, and a child of mine, burning the golly at the RWB?
Sometimes I like to reassure myself that, in the later years at least, I was a more "sophisticated" kind of fascist than some of these cave dwellers. The NF in the late 1980s abandoned the rhetoric (if not the actuality) of race hate and indulged instead in endless high falutin debate about the merits or otherwise of popular rule in Burkina Faso, and suchlike.
And yet, so many of the people who occupy high positions in today's BNP were involved with the NF during that very period, including of course Nick Griffin himself. The guest speaker at the RWB was by all accounts Roberto Fiore, whom so many of us looked up to during that so-called "intellectual" period and followed, with Griffin, into the ITP.
This afternoon I spent a little time browsing the various far-right forums to see whether any remorse was being expressed over this disgusting incident. Certainly there was an element of regret that it had made the papers but most of this, alas, focused on attacking the reporters themselves. "In public we have to project a good image. Burning golliwogs? Sieg Hail? (sic)" asks a poster at the non-aligned neo-Nazi site Stormfront. "No. The jew is waiting for an opportunity like that to exploit." ("The jew", it seems, was at the RWB this year - he certainly gets around, this guy!).
I would appeal to those who might have joined this organisation or supported it in good faith to take a step back and ask themselves - is this what we signed up to? The public presentation may have changed, but the reality resurfaces under the cover of darkness over a few drinks.
There are ways and means of challenging disengagement and injustice in our society. Putting black people onto bonfires, even if only symbolically, is not one of them.
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