I was inspired to watch the video by a curious chance encounter that had taken place in my home town of Isleworth that very morning.
My Independent Community Group (ICG) comrades and I had arranged to meet outside the Blue School for a short leafleting session in Old Isleworth. But as the rain intensified our Chair Ian Speed and I took refuge under the scant cover afforded by the doorway of the Swan public house.
Standing there I was vaguely aware of a man cycling past at some speed. My eyesight is poor these days and my vision was further obscured by the rain, so all I saw was a man on a bicycle wearing a cycling helmet. But when he spoke the immortal words "I’ve not seen you for a while, young man," without stopping, I instantly recognised a voice that I’d not heard for some 29 years.
Martin Webster was the de facto leader of the National Front when I first became a local organiser of the far-right party in the early 1980s. In my various travels around London and beyond on party business during that time I came into contact with him rather a lot - at meetings, seminars, social events and so on. He spoke at a Hounslow Branch meeting in Isleworth at least once, and drank with us at the very pub that I was standing outside when said encounter happened, on an evening when we were suddenly visited upon by about forty Labour Party activists who had been holding a meeting at the nearby Isleworth Public Hall, and this at a time when Labour members generally were considered left-wing and were often quite militant in their opposition to racism.
Webster was a larger than life character in more than just the physical sense. He was acknowledged, even by his opponents, as a talented organiser, although when the rules of the game changed as mainstream attitudes towards the racist right hardened he revealed himself to have been something of a one-trick pony. He had charisma, oodles of it, and no matter how many people were sat around a table with him he was invariably the one who would hold court. He had a crazy temper, to the point that when he was in full flight there was little point in ever trying to reason with him. One admired his intellect – he was a clever man, although not really an academic – and more than anything else he possessed a rapier wit.
It is often claimed, in historical volumes written about the National Front, that Webster was expelled from the party because he was homosexual. This is not true. The NF of the 1970s and 1980s was at its heart a homophobic party, but not as aggressively so as other far-right organisations before and after it. Webster was held in sufficiently high regard, and his strength of character was such, that he became very much accepted for what he was – until, that was, his organisational talents began to fail him. When he was expelled from the NF in 1984, it had all to do with his control-freakery, his maniacal tantrums and, of course, his opposition to the influence of the Italians around Roberto Fiore on the Front’s emerging young leaders, and nothing to do with his private life.
The purge against Webster and his close supporters began in late 1983, when a neat little two-step conjured up by the then young radicals Joe Pearce and Nick Griffin began with their resignation from the party as a protest against Webster’s style of leadership, and ended with them being reinstated after being pleaded with by the remaining party leaders, with Webster himself being offered up as the sacrifice.
Partly because I had been a victim of Webster’s outbursts myself on one or two occasions, but primarily because I considered myself to be something of a young radical who was sympathetic to what Pearce/Griffin, and the Italians, were trying to achieve, I lined up behind them and the Hounslow Branch of the NF, of which I was Organiser, did likewise. For my support I was rewarded with a place on the National Directorate and with the post of National Organiser of the Young National Front, although the latter came to mean very little as so young was the bulk of the party membership that the YNF and the NF itself were to all intents and purposes the same organisation comprising the same people.
Webster himself formed a short-lived grouplet which he called Our Nation, boasting about forty members, many of whom were relatively well-heeled and being such sustained him for a while as he plotted on the sidelines and became a bit of a thorn in the side of the new NF leadership until it became clear to him that he would not be coming back. Henceforth he went into retirement from party politics, although he continued to play a role on the far right as a public speaker at non-aligned events, as well being regarded as something of an authority on any subject which had the foul machinations of The Evil Jew at its heart. He also, to his credit, took advantage of the opportunity presented by his change of circumstances to work on his physical condition, and became a keen cyclist.
Throughout my time in the NF, even after Webster had gone, there remained a grudging respect for his intellect and for his personality. I always saw him as a bigger man than myself – sharper, more learned, wittier and with a superior organisational brain. So when I saw his video last week – and I listened to his speech from start to finish – I was actually very surprised by just how ordinary he sounded. Adequate but unspectacular in his delivery, ill-informed and unscientific in his presentation of what passed for facts, and just generally amateurish. In the long distant past, because he was older than me and exuded intelligence and a veneer of authority I had never doubted the accuracy of the things of which he spoke. What I heard on the video was, frankly, little more than ignorant drivel.
There is a popular saying that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. It is only with the passage of time, and with the benefit of the life experience which I have since gained, that I have come to fully appreciate the magnitude of the blindness which surrounded me as an adherent of far-right ideology back in the 1980s.
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