Coming Face to Face With My National Front Past...Almost!

This may seem a strange topic to choose for my first post of 2013, but I had a weird dream the other night which I want to consign to record, as much for my own sanity as for anything else, but also to provide some light amusement for those who find such things amusing.

I was somewhere in a run-down area of London, in a derelict back street. The road was busy, although it was in actual fact a cul de sac terminating at the gates of an old factory. I was lazing about on a wall, actually lying down face forward, awaiting the arrival of some people who were going to join me on a demonstration. The factory employed mostly immigrant workers, who were being exploited by their management. The purpose of the demo was to protest against their treatment by the factory bosses.

In very little time several hundred people had arrived. They were a varied and colourful bunch, made up of all types of people. There were men and women of all ages, and from a whole variety of ethnic backgrounds. There were gay people (they seemed to be there as gay people) and, strangely, there was a group of men with shaven heads and identically attired in gold whom I presumed to be a religious sect of some form or another. A similarly-clad group dressed in pink then arrived, to the apparent chagrin of the gold people. I assumed these were from a rival religious sect.

But the folk I remember most vividly were an assortment of left-wing types, not in the union militant or Rocking Russian sense but more your trendy student, look-at-me, faux alternative stereotype. Although we shared a common cause I recall feeling uneasy around these people, not so much out of fear but more a sense of insincerity and general debasement of the mission upon which I was embarked.

The protest involved a march for the length of the street, after which we would turn left into a busy main thoroughfare. There, from within the sunken depths of a major London underground station, a National Front counter-demonstration was going to emerge onto the sidelines of our route comprising two to three hundred shouting, angry neo-fascists.

There was nothing to be frightened of. The whole area was saturated with police, both either side of the march and all around the tube station where the counter demonstration would first manifest itself. Besides, I knew nothing serious was going to happen because I had been there before.

Yes, you read that correctly. This was in actual fact an identical re-run of an event that had already taken place some time previously. Only on the earlier occasion I had been a participant in, and presumably an organiser of, the counter demonstration. As such I knew the whole day was going to pass without major incident.

In fact my only fear as I approached the junction and the counter demonstration, and I recall it was a very real fear, was that I was going to meet myself!

As we turned into the main street there was, bizarrely, a “commentator” at the side of the road with a microphone, giving an account of events to the participants as it was happening. He announced something to the effect of (I can’t recall the exact words): “Of course not everyone here is really one of us, are they Phil?”.

Rather than be shaken or wrong-footed by this, I simply laughed and gave him an ironic thumbs-up as I passed without looking directly at him. One or two of those around me glanced at me, perplexed, but nobody seemed overly concerned. It was, after all, only a dream (and I am blessed/cursed with the ability to usually know that I am dreaming) and I knew this guy was completely aware of my sincerity in supporting the cause of the exploited workers and opposing the fascists, and that he was simply making mischief. Most of those around me seemed to know it too.

But notwithstanding all this I was genuinely troubled, dream or no dream, by the prospect of meeting myself as we passed the counter demo. I can remember this feeling very clearly indeed.

The feared encounter never took place thanks, I think, to the timely intervention of my alarm clock. Nonetheless I remembered the whole thing so vividly, and still do some thirty hours later, that I decided I wanted to write it all down, for posterity or for future reference.

Most people who know me at all will be well aware that I was indeed a prominent member of the National Front many years ago. Some critics of my work in the community would prefer it were still so, and like to pretend that the two decades and more that have passed since I first turned my back on the far-right and renounced its politics have never taken place. Anybody who matters, though, is well acquainted with the full facts.

There was, of course, a certain amount of licence involved where my nocturnal adventure was concerned. Even as a National Front organiser I would never, for instance, have opposed a demonstration in support of exploited workers, immigrant or otherwise. And I have never seen any significant delegation of Hare Krishnas on any anti-fascist protest of my acquaintance, although the middle-class, plastic revolutionaries in duffle coats do ring true a tad.

I like to analyse my own dreams and more often than not I am able to see where they are coming from but at the time of writing I admit to being at a loss to make head or tail of this one. Maybe a friend, or indeed a foe, would like to try and help me out here?

My Role

Somebody asked me today why I don't update this blog more frequently, and I do accept that I had been absent from duty for far too long prior to last night's posting.

All the same I see my role in the fight against the far-right not as a conveyor of everyday news that can be found elsewhere (the excellent but misnamed Lancaster Unity blog - misnamed because it clearly provides a nationwide service - being a good example), but as one who can provide a perspective from somebody who has been "on the other side" himself and who can call upon that knowledge and experience.

Knowledge, not propaganda or wishful thinking, is what sincere anti-fascists need to help them in their work. Those who don't want that knowledge cannot in my book be sincere anti-fascists.

I the accused

When thinking back, as I often do, to the fourteen and a bit years that I spent on the far-right, it sometimes occurs to me how different things might have been had I taken the time out to place myself, if only for five or ten minutes, into the shoes of those whom I was so quick to condemn.

I hope I am not being emotive nor descending too readily into pathos when I say this, but to have spent just a short time looking in through the eyes of a Jewish person, a "conspirator", and beholding the sheer unreasonableness of the charges being laid against me and others of my kind might - just might - have caused me to think things through to a more logical conclusion.

To be told the fact that some of my kind were politically left of centre and others to the right of centre provided "evidence" that I and 13 million others worldwide were actively scheming together to achieve a stranglehold over the political spectrum.

To be told that by marrying a fellow Jew I would be living proof of Jewish pretensions to racial supremacism, whilst by marrying a non-Jew I would ipso facto be part of an organised international plot to pollute the sacred Aryan bloodline.

To be told that I could not, no matter how much I desired to be but an ordinary guy in a world in which cultural differences were becoming forever less important to most, be anything other than the single-minded conspirator that it was my genetic disposition to be.

To know that this government-in-waiting that I see before me does not accept my presence in the land of my birth, yet acknowledges no home to which I might return in the event of my being compelled to vacate.

With good cause most people associate the far-right in Britain and Europe with opposition to non-white immigration and "multi-culturalism". And I, and others like me, would be told we were the architects of this historical inevitability and personally responsible for every wrongdoing committed by every immigrant, as well as by his ancestors, his offspring and his pets.

It is easy to be repulsed by the spectacle of such a self-evidently unreasonable and irrational mindset masquerading as a political ideology, but there must too be a temptation to humour it just a little. Humour is the most powerful of political weapons. I sometimes wonder why anti-fascists seem so devoid of it.

Maybe it is because fascism, leading as it does to disharmony, violence and murder, is no laughing matter. But all the same it wouldn't hurt, from time to time, to subject the absurdity of its worldview to public scrutiny and to inevitable public ridicule a little more than we seem given to do, and to titter just a little as it squirms whilst attempting to justify the absolute unjustifiability of its creed.