From Lower Down You Just Seemed So Much Better

This line is from a track called All In All by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, from the group’s defining Too-Rye-Ay album recorded in 1982. It sprung oddly to mind a week or so ago as I watched a video on YouTube of one of my mentors of old pontificating about the threat that apparently exists to all mankind from the forces of "World Jewry".

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.

Walk Away

For over eleven years now I have been an independent councillor at the London Borough of Hounslow. Concerned by what I perceived to be a lack of community engagement by politicians in my own borough and in particular around Isleworth where I live, I helped set up a community action group which very soon found itself involved in electoral politics. In 1998 I became the first independent candidate ever to be elected to the London Borough of Hounslow. In 2002 two colleagues joined me and in 2006 we won six seats, and with it the balance of power on the local authority. We entered into coalition with the Conservatives - a decision taken purely on the basis of local considerations and not one that was based on ideological preference - which is where we remain today.

But for me it wasn't always that way. My first foray into the world of politics saw me riding the waves of the extremism which pervaded the latter part of the 1970s for many young people such as myself. At the age of fifteen I joined the National Front.

In a way it was an odd decision for me to take. I wasn't a natural racist. It sounds like a tired old cliche but some of my best friends honestly were black or Asian. But the dynamics of the age drove the more impressionable towards the political fringes, and in fascism I found a philosophy and a practice which satisfied my craving for excitement.

There was nothing particularly unusual about the story up till then. An awful lot of young people flirted with the far-right, as indeed others did with the far-left. If your respectable neighbour is a suited, booted family man in his late forties who works for a bank, there's a not insignificant chance that he too attended the odd NF meeting in his early days, either that or he ran with the Anti-Nazi League and harried NF members as they marched around the streets. What is different for me is that, as unfortunately befits my personality, I threw everything I had into my new vocation. I gave up my education, any hope I may have had of following a "normal" career, and almost certainly a great part of what otherwise might have been a very different and interesting social life.

It is difficult to explain to others what makes an otherwise reasonably intelligent person become more and more deeply involved with an absurd ideology which has it that almost everything that happens in the world is the result not of circumstance or even economic forces but of the dark machinations of a small group of people whose sole purpose in life is to perform evil deeds and to plot against anything that is right and good. But I could make a start by pointing out the obvious truism that when normal people start to shun you, and increasingly the only company available to you is that of others who share your affectations and prejudices, then before you know it the outside world - the real world - becomes a stranger and increasingly you hear only the things you want to hear.

As a member of the National Front I was not a bit-part player. I became a local official at the age of sixteen, and was elected to the party's National Directorate at the age of 22. During my five years at the top of the NF I worked closely with Martin Webster, Andrew Brons, Ian Anderson, Joe Pearce, Nick Griffin, Martin Wingfield, Patrick Harrington, Colin Todd, Roberto Fiore and Derek Holland. I knew all of these individuals, and at various times considered each of them to be my friends.

In 1989 I left the NF, but only as a result of a factional dispute which saw what was left of an already dwindling party break into two, with Griffin, Holland and Fiore leading what became known as the International Third Position (ITP), which I joined, and Harrington running the bit that was left behind, which very shortly afterwards adopted the name Third Way.

The ITP, very cleverly, sold itself as a "federation of autonomous groups". Thus it could work on many fronts simultaneously. For many it had a strong traditional Catholic ethos, for others its anti-Zionist (read anti-Jewish) enthusiasms were the dominating factor. It even had a vegetarian group! Speaking personally, during my later years in the Front I had already become very attracted to community politics (albeit, during those days, with a racist flavour) and the ITP was happy for my new locally-based group, Liberation, to operate with one foot in the parent organisation and one foot out.

It is difficult to say when I first began to question the prejudices that I had taken for granted throughout my adult life. But for whatever reason things came to a head and, by the end of 1991, I had decided that I'd had enough. I dropped out of far-right activity, left the house that I had shared with erstwhile comrades and which had become our local "base", and went "home" at the age of thirty to live once again with my parents.

Others who have walked away from the far-right talk of a Damascene conversion, of a particular incident which brought home to them the wrong that they had inflicted upon others, and themselves. In his book The Other Face of Terror Ray Hill, who worked as a mole within the far-right after having abandoned his once sincerely-held racist beliefs, talks of an encounter with an Asian family who had been evicted from their home as a direct result of his actions as a right-wing agitator in South Africa. For me there was no such experience, just a long overdue realisation that for nearly a decade and a half I had been living a lie.

I cannot say that on the day I walked away from the ITP I was the dedicated anti-racist that I am today. Although recollections are hazy I am sure I met former colleagues on occasions, purely socially, in the months following my decision. Even today there is barely a day, and hardly ever a week, that passes without me bumping into somebody who was involved with me politically on the local scene at some time during my racist "career". Do I ignore them or bawl abuse at them in the street? Of course I don't. Many, like myself, have changed anyway. Any who haven't who have the misfortune to engage me in political conversation are left in no doubt at all as to where I stand today.

But so much for the background, on to the point. During the time that I was involved with the far-right I naturally encountered a not inconsiderable number of those people who call themselves anti-fascists. When I was active, anti-fascism was almost exclusively the preserve of those on the political left. That is not to say that others not on the political left were not opposed to fascism, but simply that it was traditionally people from the left who were motivated enough to become seriously involved in combating it.

Not unreasonably, when I was a member of the National Front traditional anti-racists considered me to be their enemy. What is perhaps more surprising is, since I walked away and denounced racism and fascism unequivocally as I still do today, they became more hostile still. The harder I work, as a councillor and as a community activist, to build community cohesion and a society free from fear and hatred - often in the face of well-intentioned but short-sighted opposition from colleagues on the democratic right - the more vociferous, and sometimes vicious, the attacks become.

I can handle it. But what does disappoint me is the effect that this negativity could have on others who might find themselves in the position I was in eighteen years ago, still waving the banner of the far-right but thinking twice about the morality of what they are doing and looking, perhaps without even completely realising it, for a way out of their present emotional morass. It is as though there is a door, half open, which leads to the real world but with those who have always hated them for being on the other side of the door standing in the way, blocking their way out.

There are, of course, many celebrated examples of racists turned anti-racists who have been championed by traditional anti-fascists and who are able to perform valuable work in the ongoing fight against the far-right. If I am asked why the attitude of the same people towards me is so fundamentally different I can only express my belief that it is down to my purely local quarrel with the Labour Party, a quarrel which is of an organisational rather than ideological nature. Usually when I express this view I am accused of being paranoid. So I ask for a better explanation as to why it may be, and an answer is never forthcoming.

About a year ago I established contact with a very active and well-respected anti-fascist operation, following a bit of cock-up in which the group in question managed to blow a very effective anti-BNP operation of mine out of the water. We spoke of some work I might do to help them in their cause. There was going to be a meeting. Then silence. To this day I'm still denied access to their online forum!

I have been offering for years to visit local schools and sixth form colleges to speak to young people and warn them of the dangers of becoming involved with the far-right, spreading the message of tolerance and countering irrational but sometimes widely-held prejudices. On one occasion not too long ago I managed to get a group of teachers from Hounslow together and put it to them that I could perform a valuable service by using my experience to counter racism in the borough's schools. Most of those at the gathering, not a few of them Labour Party members and supporters, blushed guiltily and some looked at their shoes. There was no way they were going to invite me to do any such thing, it didn't portray the correct image of me as a person with a rival (if temporary) political agenda. Better the kids should go unwarned than a political point should go unscored.

I believe passionately that we should be making it easier, not harder, for one-time fascists who genuinely see the error of their ways to put the far-right behind them and re-enter normal society. Often they will have valuable information and experience to offer, and in my view the most effective way to counter fascism is to understand who the people are and how they work rather than just seeking solace in our own prejudices and mythologies. Of course anti-fascism needs to be on its guard for the odd Trojan Horse, but that is not an excuse for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. People such as Searchlight, whose business anti-fascism is, will spot any such people sooner rather than later.

And that is why I have launched this blog. I hope it will be read, and enjoyed, by anti-fascists, but its target audience will be those members of the far-right groups themselves who are sincerely looking for a way out of their destructive lifestyles. Its purpose will not be to criticise other anti-fascist operations beyond the things I have already said, and in a spirit of goodwill and co-operation I will link to them and encourage my readers to visit their sites and see what they have to say. But my way will be different. My way is about combating fascism, with no party political strings attached.

Any member of any far-right group (or anybody else for that matter) can contact me in absolute confidence. My way is about imploring reluctant one-time dedicated fascists to do the decent thing, and WALK AWAY!