Is Farage Treading an Old Path to Oblivion?

One of the few blessings that I have acquired in a lifetime of political interest and involvement is an exceptional long-term memory. No matter that I am more than capable of venturing out into the rain having forgotten to put my shoes on, I can nonetheless still recall verbatim particular conversations that I had with particular people in particular situations in days when we all watched TV in black and white.

I was only a boy of fifteen when I joined the National Front back in 1977, but I do remember the buzz of excitement and expectation that existed around the party at that time. Although at its heart it was an anti-democratic party the NF was committed at the time to following the electoral road to power, which after all its Austrian mentor had himself trodden successfully. Ever-increasing returns from elections, local and national, seemed to confirm that the party was on its way. There was no need to shun democracy for as long as it seemed to be working in one's favour.

GREATER LONDON COUNCIL ELECTIONS

It seems incredible to reflect that even in its halcyon days of the 1970s the National Front never won a single seat on a single local council. It came exceptionally close, capturing more than 30% of the vote in several wards in its East London and other heartlands. In the Greater London Council elections of 1977 it won 119,000 votes in the capital, and a local election in Deptford saw a combined vote of 44.5% for the NF and National Party (an NF splinter group), against 43% for the victorious Labour candidate. The NP won two local council seats in Blackburn. At its absolute peak, NF membership was nudging 20,000.

The reasons why the NF never made the breakthrough to actual electoral success are manifold. The party's electoral strategy was, to begin with, designed with rapid national success firmly in mind. Subconsciously party managers were only too well aware that the whole edifice was constructed on sand. Living a lie by presenting itself as a democratic patriotic party when at its core its philosophy was national socialist it could have been forgiven for fearing that a period of "middle management" which would have exposed it to the daylight may actually have been detrimental to the realisation of its long term aims. Particularly as most of its candidates would have made noticeably poor councillors.

Secondly the party system was less fluid than it is today. With a significantly higher percentage of voters still committed to one or other of the big mainstream parties, often still according to class background or loyalties, and generally better turnouts, the prospects for an outsider party to launch a successful assault even at local council level were less promising.

Thirdly, and associated with the previous point, there was already an aura of "bad news" developing around the NF. Its opponents relentlessly opposed it as a nazi party through publicity campaigns, demonstrations, media coverage and youth culture and, whilst the Front had constructed an elaborate defence strategy to try to minimise the effect of such attacks, that strategy was somewhat compromised by the fact that, in essence, the allegations were true.

AGE OF THATCHERISM

When the general election of 1979 took place all of these facts eventually conspired to deliver the National Front a hammer blow from which it never recovered. An unwitting pincer movement by the combined forces of the anti-racist left and a dynamic new Conservative Party leadership drew the large majority of the NF's erstwhile voters away, and the age of Thatcherism began in earnest.

What comparisons can be made between the NF's adventure in the mid to late 1970s and that currently being enjoyed by Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party?

At every level UKIP has exceeded anything the NF ever achieved even at its peak. It has a number of councillors. Recently it won its first ever parliamentary election, by a landslide, and is anticipating another as I write. At this year's elections to the European Parliament UKIP won more votes, and returned more MEPs, than any of the establishment parties.

Whilst it is important to acknowledge that, unlike the NF of yesteryear, UKIP is not an extremist party with an underlying anti-democratic agenda, many of those who follow it are of a similar ilk to those I used to share meetings with back in those far-off days. Old reactionaries, averse to Johnny Foreigner and bemoaning the loss of Empire, are not a great deal different today to what they were four decades ago. For the NF they were padding, a useful veneer with which to mask a much nastier and more sinister reality. In UKIP's ranks they are probably more genuinely welcome. But they are of a similar stock.

Like the NF, UKIP do sometimes get a bad press from the anti-racist movement - but there are two essential differences. The first is that charges of racism, and more especially those of fascism, stick far less. There are no embarrassing photographs of which I am aware of Farage parading around the English countryside in paramilitary uniform. No quotes about putting people into gas chambers. No prison sentences served for violent and unlawful political activity. The second is that much of the "left" which comprises that movement is still sufficiently emotionally attached to Labour not to want to unsettle too much a rising political party which takes most of its votes from the Tories.

Nevertheless, one has to ask whether the powers that be will ever trust UKIP, as an outsider party, enough to allow it to make the breakthrough which runs the risk of changing the character of a hitherto obedient party system forever. If it won't, then at some point they will need to act.

Currently the big parties seem to be following what is really something of a non-strategy, vying limply with one other for the UKIP vote. Doubtless the Tories, who have the most to lose, will be scouring the sewers for undiscovered dung piles which can be unveiled to the voting public at strategic times during the coming campaign. Labour loyalists meanwhile must decide just how comfortably their natural aversion the UKIP-style politics can sit with their hopes that a divided right-leaning vote will help ease Labour into office.

Nick Griffin Expelled as BNP Follows a Time-Honoured Tradition

 

When I stumbled by chance yesterday evening upon an article on the BBC News website breaking the news that Nick Griffin had been expelled from membership of the British National Party my first reaction was to laugh out loud.

My mirth was induced not by any desire to heap scorn upon a man whom I’d considered a friend and comrade in the days when we shared a political outlook which I’ve since come to despise. Rather it was the amused reaction of one who had once more been reminded of the perennial farce that is and always has been the far-right’s approach to organisational etiquette.

Griffin and I were both young men in the National Front in the late 1970s, when the racist party had emerged from an acrimonious split with a Strasserite faction, which had oddly allied itself to a right-wing Tory-inclined faction in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the organisation from the national socialist clique which had ruled with a hidden hand more or less since the NF’s inception a decade or so earlier.

MARGINS

During the latter part of the seventies the party mood had been upbeat and expectant as election results got better and better and the breakthrough for which it had hankered appeared increasingly imminent. When instead of achieving that breakthrough electoral support crashed, membership figures plummeted and the organisation was reconsigned to the margins whence it had come the then NF leader John Tyndall scarpered to form his own breakaway party, the New National Front (which, ironically, would later become the British National Party). So bitter was the manner of his parting that Tyndall and those who had followed him very quickly became non-people, whose names could no longer be spoken.

Nick Griffin, the NF’s National Student Organiser, was by this time already firmly ensconced on the party’s governing body, the National Directorate.

A shadow of its only recently former self the NF trundled along, holding badly-attended public activities in the back of beyond which had become more of an institutional nostalgia trip than a serious attempt at winning friends and influence, until the de facto leader of the party and “mastermind” of the failing strategy, Martin Webster, was ousted from his post of National Organiser following a carefully managed coup in which Griffin was instrumental. Needless to say the transition from deposed leader to expelled ex-member was, for Webster, a rapid one and he and his supporters very quickly became persona non grata, the more outspoken amongst them soon finding themselves the unwilling recipients of some pretty disgusting (if sometimes rather imaginative) hate material.

For a few years thereafter the National Front, sans Webster, ploughed new furrows, enjoying small oases of success amid a wider desert of failure as the party remained the retreat of the lonely, the obsessive and the eccentric. Nick Griffin was a major player, although there were other major players too. There were fewer though once the split of 1986 had taken place. At a historic meeting of the National Directorate in Slough factions led on the one side by Griffin and on the other by Martin Wingfield, Andrew Brons and the late Ian Anderson went their separate ways in a dispute which began with the almost gentlemanly exchange of letters of expulsion and culminated in the attempted car-bombing of Anderson’s motor vehicle and the breaking of the then Griffin supporter Patrick Harrington’s arm during a factional scuffle outside an East London public house.

For the remainder of the 1980s the two factions, both calling themselves the National Front, dedicated themselves almost entirely to the cause of trying either to harass or to embarrass the other out of existence. When the anti-Griffin NF announced its intention to stage a march against Middle Eastern terrorism the pro-Griffin version would distribute a press release declaring its undying love for the fathers of the Iranian Revolution. When the Griffinites denounced the Union Flag as an imperialist rag the Wingfieldites, for want of a better term, would bedeck every page of their propaganda material with it.

ITALIAN EXILES

Then, in 1989, Griffin and a few others got itchy feet and decided they would relocate what was left of the party (or at least their faction thereof) to the French countryside, much to the chagrin of Patrick Harrington who by now was running the organisation on a day-to-day basis from his Mum’s basement pad in Kensington. The result, inevitably, was not a mature discussion on the future direction of the party but rather its division into two further factions, this time neither of them laying claim to the name “National Front”. The Griffin group, backed by the Italian exiles around Roberto Fiore, became the International Third Position whilst what remained in England changed its name to the Third Way. The Wingfield/Anderson faction, whose existence everybody had all but forgotten, thereby became the one and only National Front by default. Every one’s a winner.

By far-right standards the ITP/TW split was relatively civil. Both parties decided to go fairly much their own way and to do fairly much their own thing. Both organisations still exist today, in one form or another, but Nick Griffin has nothing to do with either of them

When I parted company from the far-right and its ideology towards the end of 1991 – many years later than I ought to have done – Griffin was still a member of the ITP, although recovering from the shotgun cartridge accident in France which led to him losing an eye. It was some while later that he joined the BNP, apparently via an incident in which he managed to relieve an ITP colleague of his life savings through an ill-advised printing venture, and determined from the beginning that he would usurp the leadership from the now ageing John Tyndall. Within a few years he had achieved his objective of taking control of the party which he had once so disparaged. Before long, naturally, Tyndall had been expelled.

Under Griffin and his “modernisation” strategy the BNP achieved considerable, if temporary success. At one point it was able to count its councillors (including parish) in three figures, as well as boasting two MEPs and an elected representative on the Greater London Authority. His ability to achieve this was down to lessons learned from the experience of the NF in the 1970s coupled with an understanding of the importance of building from the grass roots, a strategy to which Webster had been oblivious. Add this to a political climate in which establishment politicians were held in low regard, low voter turnout and an element of personal media savvy and he and the BNP were away. Sadly for him the quality of his elected councillors was found wanting and his unwillingness or inability to train them conspired against any prospect of sustained growth.

DECLINE

As decline began to set in BNP members began to ask questions. They questioned Griffin’s tactics. They questioned his commitment to core principles – some traditionalists felt he had moved away from those great fictions that have sustained “nationalist” ideology in the UK since the Second World War whilst some of the newer recruits feared he was still old guard at heart. Most of all, they questioned his financial probity. Talk abounded of large sums of money unaccounted for, dodgy deals, debts not honoured, employees not paid and all manner of other irregularities.

A common by-product of the disputes that beset the BNP during its later days of decline was the emergence of leadership challenges. Chris Jackson, Colin Auty, Eddy Butler, Andrew Brons – all of them tried, failed – and ended up outside of the party in short order. Nick Griffin, as the far-right itself, has never done “ordinary” leadership contests in which the best person wins and the other shakes hands and lends his or her full support to the victor. For as long as I can remember, every leadership challenge in the recent history of the far-right has resulted in expulsions, resignations and bitter recriminations.

As the BNP’s star has faded with the emergence to major prominence of UKIP which, despite its undisputed commitment to democratic traditions, casts its net wide enough to enable it to embrace most erstwhile far-righters, so my own interest in keeping a watchful eye on the BNP and other far-right groups has mellowed. Nevertheless I have been periodically following with voyeuristic interest the fortunes of what very little is left of the BNP, from the moment when Griffin “stepped down” to make way for one Adam Walker (whom I’ve never met, but from his track record he seems none too bright) to his inevitable expulsion.

My amusement derives from the fact that Nick Griffin’s BNP career has ended in precisely the same manner as that of every one of his victims, from his expulsion without a proper hearing to the obligatory whinging about the unfairness of it all.

It is difficult to predict where Nick Griffin will go from here. Much depends on whether, at 55 and with 40 years of flat-out political activity behind him, he has the stomach for beginning all over again. Maybe he’ll fight for his job back which, with the BNP’s current fortunes, is akin to squabbling over the best seat on the proverbial Titanic. Or maybe he will regard it as a blessing and launch a new project of his own, one more suited to the current UKIP-friendly climate. His traditional support base has not vanished, it has simply relocated to a nicer home. For as long as it exists, it has the potential to return to the far-right if it gets its act together and the “moderate” UKIP fails to maintain momentum. To get rid of it for good we need to educate, not manipulate.

To some Nick Griffin is the man who almost took racism and fascism into the political mainstream. To others he is a charlatan who has run the BNP in the manner of some two-bit gangster, first cooking up spurious charges and later expelling all his critics within the movement. It is difficult not to see that the folk now running the party who have expelled him for bringing the organisation into disrepute are treading a well-trodden track.

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.

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?

Understanding the threat of "Cultural Nationalism"

A little over a month ago I commented upon the upheaval currently taking place within the British National Party (BNP), with party leader Nick Griffin finding himself being challenged for his job by Eddy Butler, a former NF stalwart from London's East End.

In that article I explained that Butler had unsurprisingly failed to meet the ludicrously prohibitive nominations criteria to enable his challenge to proceed to a full ballot against Griffin, and stated that the formation of a breakaway party was "almost inevitable".

I can now report that the almost inevitable has happened, in the event against the wishes of Butler who believes his best chance of seizing the leadership of the BNP rests upon him playing a waiting game and standing for the post again in 2011. At least that was what he believed earlier this week. The arrival a day or two ago of his notice of expulsion from the BNP may yet of course induce a rethink of some kind.

The breakaway has been forced by a number of Butler's more impatient supporters, who refuse to wait another year for the privilege of mounting another, probably doomed challenge under rules which appear designed for the specific purpose of giving Griffin a job for as long as he wants it.

The new venture goes under the name of the British Freedom Party (BFP). I'll not link to it, but for those who wish to see first hand what it is about I am sure Google will prove helpful.

One of the cheerleaders of the BFP would appear to be one Lee Barnes, formerly the BNP's celebrated legal eagle but now an outspoken anti-Griffinite. Like many of those involved on both sides of the dispute Barnes seems to have appeared on the far-right scene some considerable time after I departed it, but he has a reputation in fascist circles as being a wordy and knowledgeable if sometimes rather eccentric kind of guy.

On his blog Barnes advises us that the new outfit will pursue a policy of what he describes as "Cultural Nationalism", which he differentiates from "Ethno Nationalism" (based on race - you're okay if you're white) and "Civic Nationalism" (based on citizenship - you're okay if you have a British passport). According to Barnes:

"Those who are British citizens must integrate into British culture and society, it is not for us to surrender our country and culture, and re-engineer our society, to suit immigrants.

"All immigrants must become British - Britain will not become colonised.

"All those of all races and religions who are British citizens and who are proud to be British and who respect British culture are welcome to join our party."

Whether the BFP will ever amount to anything or whether it will fizzle out as so many other BNP breakaway groups have in the past is still to be seen. It is not a good start, from their point of view, that the anti-Griffin faction would already appear to have split between those who still believe the party can be changed from within and those who feel a new party is the answer. The latter would certainly appear to be devoid of anybody who could by any stretch of the imagination be described as a political heavyweight. Rumours abound that MEP Andrew Brons could be about to join them, but the journey from former Nazi Party sticker displayer to "Cultural Nationalist" would be a considerable one.

What I find myself contemplating with a degree of trepidation is a redrawing of the battle lines in a way that I have for some time considered to be inevitable as the concept of a "racially pure" Britain slips further and further into the realms of unreality. Whereas in the 1960s and 70s it was (just about) possible, without having to undergo a complete credibility bypass, to talk of repatriating "racially unassimilable" minorities, the widespread assimilation of same over the years and decades that have followed has consigned the aspirations of the race freaks to the margins even within their own company.

Instead the argument that minorities will be "welcome" (read "tolerated") just so long as they "integrate into British culture and society" (undefined) emerges as an ostensibly more reasonable option and, I suspect, one that may resonate with the not inconsequential "I'm not racist but..." tendency in our society.

So why should minorities not "become British"? Why should they not accept "our" ways, and adopt them henceforth as their ways? What, to put it bluntly, is wrong with "Cultural Nationalism"?

The first and most obvious worry of course arises from the pedigree of the new party that heralds the concept. It is a breakaway from the unquestionably racist BNP, led and populated by people who had joined an unquestionably racist party to begin with. The objections cited by the rebels towards the BNP leadership throughout their campaign to wrest the party from Nick Griffin have centred not around any dissatisfaction with BNP policy but instead around internal issues such as nepotism and financial probity.

It is possible, of course, for an entire organisation or a faction within an organisation to change fundamentally. The National Front was doing it all the time throughout the 1980s, moving seamlessly from one ideological fad to another, albeit always within the confines of a race-focused overview that remained unshaken. The Social Democrats broke away from a Labour Party that was too left-wing, then merged with most of the Liberals to become the Liberal Democrats who now shun Labour for being too right-wing. There's nowt so queer as folk, especially in politics.

But the move towards "Cultural Nationalism" is not a clean break from racism in the way that I and others who have been where I have been and seen what I have seen would recognise. Rather it is merely a movement towards a more populist expression of racism in a form with which those who would baulk at the purist pretensions of National Socialism would identify.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with all our citizens sharing and celebrating a common British identity. I wrote about such a thing here over two years ago on Walk Away's sister blog, A Community In Action. But that identity arises from our rich diversity as a nation, not from the forced submission of myriad cultures to the one.

I find myself wondering exactly what it is that "Cultural Nationalism" requires of minorities that they might become "like us". Like whom exactly? Like white people?

And just how far is this requirement supposed to go? Is everybody required to eat English food, wear English clothes, adopt "English" religious beliefs? Will accents be acceptable?

It is difficult to imagine a society in which some citizens are required by order of the state to imitate the ways of others ever being able to embrace true equality. Integration is a process that emerges organically over time in an atmosphere of tolerance and respect.

"Cultural Nationalism" moves us away from a society based upon respect and equality. It is but a Plan B for race purists whose first idea passed its sell-by date without being bought.

The NF and it's short-lived electoral breakthrough

The National Front is not an organisation that it is easy to feel sorry for, and so one has to laugh at the news that despite the racist party having waited 43 years for its first proper councillor the man who achieved that dubious honour just a week or so ago has had his party whip removed this morning.

Rumour has it that Councillor John Gamble, who had originally been elected to Rotherham Borough Council as a member of the BNP for Brinsworth and Catcliffe ward before leaving/being thrown out (depending upon whose version one reads) and joining the National Front via the England First Party, didn't realise that his new party was racist.

This gave him, and them, a particular problem as he claims to have had "several black girlfriends", although some of his erstwhile comrades are suggesting on sundry fascist websites that these "girlfriends" have been extremely temporary liaisons, not to mention somewhat costly.

Councillor Gamble has now announced that he intends to sit as an independent.

One wonders just how many people join fascist parties out of a sense of personal inadequacy and self-loathing. An interesting sociological study, if nothing else.

MPowering Youth Through Education and Experience

I spent a hugely constructive couple of hours yesterday (Saturday) afternoon at the Hounslow Community Centre as a guest at a workshop for young people organised by the MPower Hounslow Youth Project.

About fifteen youngsters - boys and girls mostly from a Muslim background - discussed a host of topics relating to political and social extremism, not just on the fringes of Muslim society but also street gangs and football hooliganism.


I was invited to the meeting in time to give my own presentation about my experiences as a National Front organiser in the 1970s and 1980s, but I arrived early enough to hear some of the earlier presentations and was amazed by the quality of the information that was being imparted. It occurred to me instantly that this project was deadly earnest about trying to keep potentially vulnerable young people who might otherwise find themselves receptive to extremist ideas on the straight and narrow.

When it was my turn to speak I simply gave it from the heart. Many of the people there were so young they had never even heard of the National Front, but most had heard of the BNP and I circulated some photos and written material demonstrating the extent to which I had been involved, including a fading snippet from a local newspaper showing myself and Nick Griffin, now leader of the BNP, addressing a rally in Isleworth and a letter I once received whilst in prison from an outspoken Ulster loyalist friend (writing from another prison) literally a few months before he was shot dead by members of a fringe Irish republican group.

I spoke of the way in which one becomes "ghettoised" when joining up with an extremist group, rightly shunned by normal society but with the result that one finishes up only speaking to and listening to others who share one's own prejudices, and sliding deeper and deeper thereby into an extremist mindset and way of life.

I think it fair to say that most of these very young people were ever so slightly taken aback to suddenly find themselves being lectured by this middle-aged, greying and nondescript old scruffpot and hearing about a way of life in which guns and bombs, whilst not perhaps a feature of everyday life, certainly existed as a feature of the political dialectic at the time.


I think I have said before on this blog that this is the kind of work, more than anything else, that I really want to be doing. I deeply regret my past as a right-wing extremist, but accept that it happened and believe that I am uniquely placed to offer warnings, advice and guidance to young people who may in the wrong circumstances found themselves being led along the same destructive and dangerous path.

MPower is a superb resource for vulnerable young people and I have already expressed to the organisers my willingness, indeed my eagerness to assist them in their future work should they wish me to do so. My respect for those who dedicated themselves to working with and helping young people in this way really does know no bounds.

My interview with Ed Saunt of the Hounslow Chronicle

A week or so ago I was contacted by Ed Saunt of the Hounslow Chronicle who wanted to write a piece about me and my former association with Nick Griffin, the Chairman of the British National Party (BNP), in the wake of his recent appearance on the BBC's Question Time programme.

I'm always happy to be of assistance, particularly in the case of young local journalists looking to showpiece their talents, and to put my specialist knowledge of the far-right to good use. Heaven knows I've been offering to do so for the past eighteen years but, as someone who has issues with the Labour Party even if only in a strictly local context, many of the most vociferous anti-racists, being possessed of a political conflict of interests, have preferred to perpetuate the myth that I am still in some way involved with the far right and of course, in order to keep that particular ball in the air, have had to dismiss any intelligence that I am able to offer as a "smokescreen".

So when Ed informed me that he wanted to carry a major piece on me and on my experiences with the far-right I agreed, but insisted that we should conduct the interview by e-mail where there would be a paper trail leading back to what I had actually said if in the event that I was in any way misquoted or misrepresented (that wasn't how I actually put it, but he was smart enough to understand).

Whilst I maintain that this was the correct thing to do in view of the sensitive nature of the subject (and Ed readily agreed to my proposed way of doing things anyway), as it happened I needn't have bothered. The two-page article demonstrated that Ed had a talent - unusual amongst local journalists, particularly the younger and more ambitious ones - for being able to write a feature which catches the eye and draws the crowds (inasfar as the Chronicle readership could be described as a crowd) without having to resort in any way to fabrication or distortion. Indeed, after a well-written and cogent introduction, the larger part of the feature consisted of a simple but effective reproduction of the question and answer interview that we had conducted, warts and all.

I am grateful to Ed and to the Chronicle for the mature approach which was taken in the production of this feature and would be happy to help them, or any other potential interviewer who is prepared to adopt the same ethics in seeking out good information on this most topical of subjects.

The full text of the interview can be found here.

Sick stunt reveals racism in its natural presence

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.

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!