From the street to the state: making anti-fascism anti-racist in 1970s Britain

The rise of the National Front

After the second world war, because of the horror at the Holocaust and the far Right’s failure to distance itself from the war-time enemy, post-war fascism was easily written off as both lunatic and politically marginal. ² Although there had been attempts (by Mosleyites and the White Defence League ³ ) to capitalise on the racist violence of August 1958, where in Nottingham and London’s Notting Hill gangs of white Teddy Boys and others had rioted against black homes and businesses, fascists were not its instigators – though the following year in Notting Hill a Mosleyite was responsible for the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane. ⁴ And much of the fascist Right was still focused on anti-Semitism, as evidenced by Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement holding a rally to ‘Free Britain from Jewish Control’ in Trafalgar Square in July 1962. The meeting came under attack from a large crowd who threw coins and rotten fruit. ⁵

What did burgeon post-war, however, was an unchecked racialism, predominantly in housing. Local anti-immigration groups, such as the Palgrave [white] Residents’ Association (which became the Southall Residents’ Association) formed in Southall in 1963, aimed to prevent New Commonwealth immigrants moving into local housing. ⁶ Such groups often received local support from the Conservatives, as in 1964 when Conservative MP for Smethwick Peter Griffiths worked with the local council to buy up empty properties on Marshall Street, in order to deny their sale to non-white families. ⁷ The ‘plan’ for Marshall Street was a deliberate allusion to the US post-war Marshall Plan, implying equivalence between Commonwealth migration and fascist invasion. Griffiths had secured his seat off the back of a now infamous election campaign of the same year, using the slogan ‘If you want a n***** neighbour vote Liberal or Labour.’ ⁸ Extremist fascist groups actively supported Griffiths’ electoral campaign, sending personnel and resources to the area. Colin Jordan’s hopes for the campaign were that ‘once people started to think racially, their own logic would take them well beyond any position the Conservatives could ever adopt’. ⁹ Fascist groups were beginning to shift away from an exclusive focus on the marginalised ideology of National Socialism towards a more acceptable, even media-friendly, racism. The Griffiths campaign foreshadowed the extreme Right’s adoption of anti-immigration as its chief propaganda focus.

This approach was given its first major boost during the second reading of the Race Relations Bill, when on 20 April 1968 the Conservative MP Enoch Powell gave a speech to a small gathering of party supporters in Birmingham. Powell prophesied a coming racial war should (black) immigration not be immediately halted and a repatriation programme of ‘generous assistance … pursued with … determination’ begun. ¹⁰ Powell criticised the Race Relations Bill which was about to become law and repeated lurid fabrications about immigrants supposedly told to him by his constituents. To a recent Powell biographer, ‘Despite all the intellectualism of Powell’s speech, it sounded definitively fascist.’ ¹¹ There is little question that Britain was already a racist society, having been moulded by a century of colonialism, war, and ‘scientific’ race theory. But Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, as it was known, was a decisive intervention that changed the context for racism and racial violence in Britain. The speech ‘gave a fillip to popular racism that made the lives of black people hell’ and ‘took the shame out of middle-class racism’. ¹² Ten days after the speech, a West Indian wedding party was attacked by fourteen white youths shouting ‘Powell, Powell’. Wade Crooks, who needed eight stitches over his left eye, told The Times – in what was front-page news – ‘I have been here since 1955 and nothing like this has happened before. I am shattered.’ ¹³

Powell enabled political forces to his Right to appear viable and credible. The NF, formed in a 1967 merger of the League of Empire Loyalists, the first British National Party and various local Racial Preservation Societies, began to grow in Powell’s wake. And now a link was formed between the fascist Right and the fringes of the Conservative party. As a Sheffield NF organiser told the investigative journalist Paul Foot:

Powell’s speech gave our membership and morale a tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speeches we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of the Tory organizations. ¹⁴

This relationship was symbiotic. Powell’s rhetoric shifted mainstream Westminster politics rightwards and at the same time the fascist Right began to discard its overtly Nazi tropes, replacing its anti-Semitic conspiracy theory (at least in public, most of the time) with the anti-immigrant mantra.

It was the Ugandan Asian ‘crisis’ that gave the NF its next major push. In August 1972, Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of tens of thousands of Ugandan residents of South Asian descent, who were entitled, as British passport holders, to come to Britain following arrangements made at Uganda’s independence in 1962. This led to the NF’s ‘period of most spectacular growth’ which, in a typical account, was ‘triggered by the [Conservative] Heath government’s admission of the Ugandan Asian refugees’. ¹⁵ In fact it was not the government’s decision to abide by international agreements (which might see the population increase by less than 0.05 per cent) but the overwhelmingly hostile and racist response to that decision by British society at large (and especially the press) that the NF drew on.

The NF expanded both its public profile and its efforts to win over the Tory Right, primarily via the Conservative Monday Club, which it came close to taking control of. ¹⁶ The archive of Powell’s personal papers is ‘filled’ with documents relating to ‘grassroots efforts to organize the mass repatriation of black people from Britain’. A ‘clear overlap’ between Powellism and the NF was maintained by Powell’s confidante Beryl Carthew, who published the Powellight magazine (its name a pun on the anti-fascist journal Searchlight). Carthew was expelled from the Monday Club in 1973 and by 1976 her home was listed as the headquarters of the West London branch of the NF. Powell told her he did not consider the NF dangerous, his only objection to her later political activity seeming to be that he was an obstinate Tory and considered membership of small parties pointless from a pragmatic standpoint. ¹⁷

After a brief lull, the Front received another boost when the 1972 ‘crisis’ was replayed with another set of refugees in May 1976, this time from Malawi. Press sensationalism reached fever pitch; Labour MP Bob Mellish opined ‘enough is enough’ in the Commons; ¹⁸ then in June, a Sikh teenager, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, was murdered in a racist attack in Southall. John Kingsley Read, leader of the National Party, a brief-lived split from the NF, declared ‘one down, a million to go’. At Read’s trial for incitement to racial hatred, Judge McKinnon, summing up, encouraged a verdict of not guilty (which the jury delivered), repeated Read’s lie that Chaggar was stabbed by an Asian youth, then wished him well after he had been acquitted. ¹⁹

The mid-1970s probably also marked the high-point of NF membership for, by the end of the decade, it was in decline. Despite fielding 303 candidates at the 1979 general election, its share of the vote collapsed, and though this increased in absolute terms by more than 77,000, by the 1980s the organisation was a shadow of its former self (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

National Front general election results, 1970–1979 ²⁰

Election	Number of candidates fielded	Total number of votes	Average percentage vote
1970	10	11,449	3.6
February 1974	54	76,865	3.1
October 1974	90	113,843	3.1
1979	303	191,719	1.1

The anti-fascist response

Since the emergence of fascism in the 1920s, there had been opposition to it. In Britain, before the second world war, the high-point of anti-fascist activity was the famous 1936 Battle of Cable Street, where 100,000 demonstrators fought with police whilst attempting to stop a march by Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts through a Jewish heartland. Later, thousands of individuals joined the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic against Franco. After the second world war, as Mosley attempted to resuscitate a moribund fascist movement, trade unionists and Jewish anti-fascists, many of them veterans of the war, responded by sweeping his goons off the streets. ²¹ As such, by the time the NF rose to prominence in the mid-1970s, there was a tradition of anti-fascist organising with both national and international precedents. A major challenge for anti-fascists responding to the NF was how to relate to earlier periods of fascism and anti-fascism. Did the NF represent a direct continuation of pre-war fascist traditions, or was something new taking place? And where were the new anti-fascists?

By the late 1960s, organised anti-fascism had declined from its 1930s high and then brief post-war anti-Mosley revival. Although the League of Anti-Fascists (‘an amorphous group of communists and left-wingers’ according to Special Branch ²² ) gathered to picket the founding meeting of the NF in December 1967, the Front was largely ignored in its early years.

The organised Left was focused on industrial and shop-floor organising. Race was secondary to class to the point of neglect. The Communist Party (CPGB) concentrated on exposing Powell as a ‘diehard Tory who has never done anything to help working people’. ²³ The Left was abandoned in the 1950s and 1960s by black activists in an exodus comparable to those from the CPGB after the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, but this loss ‘has never been acknowledged by the left in general or the Communist Party in particular’. ²⁴

Despite the slow and alienating start, by 1974, when the NF first eclipsed Powell in terms of public profile, the anti-fascist movement was beginning to grow. In June 1974 the NF planned a ‘Send Them Back’ march followed by a rally in Red Lion Square, London. Around 2,000 anti-fascists assembled to oppose the Front, made up of members of Liberation (formerly the Movement for Colonial Freedom), the CPGB, the International Socialists (IS), the International Marxist Group (IMG) and the unaffiliated. A militant section of the anti-fascist march led by the IMG broke off and attempted to blockade the entrance to the NF rally. The police attacked and in the fifteen minutes of clashes that followed Kevin Gately, a Warwick University student, was struck on the head, probably by the police, and died following a brain haemorrhage. ²⁵ It was a turning point for the burgeoning anti-fascist movement, but for the revolutionary Left the questions of racism and fascism were still refracted through the lens of industrial conflict. For the IS, still, ‘our main target in the present period is neither the Front nor fascism, but reformism, and its ally, racialism, in the labour movement’. ²⁶

The press and the government blamed the anti-fascists for Gately’s death. Richard Clutterbuck, the counter-insurgency theorist and army veteran of Palestine and Malaya, considered ‘the result’ to be ‘precisely what the NF would have wished’. ²⁷ But anti-fascist activity grew nonetheless in the aftermath of the tragedy of Red Lion Square. Eight thousand people joined an NUS-organised march in Gately’s memory, and in September 1974, 7,000 anti-fascists blockaded the path of an NF march, forcing the police to re-route it. ²⁸ A year later, 700 NF supporters were outnumbered by a counter-demonstration of 5,000 in East London. ²⁹ At a local level, grassroots Anti-Fascist Committees (AFCs) were forming in towns and cities across the country. ³⁰ These were broad-based coalitions of representatives from different parties, labour movement and tenants groups, trades unions, faith groups and sometimes also local authority employees.

February 1975 saw the launch of the anti-fascist journal Searchlight, edited by Maurice Ludmer. Anti-fascism was gaining a lifeblood of its own and was no longer just an adjunct to trade-union or leftwing activity. In autumn 1976, the formation of Rock Against Racism (RAR) (a campaign to reach young people by involving rock, pop, punk and reggae musicians) gave an additional boost for anti-fascists in the cultural arena. Especially important in drawing masses of white youth into anti-racist activity (even if some engaged more superficially than others), hundreds of concerts were put on around the country under the RAR brand between 1976 and 1981. ³¹

The first half of 1977 saw activism grow yet further. In April, 4,000 anti-fascists assembled to oppose the 600-strong NF St George’s Day parade in North London, in the first confrontation that saw street fighting with the NF on a large scale. ³² The following month the inaugural issue of CARF, the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism newspaper appeared, building the propaganda arm of the emergent anti-racist anti-fascist scene. ³³ The growth in interest in anti-fascism was epitomised by the Southwark Campaign Against Racialism and Fascism, which reported that its first meeting was attended by ninety-nine delegates representing fifty-one different trade-union branches, political and community groups. ³⁴ The growth of the movement was evident when twenty-six anti-fascist, women’s and black groups formed the (London) Anti-Racist Anti-Fascist Co-ordinating Committee (ARAFCC), adopting CARF as its newspaper. ³⁵ Its first test was at what came to be known as ‘the Battle of Lewisham’.

The Battle of Lewisham 1977

The pitched three-way battle between police, the NF and a mix of locals and anti-fascists on the streets of Lewisham, south London, in August 1977 has passed firmly into anti-fascist lore as a victory for anti-fascists, who broke the morale of the NF in a massive display of popular unity against an outside force. This it was, as we will see below, but what has often been neglected is why the battle was in Lewisham as opposed to any other place, with important implications for the future of the anti-fascist, anti-racist movement.

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Figure 1.

National Front begin march to Lewisham, 1977 (image courtesy of ARAFCC)

On Monday 30 May 1977 the police had raided homes across south-east London. Dozens of young people (almost all black men) were arrested and twenty-one were charged with ‘conspiracy to rob’, a crime which required practically nothing in the way of evidence to convict. The Lewisham 21 Defence Campaign began holding street stalls in Lewisham town centre, which, on one Saturday in July, was attacked by nearly 200 fascists. Meanwhile, the press was upping the ante with headlines about a supposed black crime wave. ³⁶ So when the NF called an ‘anti-muggers’ march through Lewisham for 13 August, they were not only targeting an area for its multicultural population, but purposely following where the state and the media had led.

In the run-up to this highly provocative march, the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (ALCARAF, an affiliate of ARAFCC) began building support for a counter-demonstration. ALCARAF was a notably broad-based campaign by the standards of other AFCs and had the support of the Mayor of Lewisham, the Bishop of Southwark, the Jewish Defence Committee and the CPGB. Local politicians joined ALCARAF in repeated appeals for the NF march to be banned, but the Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees and Metropolitan Police Commissioner David McNee rejected their pleas. ALCARAF and the CPGB called for a peaceful rally at nearby Ladywell Fields, a popular park and open space. ³⁷

Among other groups, ARAFCC and the IS, now renamed the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), made plans to confront the fascists directly, by mobilising as many people as possible to intercept the NF’s march. ARAFCC was in the strange position of having ALCARAF as a constituent member, whose plan was only partially supported by the wider London grouping, many of whom wanted to confront the NF as well. In the end ARAFCC voted to publicly endorse the Ladywell Fields assembly but also encourage anti-fascists to reassemble in the afternoon at Clifton Rise where the SWP and others would be waiting. The second part of the plan was more quietly advertised and did not feature in press releases, though the back page of the CARF issue printed just before the march called on people to attend both assembly points. ³⁸ Others such as Women Against Racism and Fascism (WARF), the IMG, the Workers League and Big Flame all supported both events. ³⁹

The debate in the run-up to the Lewisham event reflected what is often seen as the central, or at least most untiring, debate within anti-fascism: militancy versus pacifism, direct action versus peaceful rallies on the other side of town, or even reform versus revolution. ‘We totally oppose the harassment and the provocative march planned by the SWP’, read a CPGB handbill at Lewisham, attacking those ‘who insist on the ritual enactment of vanguardist violence’. ⁴⁰ For its part the SWP dismissed the CPGB as interested only in ‘class-collaborationist anti-racialist committees stuffed full of reformist trade-union bureaucrats, jolly liberal clergymen and other such riff-raff’. ⁴¹ The issue was to recur throughout the 1970s, with the SWP later to be accused of the same sins. An earlier demonstration in February 1976 in Stechford, Birmingham shows that this was not confined to a debate between communists and Trotskyists. There, when 750 NF members marched in support of their candidate at a forthcoming by-election, 300 anti-fascists followed the Birmingham Trades Council to a rally in the city centre. Meanwhile, up to ten times that number responded to the call of black and Asian groups to stay in the area of the NF demonstration to defend the residents living there. The Labour Party candidate declined to participate in either demonstration. ⁴²

At Lewisham, the division was resolved when the organisers of the peaceful rally planned its finish in good time for anti-fascists to make it to the ‘confrontation’ in the afternoon should they wish. Despite the war of words at the time, the splitting of the demonstration in two showed the strength of diverse tactics. More people were involved as those who couldn’t or wouldn’t confront the NF directly could still participate in the morning, and on the day the divide likely contributed to distracting and overwhelming the police.

On the morning of 13 August, 4,000 anti-fascists gathered at Ladywell Fields for the rally, which passed without incident. ⁴³ Around 3,000 people then made their way towards the Clifton Rise assembly point where many were already waiting. The NF march assembled at 1.30 pm but was soon split in two under a barrage of stones and fists. Police counterattacked and succeeded in driving the anti-fascists back. Unable to reach their planned destination of Lewisham town centre, the 500–600 NF supporters eventually managed a short rally in a car park near Blackheath. The Front then dispersed and had mostly left by 3 pm. It was at this point that the bulk of the ‘battle’ took place. Police were determined to clear the streets of the celebrating anti-fascists and charged. ⁴⁴ Bloody fighting ensued and riot shields and long batons were deployed for the first time in the UK (prisons and the north of Ireland excepted). By now some anti-fascists had left but the crowd that remained was much more militant:

The cry went up from the marchers, ‘Let’s go to Ladywell station’, but we [SWP members] meant to go to the train station, to go home. The black youth took it up, ‘To Ladywell, Ladywell police station’ … And the black youth did go there. They stoned the station. ⁴⁵

In another incident, a man threw a brick through the window of a police van, rendering the driver unconscious. For the police’s part, one section of the riot squad reportedly threw an anti-fascist through a shop window. ⁴⁶ By the day’s end 214 people had been arrested and dozens injured. ⁴⁷

The SWP claimed credit for the Clifton Rise mobilisation, and the press gave it the blame for the ensuing violence. ⁴⁸ Looking back at Lewisham, SWP supporters clearly felt they were the main force confronting the NF. Ted Parker told Dave Renton

people wanted to march to Clifton Rise [from Ladywell] but they just wouldn’t line up behind a Socialist Workers Party banner … Eventually, we found some members of some other group … with a banner for some united campaign against racism and fascism. People agree[d] to group behind that. ⁴⁹

An unimpressed ARAFCC noted at the time:

Contrary to press reports of Saturday’s events, the bulk of the anti-racist demonstrators were neither members of nor under the control of the Socialist Workers Party. In fact the ARAFCC led some 3,000 people from the ALCARAF-called march up to New Cross (avoiding the police cordons). ⁵⁰

But most accounts suggest that what was really decisive in the course of the day’s events was neither ARAFCC nor the SWP but the actions of the local community and its black youth especially. ⁵¹ Harassed by the police near-daily, on seeing the force arrive in numbers reminiscent of an occupation to enable a neo-Nazi parade, they needed little encouragement to go on the offensive, as photos of the event reveal.

The Anti-Nazi League

Following the battle, the SWP was isolated from some other anti-fascists and privately aware that it had been less influential at Lewisham than widely suggested. It quickly moved to establish a vehicle for anti-fascist organising that could draw support from outside the party. In November 1977 it launched the ANL with the support of a number of left Labour MPs, the anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain, as well as Searchlight. The objective of the League as laid down in its founding statement was to counter the NF at the next general election. ⁵² Existing anti-fascist organisations do not appear to have been consulted prior to the launch of the ANL. ARAFCC had already scheduled its annual general meeting for November and the minutes record a degree of scepticism about ‘the great and the good’ that had formed the ANL, but concluded that the London AFCs should strive for fraternal relations with the new organisation. If the ANL restricted itself to election work, then it was expected there would be few problems of overlap with the broader and longer-term anti-racist agenda of the AFCs. ⁵³ But it is worth noting that the organisation that would later become the sine qua non of anti-fascist organising emerged when it did on the back of what was essentially a black protest against the state and the police.

The emergence of the populist ANL gave anti-fascism a tremendous public boost. By early 1978 it had distributed 1,700,000 leaflets, 25,000 badges, 90,000 posters and 300,000 stickers, ⁵⁴ and local ANL groups were established all over the country. The ANL gained the endorsement of fifty local Labour parties and had support from many trade-union branches and workplace organisations. ⁵⁵ By summer 1978, the ANL had perhaps 50,000 active supporters. ⁵⁶ The League increased its profile further by joining forces with Rock Against Racism to put on two huge carnivals that year. The first saw 80,000 people march from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park for a concert headlined by The Clash, Tom Robinson and X-Ray Spex. The ANL had expected only 20,000. The second carnival in Brockwell Park was even bigger, with as many as 100,000 in attendance. ⁵⁷ But the legacies of both carnivals were marred by violence in East London. The day after the first, ‘one thousand fascists [marched] … with not a glimmer of opposition to them’. ⁵⁸ The Hackney Committee against Racialism had tried to get the carnival organisers to announce from the stage notice of the planned NF demonstration, but had been rebuffed. CARF despaired:

Lewisham may not get the positive publicity that the Carnival has received, but that in itself is a good reason for asking who benefits from diverting protests off the streets, into the parks and away from direct confrontation with racists and fascists? ⁵⁹

On the day of the second carnival, the NF had called a march through Whitechapel, the area where Altab Ali, a young garment worker, had been killed in a racist attack in May. Also between the two carnivals, the four Virk brothers had been imprisoned for defending themselves from a racist attack outside their home. ⁶⁰ The ANL declined to divert resources from the Carnival to defend the East End, and the NF march went virtually unopposed. The Hackney and Tower Hamlets Defence Committee was ‘openly and bitterly’ critical of the ANL for its actions. ⁶¹

The ANL was by now the dominant anti-fascist force. ARAFCC convened a two-day conference at Middlesex Polytechnic in June 1978 in an attempt to bring AFCs from around the country together along with black, women’s and gay liberation groups. Over 350 attendees represented 179 groups and committees. A national structure was agreed and various policy motions passed but there was much dispute over the conference order and especially on whether enough time was given to discussing sexism and women’s liberation. By the end of the weekend the tone of debate was ‘uncomradely and acrimonious’. ⁶² A Searchlight editorial laid the blame on ‘certain women, Gay and Left groups’ with which both Oxford AFC and Leamington WARF took issue in the magazine’s letters pages. ⁶³ CARF reported that ‘Black people felt excluded from the discussion, labour movement members were alienated by debates which tended to focus upon the ideological aspects of fascism, and there was no common programme or recognised set of tactics which could unite the many “sects”.’ ⁶⁴ The small but prolific libertarian socialist group Big Flame felt the collapse was inevitable:

coming as it did at a time of the escalation of the struggle and the relatively recent entry into it of women, gays, black organisations and trade unionists, the conference was almost bound to explode … however, probably the main reason for this failure was the rapid growth of an alternative organisation, the Anti-Nazi League. ⁶⁵

Following the failed conference, ARAFCC voted to disband in September 1978. ⁶⁶ A collective with close ties to Race & Class continued to publish CARF. Many local anti-fascist organisations remained active but there were no further efforts at national organising outside of the ANL in the 1970s.

Whilst the ANL faced criticism for leaving the streets for the parks, direct action against fascists was still commonplace, especially at the local level and still often involving ANL/SWP supporters. The most militant actions were undertaken by ‘the squads’. NF attacks on leftwing paper sellers and bookshops led to the growth of small groups of anti-fascists at first focused on protecting the Left but soon branching out into targeted attacks and intimidation campaigns against known NF members. In activist memoirs, it was argued that the sheer quantity of violence meted out to the NF contributed to a high turnover in NF membership and the demoralisation of those who stuck with it. ⁶⁷ This commitment to action is reflected in an extraordinary episode in October 1979, when four men broke into a Sussex print works that doubled as the NF’s headquarters. Finding firearms, membership lists, books and SS uniforms, they set the building alight. ⁶⁸ NF organiser Martin Webster later admitted in court that anti-fascists had made it ‘impossible’ for him to get NF members on the streets in desired numbers. ⁶⁹ Serious violence eventually fell out of favour with the SWP which denounced squadism as ‘a form of terrorism’ ⁷⁰ and expelled its leading proponents.

Southall 1979

Mass direct action had not vanished completely and returned after Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan finally called the general election the ANL had been preparing for, which was set for May 1979. The high-point of the NF’s election campaign was to call a ‘public’ meeting in Southall, the area with the largest Asian population in the UK, on 23 April (St George’s Day, again). The local Asian community led a demonstration ‘for Unity and Peace’ in a bid to have the meeting cancelled. ⁷¹ The community’s peaceful march on 22 April was subjected to snatch-squad arrests by the police. ⁷² The following day multiple demonstrations against the NF meeting took place. The Southall Youth Movement (SYM) placed priority on blockading the town hall and gathered 200 supporters outside early in the day. This youthful and militant group was attacked by the police and many were arrested. ⁷³ Southall was transformed as local workers left factories early in what was ‘effectively a political strike’. ⁷⁴ Police then sealed off the town centre ahead of the larger proposed action called by the Indian Workers Association (IWA) and the ANL, a mass but peaceful sit-in at 5pm. ⁷⁵ Police roadblocks prevented the planned sit-in from taking place, as well as residents from reaching their homes. Demonstrators congregated at the main roadblocks. Police forced a path through the crowds and walked a few NF members into the hall. The requirement that such meetings under the Representation of the People Act be public and hence open to non-NF members was not enforced. From here on police began attacking demonstrators. Police raided 6 Park View, known as the Peoples Unite building. Officers formed a gauntlet from the house, truncheoning those ejected from it. Clarence Baker, manager of the reggae band Misty in Roots, was left comatose. ⁷⁶ On nearby Beechcroft Avenue at around 7.30pm, 33-year-old teacher and SWP/ANL member Blair Peach was struck on the head by a police officer from the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group (SPG), killing him. ⁷⁷ Peach was a well-known anti-fascist campaigner and had been attacked by NF members near his home twice in the months before his death. ⁷⁸

In addition to one death and many injuries, over 700 people were arrested and 342 eventually charged. The press response mirrored that at Lewisham, casting the SWP and ANL as outside agitators and responsible for Peach’s killing. Whilst many ANL supporters and other anti-fascists had travelled from outside Southall (as had the entirety of the NF, who unlike the ANL had no local links whatsoever), the majority of the demonstrators were local Asians. Almost all of those detained were from the area. ⁷⁹ According to the local group Southall Rights, the events ‘left a scar on the people of Southall that will take years to heal. The racial abuse that accompanied the violence, the wanton destruction of property … and the pursuit of persons running away and/or trying to seek shelter, all give the lie to any suggestion that the Police were merely defending themselves.’ ⁸⁰

A fortnight after the events at Southall, the Conservatives won the general election. The NF received a tiny share of the vote and the organisation fell into another period of in-fighting, its electoral ambitions more or less permanently dashed. The ANL national conference held shortly after the 1979 election recognised its levels of activity ‘will inevitably not be the same as [they were] in the last eighteen months’. ⁸¹ The ANL was quietly wound up by the SWP in around 1982, leaving little to fill the vacuum. Many of the AFCs that had expected to continue the anti-racist struggle after the election were no longer active. Searchlight soon complained there was ‘no anti-racist, anti-fascist movement to speak of’. ⁸² A year earlier, ARAFCC had warned that ‘the arrival of the ANL, although drawing into the movement many new people and groups, also served to weaken certain local campaigns and to narrow the focus on fascism, leaving as a secondary issue the problem of racism … Anti-Nazism tends to deal with the visible “symptoms” of fascism, whilst anti-racist campaigns can tackle the causes of racism at their roots.’ ⁸³

Historical assessments of the 1970s anti-fascist movement invariably tend towards the question of whether the ANL really caused the NF’s electoral defeat in 1979, or if it was, in fact, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher gave a famous interview to World in Action in January 1978 in which she supposed ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. ⁸⁴ This is often seen as the end of the tacit agreement between Labour and the Conservatives not to openly compete on immigration at the polls which had held during the 1960s and most of the 1970s. ⁸⁵ The usual argument then follows that NF voters abandoned the party for the safety of the Conservatives, with the implication that hardly any NF supporters were really fascists, but just ‘ordinary citizens’ concerned about immigration. Of course this neglects that, as noted above, the absolute vote for the NF actually increased in 1979. In reality the Conservative party’s offensive over law and order and immigration was about defeating Labour more than the NF. But it would be remarkable if the hundreds of thousands of people who passed through the anti-fascist movement between 1977 and 1979 had no impact on the election. Some later writers have concluded that the Front was never able to recover momentum following its defeat at Lewisham, even before the founding of the ANL. ⁸⁶

Anti-racism or anti-fascism, or: the street or the state?

But perhaps more important than the effect on polling numbers was that anti-fascism was changing, and being linked to anti-racism – thereby raising the question of the role of the state. And indeed it was radical black political analysts, because of their understanding of colonial and imperial history, who had already for some years considered the UK state as fascist. For, before the founding even of the NF, much less the ANL, the Black Power movement in Britain was talking about fascism. In 1967 the Universal Coloured People’s Association stated that:

the only difference between the Ian Smiths and Harold Wilsons of the white world is … a difference in tactics … it is not a quarrel between fascism and anti-fascism but a quarrel between frankness and hypocrisy within a fascist framework. ⁸⁷

At the high-point of the Black Power movement in the 1970s, the ‘Mangrove Nine’ trial of nine black men and women for a range of crimes from affray to incitement to riot, the defendants explained they were picketing ‘the three main centres of fascist repression in the area – Notting Hill, Notting Dale and Harrow Road Police Stations’. ⁸⁸

The pages of this journal in early 1975 indicate that this was not just a case of overblown rhetoric but a real point of tension. The barrister Ian Macdonald (who represented some of the Nine) concluded, à la George Jackson’s analysis, ⁸⁹ that ‘we are already living under fascism’, appealing for the Left to reject a view of anti-fascism that was reducible to just a broad defence of ‘so-called democratic rights’:

The irrelevance of the National Front is that its policies have already been incorporated into the state plan … Compared with what successive Labour and Conservative governments have legislated and put into effect through immigration officers, the proposals made by Oswald Mosley and his fascist supporters in the 1950s look mild and liberal … To me, the young black men and women who swarmed round Caledonian Road police station in 1970, or those who went into the Stoke Newington station and tried to take a police hostage in return for their arrested friend, were engaged in far more effective anti-fascist activities than the red battalions of Red Lion Square. ⁹⁰

In reply, trades unionist and Searchlight editor Maurice Ludmer despaired at

the way the word fascist has been hurled around, with almost gay abandon, as an invective to fit anyone on the right or in the establishment to whom we are strongly opposed … if he [Macdonald] finds it difficult to distinguish between capitalism in the form of a bourgeois democracy from capitalism in the form of fascism, then perhaps a consultation with the workers of Spain, Chile, Greece and Portugal would bring greater clarity on the subject … to bar capitalism’s way to a fascist solution to its crisis is a valuable contribution to the struggle for socialism. ⁹¹

These arguments by sections of the Left highlighted the need to understand how the British state impacted differently on the white and black working class and how important it was to understand the way black people interpreted danger to their community. Colin Prescod pointed out:

The National Front throw bombs at black people’s premises. They beat up black people on the street and so on. So they are harmful. But in a sense, they’re not the major threat to black people. Any black youth on the street will tell you that the major threat for them, for all their lives in this country, has been represented by the police. ⁹²

Seeing the problem of the NF as secondary to that of the racist state had important implications for anti-racist and anti-fascist organising. A. Sivanandan considered that because the ANL was stuck dealing with the symptom (fascist groups), it paid insufficient attention to the disease (racism):

The marches by fascist groups, like the National Front, through Black areas like Lewisham mobilized thousands of Black and white people on the streets. There were contradictions, however, between groups like the Anti-Nazi League (which was anti-fascist, and, incidentally, anti-racist) and the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (which was anti-racist and, therefore, anti-fascist). Basically Black people and local CARF groups said, let’s get rid of racism, the recruiting ground of the fascists, whilst the ANL line was class first and race afterwards. ⁹³

The ANL was thus criticised for having a narrowly ‘anti-Nazi’ politics. The semi-official history of the ANL argues that ‘it was necessary to remind people of the history in Germany … to call the NF Nazis was to point to genocide as the goal of their movement’. ⁹⁴ The message of the ANL was captured by the famous slogan, ‘the National Front is a Nazi Front’. In practical terms, by campaigning against the NF as Nazis, the ANL was limited to only ever ensuring its electoral defeat and could not address the widespread racism the NF drew on (though it must be recalled the ANL was formed explicitly with its eyes on the general election). This is not to say that the ANL and other anti-fascists did not campaign against racism or consider it a serious issue, and Rock Against Racism is especially important in this regard. The propaganda value of casting the NF as Nazis was clearly immense, but the united front tactic behind it hitched everything to the NF’s defeat at the polls. Big Flame rightly said ‘we should never argue that a political challenge to the NF … is a choice between Smash the Front or Fight Racism’ and implored after the election that ‘moving from defence to attack is the only way to consolidate the success of the ANL’. ⁹⁵

As Paul Gilroy noted:

Being ‘Anti-Nazi’ located the political problem posed by the growth of racism in Britain exclusively in the activities of a small and eccentric, though violent, band of neo-fascists … even the most racist Britons did not necessarily recognize themselves as Nazis or identify their ideas about alien culture, mugging or repatriation, as being derived from the teachings of Hitler or Mussolini. ⁹⁶

The history of the far Right and its popular basis for support at this time is understandable only with reference to British history, especially ‘scientific’ racism domestically and imperialism internationally. The ‘Nazi front’ message did not fully grasp that the NF was not importing an alien ideology, but drawing on the history and practice of the British state. The main precursor group of the NF was the League of Empire Loyalists – the character of 1970s British fascism was in many regards arguably more of the nineteenth century than it was of the 1930s. If it was Britain’s past that inspired the fascists of the 1970s, it was the contemporary state, with all its repressive and ideological trappings, that nurtured and gave succour to the NF. And, as Sivanandan pointed out, ‘It was not enough to situate fascism historically … and take up the refrain of “Never Again”. Something was happening again – if differently – and we needed to see it in a contemporary perspective.’ ⁹⁷

In historical assessments of the Left, differences and arguments are often seen as signs of weakness. But in this case, one can see how the injection of black and anti-racist perspectives into anti-fascism in the 1970s came to strengthen the movement. And it marked two important developments. First, it firmly challenged the belief that fascism was a static beast, and that the far Right in Britain would forever resemble Mosley’s Blackshirts. Second, it dispelled any notion that anti-fascism could afford to separate itself from a wider anti-racist struggle.

The contradictions between the two trends in anti-fascism described above are still visible now. But where left and anti-fascist forces view the far Right today in the context of the state, institutional racism and the border regime, they do so by drawing on a legacy advanced by the militant black struggles against racism of the 1970s.