Among the Thugs

BURY ST EDMUNDS

One British supporter, himself a referee, said that the ground outside the Stadium was littered with British National Front leaflets, some overprinted by the British National Party with their address. One witness spoke of passengers on the boat crossing the Channel with National Front insignia singing songs of hatred and exhibiting violence.

Mr John Smith, Chairman of Liverpool Football Club, spoke of how six members of Chelsea National Front had boasted to him of their part in provoking the violence and said that they seemed proud of their handiwork. Mr Bob Paisley, a former manager of Liverpool Football Club, said that he was forced to leave the Directors’ Box at the start of the game as dozens of fans poured over the dividing wall and that the person next to him claimed that he was a Chelsea supporter and was wearing a National Front badge. A number of banners decorated with swastikas were recovered after the match, including one marked ‘Liverpool Edgehill’ . . . A banner with ‘England for the English’ and ‘Europe for the English’ was observed and a contingent of the National Front were clearly seen in Blocks ‘X’ and ‘Y’. One party leaving Brussels main station was observed to be Londoners wearing Liverpool colours, carrying Union Flags and having National Front and swastika tattoos.

Mr Justice Popplewell

Final Report on the Deaths at Heysel Stadium, January 1986

THE FIRST NATIONAL Front disco I attended was in Bury St Edmunds on an unseasonably warm evening in the middle of April. Bury St Edmunds is a highly ordered, middle-class town in East Anglia. It is known for its Georgian architecture and its rural ways, and I had decided beforehand that, following the disco, I would spend the night there. But around midnight it became evident that what I had planned for myself and what others had planned for me were not the same. It was around midnight that I found myself in the market square pushed up against a lamp-post, looking into the eyes of a young man named Dougie. Dougie, who was about my height, had gathered a great quantity of my cotton shirt in such a way that he had me standing on tip-toe, and every now and then, serving to reinforce the occasional phrase that Dougie wished to stress, I was lifted off the lamp-post and then pushed back sharply against it, knocking my head.

You like the National Front, don’t you? Dougie was asking, stretching out his question to accommodate the full, painful rhythm of his lifting me up, bumping me back and knocking my head again.

Yes, Dougie, I said, I like the National Front very much.

But the point is, Dougie said, you really like us. He paused. Don’t you?

Lift. Push. Bump.

Yes, Dougie, I really like the National Front.

I had grown fascinated by the tattoo on Dougie’s forehead, right there in the middle, a small but detailed blue swastika.

And [lift] you are going to write nice things [bump] about us, aren’t you? Knock.

Dougie had become a problem.

The evening was meant to be a good-natured Saturday-night outing, a party among friends, commemorating the opening of the Bury St Edmunds branch of the National Front and celebrating the twenty-first birthday of a new member. The party had been organized by Neil, the new chairman. It was an important event for Neil. This was his first National Front disco, and there would be members of the executive branch up from London to judge his performance. There was an approved way of holding such events, and Neil had worked hard to ensure that it was all done in the proper way. There was the party’s climax, for instance. It was essential, as branch chairman, that you did not allow your lads to get too excited too early. A branch chairman would know not to do this. He would want the lads to get too excited—crowd frenzy was a valuable tool—but only briefly, right at the end, just before closing time. It was even permissible that some people might become a little violent—a little violence was an acceptable thing—but, again, only at the end. Any earlier, and the police would have to pay a visit. There was an understanding with the police of Bury St Edmunds, I was told: they didn’t want to have to pay a visit.

But Dougie had become very excited very early. What’s more, Dougie had become not a little violent, but very violent. Dougie had become a problem. And now this problem had a good part of my throat gathered into his fist.

There was another problem about Dougie: he was related to the new branch chairman; Dougie was Neil’s brother.

I had met Neil and Dougie at a Cambridge United football match. Both were Chelsea supporters, and the match where we met had marked only the second time in its history that Chelsea had travelled to Cambridge. After the first match, there had been so much trouble—Chelsea supporters had ‘done’ Cambridge—that there had been a call to abolish the Cambridge team and ban football from the city.

Trouble was likely at the second match as well, and I made a point of getting into the Chelsea side of the ground. On the way over, I came upon a boy who had fallen on to a car bonnet, having stumbled into the street beforehand, stopping traffic. Blood was pouring from his throat, which someone had cut open with the serrated neck of a broken wine bottle. There was more fighting further down the Newmarket Road. I saw a fence being taken apart, the slats of wood being handed out as weapons. There were roving gangs of lads—six or seven in each—and every few minutes a new one appeared and then went chasing down one of the side-streets.

I entered the stands for the visiting supporters and ended up following a skinhead—big and brawny with a tight-fitting white T-shirt and fleshy biceps. His name, I would learn, was Cliff, which—sheer, unadorned, vaguely suggestive of danger—seemed entirely appropriate. The skinhead phase had long passed and, even here, in this crowd, Cliff stood out as a nostalgic anomaly, but Cliff had such an aggressive manner—the regulation braces and the heavy black boots and pockets full of twopences (their edges sharpened beforehand) to throw at the Cambridge supporters—that he seemed the most obvious person to befriend.

Once the match ended, I followed him outside the ground. He began panhandling to raise the money to pay for his fare home, and I offered him some change and introduced myself.

Why me? he wanted to know.

I didn’t know what to say. And that was when he pointed to the badge attached to his braces. Is it because of this? he asked. Is that why you picked me?

And then, for the first time, I noticed a discreet little badge. It said: ‘NF’.

Cliff was a drummer in a rock band (Have you heard of White Power music? I had not heard of White Power music) and an unemployed bricklayer. He was accompanied by several others, another feature about him I had failed to notice. One was Dougie. Dougie neither spoke nor smiled. He stared. His head, gaunt and darkened with exhaustion, could only have looked more like a skull if the skin had been peeled away. Another was Dougie’s brother, Neil.

Neil concluded that I would want to visit his operation in Bury; he was just setting it up and there would be a party some time soon. I could come over, meet the lads. He would put me up himself.

I asked Neil for his number.

He wouldn’t give it. He asked me for mine. He had to have mine—and my address, please—before he could give me any further information. There were people he would have to clear this with.

Somebody would be in touch.

And the following week, somebody was in touch. I received a large brown envelope. My name and address had been written out by hand. There was no indication of the contents or the sender except the postmark: Croydon.

Inside, I found three editions of Bulldog, printed in exclamatory red and black. Bulldog—its title invoking that highly expressive icon of English male culture—was the publication of the Young National Front. According to the banner at the bottom of the front page, it was the paper ‘THEY WANT TO BAN.’

I picked up one and read—beneath the headline, ‘SEX SLAVES! BLACK PIMPS FORCE WHITE GIRLS INTO PROSTITUTION’—a graphic account (beatings, kidnapping, torture, a bathtub full of spiders) of white prostitutes working for black pimps. There was an editorial. ‘We hate what these Black animals are doing and we think that all of them should be locked up until such time as a National Front government can send them back to their own countries.’

I flipped through the pages. In each edition there were two regular columns. One was ‘Rivers of Blood’—its tide borrowed from Enoch Powell’s speech predicting rivers of blood if the immigration of blacks into Britain was not stopped. ‘Rivers of Blood’ listed the incidents of racial injustice that had occurred the month before: a white youth had been killed by a ‘Black bastard’; a race riot at a disco; an account of Savile Town, the multi-racial district of Dewsbury in Yorkshire, accompanied by a photograph of a member of the National Front kicking an Asian in the face. ‘The trouble in Dewsbury,’ the column concluded, ‘will only get worse unless the Blacks are sent home. The choice is an easy one: repatriation or race war!’

The other column, entitled ‘On the Football Front’, took up the back page and was devoted to activities on the terraces. This is one of the letters to the football editor:

Dear Bulldog,

In issue 35 you printed an article on the racist ‘boys’ who support Newcastle United. The ‘boys’ were pleased to have been mentioned but they disagree strongly with Bulldog’s claim that they don’t have as many racist ‘boys’ as Leeds, Chelsea or West Ham. In fact the ‘boys’ believe that they have more and that they are now the number one racist ‘firm’ in the country . . .

Yours sincerely,

Joe of the East Stand

This is another:

Dear Bulldog,

I buy your paper regularly but a lot of your reports are the same: it’s always Leeds or Chelsea or Spurs or West Ham in every issue. I follow Rochdale AFC and at every home match you can count on hearing racist chants and songs. The police have tried to stop us but to no avail. Recently they were stupid enough to send a Paki copper but he got so much abuse that he hasn’t been seen at the Dale since. If you print this letter it will show people that there is NF support at the smaller grounds as well as the big ones.

Yours sincerely,

The Rochdale AFC National Front

From my reading of Bulldog, the member from the Rochdale National Front was unnecessarily worried about his minority status as a racist supporter from the provinces. In these three issues of Bulldog, there were accounts of racial abuse in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Cardiff, Portsmouth and Folkestone Town, which wasn’t in the league (‘During a Southern League Cup match between Folkestone and Welling, the Folkestone fans threw bananas at the opposing Black players’).

How was I to view these publications? I was surprised by how much I disliked receiving them. I found them repellent—spread across my kitchen table, having been delivered in the ordinary way, arriving with the morning letters and bills—and I was reluctant to touch them: it would be a few days before I was prepared to examine them again. I didn’t believe that they were widely read: the writing inside was characterized by too much ranting; it was the hortatory hysteria of someone who wasn’t being listened to. Even so, I was sure that many people shared its views, although I didn’t think that I personally knew many of them. I was confident that my English friends didn’t, but my English friends—met in Cambridge or London or Oxford—were of a different world. I was coming to wonder how much they knew about England.

The first time I heard the ape grunt—the barking sound that supporters make when a black player gets the ball—it was so foreign I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was a deep, low rumbling, and I had trouble placing where it was coming from: from underneath the ground perhaps? That such a sound could be coming up from the ground was frightening. I thought: it’s an earthquake, if only because that was the only sound—that low, bass drumming—that seemed at all comparable. I remember a friend visiting from the United States. He was here for a week and I wanted to show him the football terraces. There was a match at Millwall—the names alone evoked what I wanted to him to see: Millwall at the Den on Cold Blow Lane. But there had been rain and the pitch was a swamp, and the match was cancelled. We crossed London and got to White City in time to watch Queen’s Park Rangers. A black player touched the ball and the grunt started: uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh.

My friend turned to me and said: What is that curious sound?

I said nothing, but the grunt continued: uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh.

What is it? he asked again.

It’s because a black player has the ball, I said. They are making an ape sound because a black player has the ball.

The looks that crossed my friend’s face were so genuine and so unmediated—bewilderment, outrage, disgust, but mainly incomprehension: he couldn’t understand it. The grunt continued: uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh. Both of us looked round. The grunt was coming not from a few lads, but, it seemed, from everyone on the terraces—old, young, fathers, whole families. Everywhere we looked we saw the ugly faces of men grunting, sticking out their lower jaws in their crude imitations of apes. Why was it so much worse here? I thought, appreciating suddenly the ironies of being in White City, having entered from South Africa Road—until finally the black player passed the ball on and the grunting stopped.

And then another black player got the ball and the grunt resumed.

My friend’s face was still fixed in an expression of intense incomprehension. I couldn’t explain it. I was embarrassed to be living in this country.

It’s England, I said.

There were other items inside my brown parcel. One was a copy of National Front News, a more serious periodical, full of opinions about the National Health Service, British Rail, employment, crime figures and a piece on deer hunting entitled ‘Stop this Barbaric Sport’: a publication that had set out to tell a young man what to think. There was a compliments slip from Nationalist Books and a note wishing me luck with my writing about football supporters, hoping that the enclosed publications might help. It was signed ‘Ian’.

‘Ian’ was Ian Anderson. I identified him from my copy of National Front News; its back page listed developments in the Party. Ian Anderson had a number of responsibilities. He was the Party’s Deputy Chairman, the second in command. But he was also the head of the Branch Liaison Department. And he was the head of the Administration Department. And he was involved in the Activities Department, but of the Activities Department Ian Anderson was joint-head with a man named Joe Pearce (Joe Pearce was the Chairman of the Young National Front; he was also head of the Education and Training Department; and he was the principal organizer of the Instant Response Groups and the apparent ‘genius’ behind the Unemployed Activist Units). The National Directorate of the National Front—I learned this as well from my back page—had ‘made a number of changes in the party administration designed to increase its effectiveness.’ It seemed to me that there was an underlying purpose to this back page that was more than keeping people informed about what was happening in the Party; it was also to convey a reassuring message about the Party’s organization: that it had one. The National Front was real, this page said; it was not an arbitrary convocation of loons on the fringe of society trying to get people to listen to it. It was a real party, with a real bureaucracy, with departments that needed running and managing.

My compliments slip had a telephone number. I wanted to know more about the National Front. I wanted to understand its relationship to football supporters.

I phoned Nationalist Books and the man who answered recognized my name. An eerie moment—was I already known among members of the National Front?—until I realized that the man who answered the phone was Ian Anderson. Ian Anderson was also, it seemed, in charge of the switchboard.

Mr Anderson was not very friendly, despite his encouraging note. Journalists made him nervous. It is possible that anyone not a member of the National Front made him nervous, but I wasn’t to know that yet. At the time, I was writing for a Sunday newspaper that had been particularly unfriendly to Mr Anderson. In fact, no Sunday newspaper—or any other paper on any other day of the week—had succeeded in being particularly friendly to Mr Anderson. This was perhaps why Mr Anderson was a little unfriendly himself. And you can’t really blame him: once you’ve had your teeth kicked in so many times you learn to close your mouth.

He wanted to know why I would be any different from the others. Why should he speak to me?

This was not a simple question: how do you reassure a racist militant that he doesn’t arouse feelings of hostility in you without saying that you, too, are a racist militant? I’m not a racist militant and, besides, he would not have believed me if I had said that I was one. So I said only that I was different.

Yes, Mr Anderson persisted, but why should you be any different?

Because I am, I repeated.

The fact is I think I was different. I wasn’t hostile to the National Front. I couldn’t take it seriously: I really did regard it as a convocation of loons, although I probably didn’t know enough to justify making such a judgement. When I came to England as a student, everyone took the National Front very seriously: opposing it was a popular cause, a rallying point at the college bar for articulate, intelligent, liberal-thinking people animated by their distaste for what the National Front represented. Intelligent liberal-thinking people are meant to show a tolerance for dissent, but the National Front was fascist and so intolerable that it made liberals behave as if they weren’t liberals. This, I felt, was a tribute to the National Front. The National Front was evil. It was an evil of such an order that many of my friends believed that its members should be banished from society—imprisoned at the least; some wanted to see them maimed. Their feelings were that strong. This, too, was a tribute to the National Front. There was an element of fear in this, and not without cause: the local left-wing bookshop had been repeatedly fire-bombed, and it was said that this has been done by the National Front; there had also been National Front marches with Nazi banners that had ended with people being badly kicked in the head. For my friends, it would have been inconceivable that one might actually talk to a member of the National Front, let alone have a conversation. And that was why I was trying to have one. I was curious. I had a chance to meet the devil and I wanted to find out if he deserved his bad reputation.

I would have hoped, however, that the devil wasn’t going to make his appearance in the shape of Ian Anderson. He was not a credible Satan figure. Photographs of him featured in the papers and broadsheets that Anderson himself had sent me: a tiny, tight-lipped little man, dressed in a suit with an outsize tie, at the head of the marches, always surrounded by big boys in boots. I had come across an article by Anderson, ‘Naughty but nice’, a heavily ironic account of a coach journey (‘There is no reason why a coach trip need be boring and dull’) to a Sinn Fein gathering. The accompanying photograph showed a minibus surrounded by lads attacking it with bricks—one was on the bonnet smashing the windscreen with his Doc Martens. The caption was: ‘Members of the public have meaningful dialogue with IRA supporters.’

It was becoming evident, though, that I was not going to have a dialogue, meaningful or not, with Mr Anderson. At least not on this phone call. Suddenly he broke off our conversation. We’ll be in touch, he said abruptly. And then hung up.

He was true to his word. More publications arrived. As before, each was delivered in a plain brown envelope, my name and address written out by hand, no other markings except for the Croydon postmark. These publications were different from the first batch; these were for grown-ups. Mr Anderson must have believed that I was different, after all.

These had tides like Nationalist Today or Heritage and Destiny. Inside there were history lessons: on the anniversary of the fourteenth-century Peasants Revolt or the traditional British folk song or the achievements of the Vikings. There were intellectual appreciations: of Hilaire Belloc and William Morris. And a denunciation of Jacob Epstein and abstract art (‘Epstein’s work is not meaningless; it is sufficiently representational to project and reflect strong and racially alien aesthetics’). There was a four-part science series on racial inequality (‘Professor Arthur Jensen’s paper is a major breakthrough for the forces of science and reason over the opaque murk of Marxist, liberal and Levantine cant and ideologically inspired bigotry’). These publications, however distasteful their contents, were not unsophisticated and revealed how deliberate was the National Front’s effort to recruit football supporters: Bulldog was a recruitment paper; it was down-market, the National Front trying to talk to the football supporter in his own language. I can see now that the National Front had modelled Bulldog on the Sun—on the publication that the lads read. The lads, it would seem, were not held in especially high regard.

And then, a few days later, I heard from Neil. He called me at home from a payphone in a pub. He understood, he said, that I had been speaking to a member of the executive board and that it looked likely that he would get approval for me to come along to Bury. The date for the party had been fixed, and it was only a few days away—Saturday, the fourteenth of April. Could I make it? He would meet me at the station. He insisted on putting me up for the night. I would be his guest. I arrived early and watched Neil setting up. The party was being held at a pub which—in the optimistic belief that its management has changed—I will refer to as the Green Man. It was in the centre of town, and Neil had reserved it from six until closing time at eleven. He had stereo equipment, a collection of records and tapes, party streamers which he had already hung from the ceiling and a large cardboard box filled with packets of cheese-and-onion-flavoured crisps. It was a party. An ordinary Saturday night party in a pub.

The others, Neil said, very preoccupied, would be arriving from London shortly. And he kept repeating that. They’ll be here any minute, he said only a few moments later.

It was evident that Neil was anxious. I wondered if it was evident to him that I was as well. For Neil the evening represented a chance to prove himself, and, if things went wrong, then his career as a fascist would advance no further. I had never thought of fascism as an endeavour characterized by its career prospects but that was what was at stake for Neil. Most National Front members whom I met later would be unemployed; many, it seemed to me, would remain unemployed for a very long time. Unlike the football supporters I was meeting, the rank and file membership of the National Front consisted mainly of people who felt, with some justice, that they had nowhere else to go. Neil was different: he worked in a meat-packing plant and had risen to the position of a middle-level supervisor. But it was clear that he believed he stood to gain more by the National Front than by anything he might do at his work.

I was less sure about my prospects: what would the evening mean for me if things went wrong? I had seen nothing to change my view about the National Front. I still couldn’t take it seriously, but by that I mean that I couldn’t take it seriously as a political party. I didn’t see the political threat of fascism in Britain—at least not now and not from this lot. But that was armchair stuff. What I did take seriously was the National Front’s bad press. I took its record of violence seriously. And that was what I found myself worrying about. I would be spending the night here, and I was not comfortable about what might be in store.

While Neil was hooking up the stereo, I went to the bar and chatted with members of the pub staff. I wondered how much they knew about what was going on. I ordered a pint of bitter and asked the barmaid what she thought about having a party for, well, you know—? I couldn’t bring myself to say the words ‘National Front’; I thought it was something to be quiet about.

She didn’t understand what I was asking. She thought I meant Neil and all his friends. Everyone knew Neil and his friends. They were regulars. And everyone liked Neil.

No, not Neil. But the others. The NF, I said finally. What do you think about holding a party for the National Front?

It’s an honour, she said, now clearly understanding. It’s an honour and a privilege.

This surprised me.

So she explained. The Green Man, she said, prided itself on being the most racialist pub in England. That was her word: racialist. There were other racialist pubs, she said. In fact, there were two more in Bury. But none was as consistently racialist as the Green Man. The Green Man, she continued, had never served a coloured person. No black or Paki had ever had a drink at the Green Man. And everyone who worked at the Green Man was proud of its record. It was also why everyone regarded it as a privilege to hold a party here for the National Front. They felt they had earned it.

No wogs, her partner behind the bar added, perhaps for clarification.

That’s right, she said. No coloured people of any description.

I was surprised. I had not expected to hear racism expressed so explicitly by people working behind the bar of a pub—one owned by a brewery that was itself a public company. The fact was I hadn’t expected to hear racism expressed so explicitly by people I had only just met, regardless of where they worked. I felt soiled by it, implicated because I couldn’t imagine these things being said unless it was assumed that all of us, the bar staff and the National Front and me, thought the same. The barmaid was attractive—she had black hair and a soft oval face—and it was disconcerting trying to reconcile this face with the ugliness that came out of it.

We also, she said, don’t serve Americans.

Oh, not you, she said quickly, registering my unease. We’re serving you, aren’t we? The Americans we don’t like are the servicemen. We never serve the servicemen. We don’t like them and don’t like them here. We want them to take their aeroplanes and go back to America.

There were American air bases throughout East Anglia, and Bury St Edmunds must have been one of the towns the servicemen visited on leave. The National Front, I remembered, was against the American military presence in England. It was un-English.

Last night, her partner offered again, a Friday night, six American servicemen came in here and we wouldn’t serve them. One was a nigger. They got very uppity and started to argue. It’s a free country, they said, and I said that’s right and that’s why I’m not serving you. That made them even more angry so some of the lads had to take them outside and deal with them. They had a go at them up against the wall, just outside that door there. If you step outside, you can still see the blood. There was a lot of blood.

I was having to think carefully about what I was hearing: I had spent fifteen minutes in an ordinary brewery pub in this perfectly ordered middle-class town and had been invited by the publican to look at the dried pool of blood just outside his front door.

More people arrived, and I was introduced to them as a journalist. This information was not accepted with the grace and interest that I would have liked. And then I spotted Cliff. An ugly face, but at least one I recognized. Cliff, I called out, relieved, grateful, expectant. But Cliff didn’t answer. Cliff, I repeated. It is Cliff, isn’t it? I asked myself. He was staring at me. He seemed to be refusing to remember me. And then he became very agitated.

What’s he doing here? Cliff asked; he was looking for Neil. Who said he could come?

He found Neil and I watched as Neil tried to reassure him—telling him that it had been approved in London—but I could see that Cliff was unhappy. He looked at me, hard. ‘I don’t like him here. Why weren’t we told that he’d be coming?’

I thought that now, after all, might be a good time to pop outside. I had no intention of looking at the wall and the blood that had dried on it, but I had decided that I wasn’t ready, just yet, for the evening ahead and that I would do well to organize my thoughts.

What was I doing here? I looked at my watch. It was seven-forty. The last train to Cambridge would be leaving in about two minutes.

I crossed the street and sat on a wall. I sat there for a long time. It grew dark while I sat there. I was not prepared for this; that was evident. So I sat there and decided that I would have to prepare myself. I didn’t know how I was going to do this. More guests arrived. Many, like Cliff, were cultural anomalies, skinheads, out of touch, not simply with what was current, but—everything. Life. The future. The world. A blond lad turned up. He was dressed in a black leather SS uniform. He had a red and black Nazi arm-band.

I was having a hard time persuading myself that this was just an ordinary pub party. Blond men in black SS uniforms with Nazi arm-bands do not show up at ordinary pub parties. Inside, the not-so-ordinary-pub-party-goers were starting to chant.

Bury skinheads we are here

Shag your women and drink your beer.

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

It was dark. By now my train must have been half-way to Cambridge. I was not sitting in it. I was sitting on a wall listening to people chant sieg heil. There was, I decided, no choice. I would have to re-enter the pub, but would make sure that I then got very, very drunk.

The pub was packed with people. I went straight to the bar and ordered three pints, which I lined up, one in front of the other, on the beer mat. I would make it to the end of the evening. I did not know where I would be when that time came, but this way, it might not matter.

Mid-way through my first pint, I found that someone had decided to befriend me. Neither of us knew why. I was, in his view, from the media, and he had made a rule of never speaking to the media. But having permitted himself to speak to me, he had some difficulty stopping. I was about to discover that, wherever I went in the pub, my new companion would always be there, next to me, telling me that he never spoke to anyone from the media. He was round and covered with fuzzy hair. His name was Phil Andrews.

Phil Andrews was in his early thirties and over the course of a decade had lived a life of several extremes. He had trained as a policeman, but gave it up. He then became a militant communist, but gave that up, too. And now, for a while at least, he had become a career fascist. He had just been asked to help run the Young National Front, an important position—its aim was to recruit new members from schools and colleges, traditionally the ‘breeding grounds’ of the left—and Phil must have been picked for the job because he knew so much about the other side.

None of Phil’s recruits would have been at tonight’s gathering. It was not a collegiate crowd. Everyone here would have been a Bulldog reader, drawn from the football grounds. I had heard that the football grounds were ideal for recruiting new members—Ian Anderson had said that there was nowhere else in Britain where you would find so much discontented youth in one place—but the problem, having brought them together, was to keep them from fighting. Neil had said the same thing at the start of the evening: his task, as the chairman, was to keep the Chelsea and West Ham supporters from having a go at each other.

My new fuzzy friend Phil was disgusted by football violence—or at least he put up a good show of disgust. According to Phil, it was all of the government’s making. The government had the power to stop the violence if it wanted to, Phil believed, but it hadn’t because it was in its interest to keep the violence going. It was in its interest to turn working people against each other. It deflected working people from having to address the real problems of their lives.

Spoken, I thought, like a true Marxist. There must be some comfort in being able to reuse, in his new capacity as a member of the extreme right, many of the old arguments that he had developed when a member of the extreme left. But Phil was manifestly upset about football violence—the more he talked about it the more distressed he became—and he wasn’t about to be interrupted.

He was upset, for instance, that the National Front was always being blamed for crowd violence, which, he repeated, he found disgusting. The National Front was blamed for the riots in France and the deaths at Heysel.

One day, Phil said, there will be riots all over Britain. Those will be organized by the NF. But not now. People are always saying that the NF is responsible for the football riots. But what would possibly be the point? Even if we could organize riots of this kind, what we would get out of them? Why would we want to organize riots in Europe?

Phil wanted me to understand this point—it was a complex one—and so he repeated it: Even if we could organize riots of this kind, wha would be the point?

Phil then repeated it again.

I looked around the room. It had filled up with Cliff-lookalikes, and Neil was playing the music—now at a fairly high volume—that was the most appropriate for heavy black boots. It was an antiquated, numbingly monotoned derivative of punk that consisted almost wholly of a crushing, unchanging percussion and an equally crushing, unchanging electric guitar. It had got the lads dancing, although at first there were not many—eight, maybe ten.

The way they danced was intensely physical: they all huddled together in the middle of the room, and, rubbing each other’s head with one hand—most were shaved on top—and holding themselves closely together with the other, they jumped up and down. Each tune was played at the same brutal and breathless speed, and the lads, to keep up, had to do a lot of jumping. In fact, I don’t recall ever having seen people jump up and down so fast, especially people who were tied together in such a peculiar knot, with their arms and hands this way and that. The tune ended, the lads bent over, breathing heavily, Neil put on something else which my untutored ear was unable to distinguish from the last thing he had taken off, and the lads were off again: they clasped each other, rubbed their heads a bit and started jumping up and down. This looked distinctly ridiculous, but was apparently the thing that everyone had in mind when they talked about an NF disco. Somewhere in the middle was the birthday boy. The NF disco, I remembered, was also a birthday party.

There were women present, girl-friends mainly, who had also retained an affection for the punk style—bleached jeans and T-shirts, their hair cropped short except for a flattened duck-tail at the back. I learned later that the women were even more anachronistic than the men and that their hair-style was in fact pre-punk. They were called ‘suedeheads’. The women sat at the far end of the pub, smoking cigarettes. They did not join in the bouncing and the clasping and the rubbing. The bouncing and the clasping and the rubbing were distinctly boys’ concerns. The boys danced; the girls watched.

Disgusting rabble, Phil said, muttering quietly. Skinhead riff-raff. They don’t know what the National Front is really about. They don’t understand the message.

Another record, and more dancing. The rest of the night was clearly going to consist of lads drinking large quantities of lager and shaking it all up violendy in the middle of the room. I then noticed that, stationed at several points around the pub—forming an outer circle around the knot of dancing lads—was a number of well-dressed men.

1 was surprised I hadn’t seen them before. They were different from anyone else in the pub. They were wearing flannel trousers and jackets and had neat executive haircuts. Several were here with their girl-friends, but they were different from the ones sitting in the back. The girl-friends were dressed in a style that could be called ‘sensible’. One had a silk scarf and a cashmere jumper. Another was dressed in jeans, but the jeans were expensive and highly flattering. They stood alongside their partners, resting on their arms.

These were the visitors from London.

That some had come with their girl-friends suggested that they, like the others, regarded the evening as an event, an entertainment, a Saturday night out, but they did not appear to be enjoying themselves—at least not yet. Unlike Phil—who was still at my side, and by now drinking very heavily, and reminding me that he didn’t speak to the media—none of the London visitors was touching alcohol. They were drinking mineral water or Coke or nothing at all. They were also not dancing and didn’t look like they were about to begin. They were not even talking—neither between themselves nor with their girl-friends. They just stood there, looking on.

I recognized one of these urbane visitors. His name was Nick Griffin. All the others from the executive branch, including Ian Anderson, might well have been there, but it was Nick Griffin I spotted and ended up watching. He seemed to have a role in managing the evening’s activities.

Nick Griffin was not in fact from London. He lived nearby, in the Suffolk countryside. The National Front was always having to change its base of operations, and for a while it would be run from a converted barn on Nick Griffin’s family’s property. I got through to the family once. They might well have been farmers, landowners certainly, affluent enough—you could hear it in their accents—to have sent their son to Cambridge, and they were now involved in helping him out in his career as a fascist.

The son was a well-mannered young man with an intelligent face. He had a politician’s good looks and an attractive manner. Like the others from London, he was different from—in Phil Andrews’s phrase—the rabble bouncing up and down in the middle of the room. In fact, it was evident that Nick Griffin had no intention of being seen near them. He spent the evening against a wall, watching, inconspicuous, and the only time he spoke was when he walked over to Neil, which he did every now and then, and whispered an instruction. Then he returned to his position against the wall. His girl-friend—pretty and blonde and utterly expressionless—stood beside him and never said a word.

There was some talk about playing the White Power music. In Nick Griffin’s view, it was too early to play the White Power music. The White Power music should be played only at the end.

I was feeling the need to wander round. My friend Phil was starting to become importunate. He was now very, very drunk, and very, very determined to tell me how he never spoke to the media. Why, he wanted to know, was he speaking to me? Why, I wanted to ask him, won’t you stop then? Phil was bothered that, in his opinion, I had not understood the observation that he had made earlier in the evening, even though he had made it several times. This was his observation that, even if it was in the National Front’s power to organize riots on the continent, what would be the point? And so he asked the question again. He asked: Even if it was in the National Front’s power to organize riots on the continent, what would be the point?

I told him I agreed. I believed him. You are right, I said, there is no point; the National Front could not possibly have organized those disturbances. The National Front, I added, has been unfairly blamed.

You see the point? he asked.

Really, I said. I see the point.

Phil followed me. I should have known. I went to the bar for another drink, paid and turned round: Phil was there. I went to the loo and when I opened the door I almost knocked Phil over. When I stepped outside to get some air, Phil stumbled along after me.

I did not want to talk to Phil any more. I didn’t want to be impolite, but I wanted him to go away.

It was time, I said, that I spoke to some of the lads. It was essential to my research.

There were many more dancing now—perhaps thirty.

Fucking skinheads, he said. They’re all lobotomized. Ignore them. What I want you to understand is this: Even if . . . Even if . . . The riots, that is. Even if . . .

And he stopped.

I spotted the boy whose birthday the occasion was notionally honouring.

How do you feel? I asked.

Wonderful, he said. I’m very happy.

How old are you?

Twenty-one, he said.

And was this how you wanted to spend your twenty-first birthday?

It couldn’t have been better.

Do you know many of the people here? I asked.

Hardly anyone, he said and then started giggling uncontrollably. He stopped only when he realized that I was the journalist that he had heard the others mention. I was surprised he realized much at all. I don’t know what chemicals were in his body, but there must have been many and his body did not seem to be particularly accustomed to housing them. He had been dancing hard, bouncing up and down, and was covered in sweat. The pupils of his eyes had contracted to tiny little dots.

You’re the repoyta, aren’t you?

Amphetamines, I figured. Speed has this effect.

You are the repoyta, he said. I knew it!

And then he grew very excited. He was convinced that he was going to be written about. He grew so excited he started to bounce up and down. I’m going to be in the papers, he said, bouncing higher and higher. I’m going to be in the papers, he said, still bouncing, until finally, ecstatic, he bounced out of range, through the crowd, over a table, and somewhere on to the other side of the pub.

I turned round and there was Phil Andrews. He was still trying to finish the sentence that he had begun the last time I saw him. He was having some difficulty focusing. He was pointing vaguely. He wanted badly to tell me something. I thought I knew what it was that he wanted to say.

Even if, he said, and stopped.

He was not going to reach the end. Nature, in a sense, had finally silenced him. I was pretty sure that he was about to vomit.

I started moving around, confident that Phil couldn’t keep up. I moved from one conversation to another. People were telling me things.

I was told that they were an organized army; that football had brought them together; that they were creating a police force; that they tried to take over the places they visited.

I was told that they were warriors.

I was told that the banks were run by Jews and that the banks ran the country; that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was vastly exaggerated.

I was told that the Labour Party was a shambles; that the Conservative Party was a shambles; that all Americans soldiers should leave Britain.

One member told me the cities should be ‘deracinated’—that was the word he used—and that we should all return to our natural element. The man who said this was another one wearing a Nazi arm-band. He was a member of the League of St George.

More militant and more extreme, he assured me, than the National Front, the League of St George was against all modern technology. It advocated a form of agrarian socialism. Modern man, he said, has been uprooted from the soil and placed in an artificial concrete world.

It’s a view, I told him, that sounds like the one held by the Khmer Rouge.

Precisely, the man from the League of St George said. And he then said it again: Yes, precisely. He nodded and grinned. It was a very sinister grin.

There was no longer a centre of the room where people were dancing, because everyone was dancing everywhere. On the far side, some of the new members had started in on their football chants, just as Neil had feared. These appeared to be West Ham supporters. They were then answered, from the other side of the room, by Chelsea supporters. A contrapuntal chorus of West Ham and Chelsea songs followed, one that sent Neil scurrying through his record collection. It was time to change the music, and Neil looked over to Nick Griffin.

Nick Griffin nodded. It was time to play the White Power music.

Most of the songs Neil then played were by a group called White Noise; Skrewdriver and Brutal Attack were among the others. None of the songs was played on any of the established radio stations or sold in any of the conventional shops. It was a mail-order or a cash-in-hand music trade, and from the titles you could see why: ‘Young, British and White’; ‘England Belongs to Me’; ‘Shove the Dove’; ‘England’ and ‘British Justice.’ These were the lyrics of ‘The Voice of Britain’:

Our old people cannot walk the streets alone.

They fought for this nation, and this is what they get back.

They risked their lives for Britain, and now Britain belongs to aliens.

It’s about time the British went and took it back.

This is the voice of Britain.

You’d better believe it.

This is the voice of Britain

C’mon and fly the flag now.

It’s time to have a go at the TV and the papers

And all the media Zionists who’d like to keep us quiet.

They’re trying to bleed our country,

They’re the leeches of the nation.

But we’re going to stand and fight.

This is the voice of Britain.

You’d better believe it.

This is the voice of Britain

C’mon and fly the flag now.

The music was delivered with the same numbing, crushing percussion that had characterized everything else that had been played that evening, and most of the lyrics of the songs that followed were lost to me, disappearing into a high decibel static. The only reason I can quote the words from ‘The Voice of Britain’ is that they were reprinted in a ‘White Noise’ pamphlet that was being passed round, no doubt to aid understanding. There was one refrain I could follow, and that was because it was played repeatedly, and because, each time, everyone joined in. It seemed to be the theme song.

Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps.

Wogs out! White power!

It was interesting to contemplate that the high-point of the evening was organized around this simple declaration of needs: a lad needed his lager; a lad needed his packet of crisps; a lad needed his wog.

Nick Griffin indicated that the volume should be turned up further, and the music was now brutally loud. The room was hot and filled with smoke and smelled of dope. The air had grown heavy and damp. Sixty or seventy lads were in the middle of the room, clasped together, bouncing up and down, rubbing their hands over each other’s heads and chanting in unison:

Wogs out! White power!

They had taken off their shirts and were stripped to the waist, their braces dangling by their sides, knocking against their legs: sixty or seventy pale, narrow chests, covered in perspiration, pressed tightly together. They were bouncing so vigorously that they all fell over, tumbling on top of each other. I thought someone was hurt—a table had been knocked over—but they all clambered up over each other and, with difficulty, resumed their dancing. They fell over again, wet and hot. I don’t know if it was the drink or the drugs or the delirium of the dancing or that chorus, over and over again, but there was a menacing feeling in the air—sexual and dangerous. The people in the crush were not in control—the business of falling over was not intended and no one was finding it funny, as people might in a spirit of drunken merriment. Some of the lads appeared to be in a trance.

I looked at the women, sitting in the dark, smoking cigarette after cigarette, none of them dancing. Something was happening that they didn’t understand. They were embarrassed. One was giggling. Their boy-friends were in the middle of the room, pressed against each other, virtually undressed, heaving and bouncing.

Louder, Nick Griffin was shouting to Neil, but Neil couldn’t hear him, and Griffin had to cross the room. I could not follow the exchange, but it seemed that Neil was being asked to turn up the volume, but that the volume couldn’t be made any louder. The volume was turned up as high as it would go.

There appeared to be more well-dressed men than before, but I don’t think that could be right. Is it possible that more would have shown up just at the party’s end—its climax? They formed a discernible circle. For the last fifteen minutes, none of them had moved; no one had gone to the loo or got another drink. They stood transfixed, studying the group.

Neil had taken to repeating the theme song. Once it had finished, he merely replaced the needle and started again.

Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps.

Wogs out! White power!

And then the whole thing was over. Dougie, suddenly, went berserk. There was some screaming on the other side of the pub, and I looked up and saw Dougie swinging a bar stool above his head. Somebody went down, and a table full of glasses got knocked over. He picked up a chair and raised that above his head, but lost his balance and crashed into a table. There was more broken glass.

Nick Griffin went over and stopped the record and turned off the stereo. The party had ended. I spotted Phil in the corner. He had passed out and was leaning against the wall, seated on the floor.

DOUGIE, DOUGIE, DOUGIE.

It was Neil speaking. He was whispering: gentle, comforting, reassuring.

Dougie, Dougie, Dougie.

I am still not sure what happened between Dougie’s swinging a chair over his head and Dougie’s pinning me against a lamppost. Having your head bumped against a lamp-post concentrates the mind wonderfully, however much it might jar its container. I am very clear about the moments when I was in Dougie’s grasp because I was thinking about each one with some care. I was thinking about the look in Dougie’s eyes—not a nice look and one that suggested that my prospects of being Dougie’s friend were very small. I was also thinking about the words Dougie’s brother, Neil, was saying. Having seen me being banged against the lamp-post, Neil had intervened.

Dougie, Dougie, Dougie.

Neil had a very gentle manner, and it seemed to be producing the desired effect. Dougie had stopped banging me against the lamp-post and was now listening. It was as if Neil was calling out to someone who was very far away and not in view—at the end, possibly, of a very long tunnel.

Dougie, Neil said, there is no need for that now, is there?

Dougie had turned his head to his brother. He was very attentive.

Dougie, Neil said, this man is a nice man. He’s a friend. He is one of us. If you let go of this nice man, Neil continued, then we can all go off and have another drink, and, if you’re good, I’ll let you throw a brick through the Indian restaurant.

Throwing bricks through the window of the Indian restaurant or the Indian food shop or, occasionally, an Indian family’s home was, I learned, a common late-night pastime. Dougie grinned—a toothy, stupid grin—and he let me go.

I’m not sure what happened later. I followed along, criss-crossing the town of Bury St Edmunds, stumblingly, going from house to house, most of them fairly run-down terraces, meeting new people, including three men in black SS uniforms. I know that I had fulfilled my promise of getting very drunk and had, additionally, supplemented the liquid toxins with whatever else was to hand. And there seemed to have been many other toxins to hand. And then blank. Nothing. I have no memory of anything. At some point, late the next morning, I woke up, feeling very unpleasant, and found myself in a damp two-up two-down. It was where Neil and Dougie lived, a squat with no heating and a broken window—through which, I assumed, they had first entered. There was only one bed and I, the guest, had been given it. On the floor around me had slept more than twenty skinheads, the rabble of the pub. They were still asleep. The room had a powerful smell about it.

Neil woke me up. He was offering me a can of lager for breakfast. There were several cases of Harp lager stacked, I now noticed, at the foot of the bed, and he wanted to know if I wanted one.

I left later in the afternoon.

Thereafter I followed the National Front casually, believing that there was something more I needed to discover. I contacted Nick Griffin several times, attended some marches, listened to the speeches afterwards. More party magazines and newspapers were sent to me—not to my home; I had moved; but care of the office where I worked—but I learned recently that the staff was so offended to receive them that the publications were all sent back with rude cover notes. In fact, I had already gained my most important insight into the National Front—there, that night at its disco—and it had little to do with its politics or its membership. It was its attitude towards the crowd.

I am sure that Ian Anderson was right when he said that the football stadium was his ideal recruiting ground, but he would also have known that it provided a special kind of member, one already experienced, if not trained, in how to become part of a crowd, sometimes a violent one, even if it was not politically directed. And he would also have known that the crowd is a revolutionary party’s most powerful weapon. On paper, it would have seemed so straightforward, and so many of the National Front’s activities—its discos, its marches, its propaganda—were designed to recreate the crowd among its members and then make it political. But it isn’t straightforward, and in the end the young, well-dressed executives of National Front were not very good at their task—they were there to lead, but few were following. But, although incompetent, they were not ignorant. They understood something about the workings of the crowd; they respected it. They knew that its potential—its rare, raw, uncontrollable power—was in all of us, even if it was so persistently elusive.