Richard Edmonds decided to broaden my horizons. Western Goals UK, a fringe group on the right of the Conservative Party, was pleased to play host to some South African MPs. I was quite interested in this – you may recall that I liked South African fruit. Richard Edmonds and I sat together quietly, while Clive Derby-Lewis, one of the South African MPs, talked about his Scottish ancestry, black crime, Nelson bloody Mandela and some other stuff about the percentage of land owned versus percentage of taxes paid. Strong propaganda if you can stay awake. Four suited and booted men stood in the corner and winked at me, so I winked back. It was a nice place for a meeting: pleasant view of the Embankment, cool summer breeze on my neck, the man from the Tory Party sitting on my other side with his legs crossed. If my mother could see me now…
Before the end of the meeting, Richard Edmonds stood up and unfurled a ‘BNP Supports White South Africa’ poster, as if he were initiating his own question and answer session. Everyone looked at us, so I yawned and looked at my shoes, while the man from the Tory Party hissed, ‘I told you not to do this Richard.’ The suited and booted four looked amused, so I winked again and left with Edmonds and the man from the Tory Party. It turned out that it was a good ruse to avoid having to put in for the collection.
It was not long afterwards that Derby-Lewis would face the death penalty for his part in the murder of ANC leading light Chris Hani. Had we known that he would be involved in such pleasantries, we would have been far more likely to have contributed to the whip round. Later Arthur Kemp, who was also arrested but not charged in connection with Hani’s murder, and controversially appeared as a prosecution witness, would eventually end up in Nick Griffin’s BNP.
I met Derby-Lewis, his party leader Andreas Treurnicht and an assortment of oddball racists again, this time in the Sudeley Room in the House of Lords. Sitting two rows in front of the historian David Irving, with an assortment of Tory-right oddballs, closet Nazis and ladies in nice frocks, I listened to Derby-Lewis adopting a more diplomatic approach to his party’s predicament while, with pantomime-like efficiency, everyone booed at the mention of the name Mandela. Treurnicht spoke no English, so Derby-Lewis spoke for him, accusing one F. W. de Klerk of being the true enemy of white South Africa. In hindsight, it was more probable at the time that Derby-Lewis would wish de Klerk dead than Chris Hani. With Edmonds absent, the Tories and I crossed our legs and listened intently, never quite realising that the one true enemy of white South Africa would be the one thing the Tories talked about the most: democracy.
Sitting with Richard in the tiny cramped office of the BNP was one of the highlights of my time in the far right. He explained everything purely and simply. I wanted to want the same things that Richard wanted. I wanted to reject all of things that I suppose, secretly, I actually longed for, most of all popularity and acceptance among people within the community, whatever that was. I don’t know if Richard had rejected these things, or at some stage had, like me, felt that he had been rejected by them.
It was a strange time to be holding those views. We were sneaking into parliament to attend meetings with real politicians when it was an institution that we hated. We sat in the halls and rooms of British democracy when it was quite clear that we actually held no respect for it either ideologically or institutionally. Once the BNP came to power, there would be no more elections; there would be no time for debates, bills or legislations or lobbying and protesting. Everything the BNP did not like would simply be banned. Could I live in a society like that? I convinced myself that I could, that by using these hatreds I could strike out against all of the things I didn’t understand. And that is still a powerful pull. I began to believe that under the BNP or the NF, I would be able, from some telephone box somewhere, to ring Downing Street and demand someone, somewhere got carted off and shot. I privately lined up a whole list of soap actors, pop stars, teachers and frigid and disinterested ex-girlfriends. All I would ever have to do is denounce them. If such a tiny party was so prepared to unleash such monstrous violence from such a distance, imagine what we could do when we were in power. Actually, imagine what we would do.
Sitting with Richard Edmonds one afternoon he explained how it would all work. There would not be any matter too small for the BNP to intervene in when in government. By all accounts, John Tyndall would never sleep. From his desk he would simply read out the names of the race traitors and Zionists who would be carted off to some shallow grave somewhere. I asked about reported UFO sightings in Somerset and he stared at me for a moment, muttered in German and offered me half a can of vegetarian mincemeat. He gave me his last slice of bread and relaxed in his chair.
‘The BNP are not responsible for any alien abductions,’ he announced slowly, before picking up the phone and shouting, ‘Did you hear that?’ into the empty receiver.
A German visitor arrived with one of Edmonds’s female admirers. She was a nutty old bint and he was one of her cousins. Apparently they only discovered they were both Nazis by chance, given that their family had done all they could to keep the skeletons in the cupboard.
The four of us sat around the cramped table out the back of BNP headquarters, poring over the newspapers, circling news of black and Jewish crime, purely for misery’s sake. Edmonds explained to the German that I was from the National Front and the German raised his eyebrows politely and waited for me to comment. I said nothing, so he gave me a German NF sticker and started talking about Alpine forest walking, David Irving and his second-hand car. It was almost as if we were all human beings, just sitting around in Richard’s kitchen, while ten thousand copies of Holocaust News were delicately stuffed into envelopes, the intended recipients all Jews, politicians, councillors etc. The German almost soiled his tweeds at the fact that in a democracy, we are allowed to do this, whereas in Germany, another democracy, you are not. Sitting in Edmonds’s kitchen we abuse democracy and use it to attack those who would strive to defend it from us. For good measure, the German adds some names of his own to the list; Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.
How could I ever have doubted that the Holocaust – the systematic murder of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and trade unionists – happened? Simply, because I needed to. If you want to (dis)believe something enough, eventually you will. I was convinced that the film shot at the Nazi death camps was all made by Hollywood movie-makers, filming Russians in German uniforms murdering and hanging Jews. After all, why would the Germans have filmed this genocide themselves? There was a massive conspiracy to discredit National Socialism; the only people to benefit were the Jews who now controlled the world once more. Sit back, relax, think about it some more, and consider. Light a cigarette, go for a walk, and have a long wank. It’s not very believable is it?
‘Matthew, you will never get all of the things you want unless we demolish the Holocaust myth, first.’
Holocaust denial was the staple diet of the far right in the 1980s and 1990s and still is to a degree today. To make people believe that the Jews are evil, you must first convince them that they lie about the Holocaust. Because the party was so small, there were still massive temptations to prove your crankiness to others in the movement. At the time, nobody else was really listening to what was happening on the outer fringes of the political landscape in Britain, so we all just shouted like lunatics at each other. The sort of publicity Holocaust denial brought the BNP was remarkable. They even charged the BBC £50 for entry to their bookshop to film them at work. For the anti-Semites who sat on the NF’s ruling body, it was almost too much to bear.
As I’d always had an inquisitive mind, and since my mother and father no longer loved each other, I decided Edmonds and Anderson would be my new parents – at least they still talked to each other. I thought I could fix them up at the social I was organising in my old local, The Swan, in Lee High Road. Of course, they’d known each other since the 1970s and had never liked each other, but I invited Edmonds, which made Anderson furious.
‘That man is a fucking Nazi,’ he ranted although Edmonds had politely declined the offer.
The social was to help raise funds to pay off fines – among them a £750 one for Terry Blackham – for the attempt to storm another Irish march, where we had managed to break through police lines, only to get battered by Red Action. Ten NF members were arrested for their efforts, even though they were all bruised and battered senseless by the time the police had arrested them.
The landlord sealed off the back of the pub and made sausage rolls, pineapple and cheese on sticks, and turkey sandwiches. He brushed his hair and greeted everyone as they arrived, formally shaking their hands and saying ‘Call me Bill,’ before getting on the phone to all his known friends exclaiming, ‘They’re here! The National Front are really here!’ And indeed we really were. He charged us cost for the food, and we charged £5 to enter. In all, sixty fascists turned up. Ex-members, who had not been to a function in ten years, turned up and mingled with the new generation of kids trying to storm Parliament. Anderson arrived a little late and introduced himself as ‘Ian Anderson, Chairman of the National Front,’ at which Bill had to change his underwear due to his over-excitement. Out in the main bar, my old school friends stood, mouths aghast, as in poured a huge army of men and three women, in their Sunday bests for an evening of sausage rolls and lager with a Bruce Springsteen cassette playing in the background. Ian Anderson couldn’t even attend a wedding without trying to flog his wares, so he sat in a corner with fifty books and 3,000 faulty NF stickers. While Anderson was trying to flog tapes of Ulster Kick The Pope marching bands, for twenty quid I knocked out copies of Animal Farm, and not the movie version of George Orwell’s book, either.
At the end of the evening, after everything had gone so well, Blackham’s brother walked into the main bar, grabbed the telephone from the barmaid and demanded a taxi. She refused and within minutes every pipe in every toilet was pulled from the wall, the toilet bowls cracked, mirrors smashed and stools broken. By midnight, piss and water were drenching the carpet, while Bill scratched his stupid head and barred me from the pub forever. We raised a healthy £500 for those members facing fines and Anderson was quite happy with his own sales, offering us five per cent of his sixty quid takings, although my suggestion to Anderson that we compensate Bill for his damaged pipework was met with a horrified scowl.
The money was normally sent to a Brighton-based football hooligan responsible for the ‘Patriots Defence Fund’, but this time, Anderson and Blackham tallied up the money in a different way. Richard White from Lambeth was given £150 to pay his fine because he was unemployed and had absolutely no interest in ever getting a job. The remainder was offered to Blackham but he refused. Instead, it was funnelled into a separate bank account. I hoped I would be offered fifty quid or so for my expenses for the revolution but to no avail. The money went to a propaganda fund, set up by Anderson for his printing services. I was to see to it that we could drum up enough newsworthy stunts. Already we had failed – like almost all other NF branches in the country except Hull for some reason – to have an ad placed in local newspapers on behalf of the local branch. The solution was simple: we would have to make the news!
Meanwhile, the top members of the Croydon branch were raided by the police, who were convinced that there was some sort of paramilitary business afoot. Their houses were searched and they were all suspended from the Territorial Army, where the authorities thought they were organising their paramilitary training. All of the leading members on the committee went into hiding.
With the NF’s annual conference approaching, Anderson was desperate to show his diminishing membership that the party was still active in London, despite the BNP’s greater numerical strength. Obviously the falling off in activities was hurting his pocket, the greatest ideological driver he ever had. At a hastily arranged strategy meeting in the Catford home of a Scottish supporter who had previously hidden the KKK Grand Wizard David Duke in his living room, a small committee of six South London and Surrey members sat around a kitchen table to draw up a battle plan. Ballard was nervous, as he was now almost solely responsible for the branch, organising leafleting and meetings. This left him feeling uncomfortable and stressed, if not a little put out that he had not been raided himself; without his own door being kicked in, it looked as if he was the source of the information that had done for his colleagues. One of the Croydon TA members had also refused to plead guilty to charges arising from the anti-Irish confrontation and was being warned he could face a custodial sentence.
‘What if he rolls over?’ wailed Ballard.
In reality, there was nothing really to hide. Our TA members had not even been allowed to fire real guns yet, which, rather than placate Ballard, made him even more depressed.
For propaganda I suggested leafleting schools and printing a local information sheet for Bromley and Beckenham; what it was about wasn’t important as long as it was newsworthy. We agreed I would take a long bout of sick leave following an accident playing soccer for Lewisham Police and would work on the South London campaign full-time, courtesy of civil service sick pay: full pay for six months.
The elderly Scotsman playing host to the meeting made weak tea and popped in every seventeen minutes (I timed him), to ask where all the money from the 1970s had gone. We decided to concentrate on Bromley, Eltham and Lewisham, drawing attention away from the Croydon branch. By Saturday, Anderson had earned the first of his money, printing a leaflet on the supposed removal of Beckenham’s war memorial to make way for a new roundabout or something. He handed us 2,000 leaflets and asked us to arrange transport to Birmingham, where the national conference was to be held, for as many members as possible.
Blackham and I delivered the leaflets every night of the week bar Wednesday, and by Thursday we were front-page news. It hadn’t been so difficult; we just made sure every newspaper office and British legion received a leaflet. I rang the local paper to pretend to be outraged that ‘these Nazis’ were so active in the area and they took the bait like a fresh salmon.
I liked Blackham, he wasn’t difficult to get along with. He’d poke me in the ribs to make me rant and rave at people in the pubs who he knew but who didn’t agree with our politics. His propensity for violence at the drop of a hat was legendary, but his ability to drop me home, while driving so pissed he could only keep one eye open, was appreciated. Still, we were getting a reputation for violence that was a little unsettling, even for people in the party.