We loved terrorists. Up at Brick Lane, Scottish Protestants in Rangers shirts would occasionally turn up looking for donations for their fellow patriots in Northern Ireland. Eddie Whicker and I knew a man who went to prison for gun-running and he too collected money for the UVF – the Ulster Volunteer Force. I care not that my family history is Irish, that my father is a Roman Catholic and so on. I never really hated the IRA until I joined the National Front, never cared for the people of Ulster who, like me, have apparently stood at the back of every queue, always accused and betrayed because of their loyalty by birthright. But once I’d joined the NF, every piece of news on the province was digested for further thought and discussion with Eddie. I was sure that the media was biased against the Unionists because of their loyalism. The countless documentaries on the BBC would always show Protestant children learning Catholic culture in the hope of peace. They had no politics and they didn’t even really understand themselves what it was they wanted, other than for everyone else to fuck off and leave them alone. They always needed more guns and bullets and so we would empty our already empty pockets upon demand.
We had to hate the Irish more than any blacks. They were fighting back against our supposed oppression of them. At every opportunity, the Irish were to be attacked, which seemed to suit Terry Blackham very, very much. There was no point getting my knickers in a twist over his hatred of my own brethren. Not if I was gonna get that job at a university somewhere once we’d butchered them all. A good Saturday selling papers in Beckenham always ended the same; us bashing Irishmen in Penge before the drunken drive home at 100 miles per hour in Terry’s car.
It was announced that Beckenham National Front would lay a wreath at the Beckenham war memorial on Remembrance Sunday. Back on went the Burton’s suit, back into propaganda mode we went. The British Legion was outraged that we were planning to lay our wreath just after the fire brigade. Despite what the papers and the British Legion said, neither Terry nor I were being ‘expedient’ about the memories of British servicemen. Sure, we didn’t really give a fuck where the war memorial went. But for working class lads of our generation, there was a real significance in the sacrifices of those men. As young boys, we had grown up reading comic annuals about flying aces and gallantry in the field of battle, making us as aware as anyone of the significance of their sacrifices. Politically, we felt they had been betrayed and that it was pointless for them to have fought Nazis and then come home to Britain to see the nation that they had fought to defend open its doors and hand out that nationality to Johnny Foreigner. That was why we were going to the war memorial.
Five of us attended the Beckenham service and stood at the very back of a three-deep circle of a couple of hundred of the great and the good. The weak November sun was shining and it was cool and peaceful. Everybody was looking at us in our natty suits and combed hair, standing respectfully with our heads bowed. The men from the fire brigade scowled at us, as did the scout leaders, the girl guides, local councillors and, you could almost imagine, the war dead. Our wreath was in memory of the fine soldiers of the white Commonwealth, South Africa, Rhodesia and Ulster! The NF had marched to the Cenotaph every Remembrance Sunday since the late 1960s, long after the war heroes had departed. It served as a reminder that even people from undemocratic and racist countries fought the Nazis in the Second World War. The war we felt we had lost.
During the silence, I felt my tummy rumble. Nothing major, a result of being the object of all that silent hostility. Then I felt a trickle as the wind passed down towards expulsion. Like a car travelling down a hill, it slammed on its brakes just before it fell out, passing through the back of my underpants. I clenched my buttocks – an expression I think I’ve read Jackie Collins use – but it was no use. I had to fart. It didn’t matter what it would smell like, it just had to be silent. I stood perfectly straight, looked around me and prayed to God it wouldn’t make a noise. Everyone was astonished. My fart ripped around the small circle of people, followed by a small aftershock of noise not expelled the first time around. The aftershock drew direct attention to me, though the British Legion’s bugler did check his instrument to make sure he had not accidentally made the noise himself. Satisfied that he had the all-clear, he too shot me a dirty look. The firemen were wetting themselves, and one of my comrades rolled on the floor in hysterics. It was disgraceful. Blackham tossed his wreath on the memorial and stormed off; the entirety of Beckenham’s well-to-do and respectable community had witnessed the NF fart their way into Beckenham folklore. He shot me an evil glance and brushed past me. I had embarrassed the branch.
On the main parade at Victoria three hours later, Steve Brady, a Gerry Adams lookalike, walked up and down the line of marchers, nodding approvingly. He only walked past the first 300, the remainder being skinheads and assorted football hooligans. The march was going to be massive! God only knows who most of the people were, but it was a tradition for this march to happen every year and people just had a habit of turning up for it. Blackham and I were head stewards, identified by our green armbands. Our job was to protect the front of the march: Anderson, Brady, Acton, Martin Wingfield, his wife Tina and the Flag Party. Just before the march was about to leave, Anderson had a panic attack and started abusing everybody.
A large group of reds were holed up behind police barricades, much to the disappointment of a small crew of Chelsea Headhunters – the notorious football hooligans, who turned up on the NF parade every year without fail. Police on horses, in vans and on foot circled the procession. As we marched off, a steady stream of abuse could be heard directed at us. Hundreds of long-haired, scruffy, unemployed types rushed at us, screaming abuse. One tried to grab the wreath from Anderson’s hands and we gave him a karate chop to the throat. Whicker walked discreetly behind me, barking instructions: ‘Watch this pillock in the green,’ ‘if that bird steps in front, smash her round the face.’ The police could hardly keep the protesters on the pavement, so they concentrated on the back of the march, where it was more likely there would be retaliation. I puffed my chest out for bravado, did the Lewisham barrow-boy stride and headed, like a majorette, towards Whitehall, yelling ‘Fuck off you queer cunts,’ at all the protesters and tourists on the pavements. Blackham and I occasionally turned to the Flag Party, shouting ‘Keep those flags high, keep smiling. Ignore these bastards,’ but in reality, we hoped to God there would be a huge punch-up. I was just about to smash a small and defenceless-looking female photographer over the head, when Tom Mundy, the NF’s only remaining ex-soldier, grabbed my arm.
‘She’s with the South African embassy,’ he warned. ‘She’s friendly.’ She smiled at me and continued taking my picture. I smiled broadly at her camera and wondered why or how Mundy knew her. Maybe she could arrange for me to join BOSS; maybe I’d become the Aryan pin-up of the week back in Jo’burg; maybe she worked for the ANC. Maybe he was giving her one! She acknowledged my restraint. A startled Eddie Whicker muttered: ‘Old meat like that is best kept in the fridge.’
The NF’s bugler suffered from severe nerves, severe bouts of depression and an inferiority complex. He was a park keeper from Eastbourne and one of those miserable gits that always shut the park early in summer, a devout Christian, without any of the charisma of a modern-day evangelist. He later escaped a prison sentence for his part in a BNP bomb plot in 2006 on account of his age. Turned out, the cheeky bastard wasn’t even born in Britain! He struggled through the last post as Anderson struggled through a prayer at the Cenotaph.
‘Is that the best bugler the Aryan race has to offer?’ shouted one protester, and even Anderson smiled.
I farted again during the minute’s silence, though this time nobody heard. The protesters had lined up behind police barriers to cat-call and abuse us. A million cameras flashed and caught us in perfect symmetry, miming one of those obscure hymns that only an Oxford-educated wanker like Anderson knows the words to. The whole march there and trudge back took about an hour. The solemnity of the occasion was not lost on anyone. After the wreath-laying we relaxed. We threw off the shackles of solemnity. We had to practise our Cenotaph manoeuvres, because eventually the NF would be in government, standing next to the Queen in glorious sunshine at 11 a.m., not cold and lonely at 2.30 p.m. It must have kept Anderson awake for years, worrying how he’d ever get out of bed in time for a morning do at the Cenotaph.
Remembrance Sunday was one of only two days of the year the NF put on a public face. Many will surmise they hide at home in white hoods, up to no good, whereas all we really ever did was spend all year trying to get people to the national conference, trying to get marchers to the Cenotaph, trying to persuade a tiny proportion of the entire electorate to vote for us. Men who paint swastikas on shed doors, men who dress in Nazi costumes in private, men who hate women, hate Jews, hate everyone, are hardly preparing for power. Come the revolution, most of them’ll be manning the barricades trying to stop it from happening. That is the truth.
The after-march rally and collection for party funds was not a lively occasion. Those who were not paid-up members went home, or to find reds to attack at the train station. Some BNP members hung around to listen to Anderson, Brady and national organiser, John Hill, a portly, thuggish Brummie, address the 100-strong crowd. I stood at the back of the crowd, bored and lonely, watching Eddie Whicker posing with his fanclub of northern working-class fascists, who only ever read about him in Searchlight. There was so much we needed to do to save our nation that it started to dawn on me that attempting to be normal, to be acceptable, to be the ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ when what we really had were dishpan hands, would not be the way. Later, Eddie and I conferred over the day’s activities. Pleasant enough, but the speeches were boring. Brady geed up the crowd with a few tough words, only for Anderson to send it flat again. So close to Parliament, could we not storm the gates just this once?
The conversation turned to the plot to kill Ken Livingstone. Sometime in the past two years, word was all over the far right about the plot. One of the UVF members, who had a collection bucket with him, was discussing it again with me and Eddie.
‘I’m getting the blame for it going tits up,’ he sighed. He’d been under suspicion for a while, having been caught in Scotland as part of a potential gun-running gang, but escaping sentence had done his kudos no favours.
‘Maybe it’s your big mouth,’ Eddie proffered.
There was a series of letters, which had been made available to the press by the UDA, of the NF’s Steve Brady giving a rundown to former UDA boss Andy Tyrie of his connections with well-known Nazi paramilitary groups. You can imagine the surprise when, in an issue of Vanguard, the attempted ‘hit’ on Livingstone was mentioned. I only asked Brady about this once, during a minibus trip to a rally in Wigan. All he would do was confirm that he knew of it. It proved nothing apart from what we all already knew: that loyalists and Nazis both have big gobs. Future Milltown murderer Michael Stone, an ‘independent’, loyalist hitman, later owned up to being the proposed man on the job and, lo and behold, the gun was found hidden in Scotland. Stone was later imprisoned for murder and the English UVF man later wound up as a leading figure in C18.
The UVF had long been illegal and the UDA only more recently, partly because of its openly murderous campaign, carried out under the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). The UDA had also been regarded as more susceptible to politicisation by the far right. Most loyalist terror groups only ever saw the British far right as an avenue for income, not something the NF or BNP had ever been very keen to donate to others. There was a keenness among anti-fascists to suggest that British fascists worked for the UDA/UFF on scouting missions, and that these organisations were offering paramilitary training to fascists in return. In reality, the training of drunken English and Scottish football hooligans was not in the loyalists’ interests. Although there were plenty of willing volunteers to take part in training, the Brady experience and the Political Soldier NF’s links to Gadaffi, left the Ulstermen wary of fascists. Loyalists, in comparison with their Republican counterparts, were embarrassingly lacking in modern weaponry and political analysis. In fact, it is fair to say the UDA had absolutely none; they were merely clinging on to the belief that they would one day put their war to bed. But there are also strong working-class convictions in the loyalist organisations. The left seem to prefer to think of all Ulster Protestants as some kind of land-owning gentry, when, in most cases I’m aware of, they are, in fact, as bollock poor as their Catholic neighbours. Despite some political foundations in the 1970s and 1980s, the UDA was more reckless than any of the other groups operating in the province.
Not only that, but even though they themselves were made up of unscrupulous murderers and drug dealers, most loyalist paramilitaries found the NF and BNP a less-than-palatable political mouthpiece.
In 1980, Steve Brady concluded in his letters and discussions with the UDA, that the majority of European Nazis were firmly in support of the Provisional IRA. On one 1980 fact-finding mission to the Nazis’ annual international get-together and beanfeast in Diksmuide, Belgium, two leading loyalists from the UVF attempted to buy weapons and chemicals for use in Ulster. As a condition of the sale, the Nazis demanded that Jewish targets in Northern Ireland were attacked. Maybe this was to ease the conscience of the Nazis, but the two loyalists steadfastly refused. At another meeting a few years later, instigated this time by a European far-right group which was down on its luck, an indignant UVF deliberately sent along a negotiator who was mixed race, ingeniously nicknamed ‘Nigger’ by his comrades.
As for Livingstone’s attempted murder, it probably never really got off of the ground. The gun may have made its way to Scotland where, by all accounts, it may still be behind a wall somewhere, but it is unlikely that either the UDA or the UVF would risk sending one of their only decent hitmen on a high-profile murder on the London Underground. Livingstone had trodden on a lot of delicate toes in the 1980s, having aired claims made by a former UDA grass, Albert Baker, that the security forces aided and abetted East Belfast UDA in the early 1970s. Livingstone used this information in his 1988 book and in speeches in parliament during the same period. It is possible that some people felt that Livingstone was inadvertently putting loyalists in danger, but the ‘hit’ on him is now, thanks to Stone, common knowledge. With the proposed hitman Stone now back inside for 600-plus years for an art stunt gone wrong, no one has ever seemed too bothered to look into the matter further.