Anderson insisted that I take the printing side of my job more seriously, but being still young and attempting to be radical, there was nothing I despised more than watching the supposed future leader of the white revolution crawling and sucking around his black and Asian clients, all to make a few more pounds for his retirement. Anderson had a classic business-first attitude towards his life as Chairman of the NF and, as absolutely no money from his private business made its way into the NF, nobody ever needed to have a crisis of confidence over such double standards.
Though I was falling out of love with being involved in the NF, I quite enjoyed being the full-time Nazi about town. It gave me plenty of opportunity to take calls from the very few newspapers that rang, most of whom wanted to speak to the BNP anyway. The more Anderson was away, the better the job became. Occasionally I’d just curl up to sleep for a few hours, or read old copies of National Front News or Nationalism Today. Occasionally, I would ring Searchlight from Anderson’s phone, not always speaking but sometimes I would tell them something very minor, if only to make it worth reading the next time it came out.
I was constantly probing what happened with the NF and BNP merger talks. During negotiations in 1987, after the Flag group formed out of the warring NF, Richard Edmonds, speaking on behalf of the BNP, insisted Tyndall be Chairman of any merged party or, as he would be known without internal democracy, ‘Leader’. He was merely laughed at. For his efforts, Edmonds was seen as a dangerous psychopath by the NF leadership, who viewed his renditions of the Horst Wessell sung at an East London market on a Sunday morning as embarrassing. Nobody ever minded Edmonds being a Nazi, but did he have to be so open about it? When he was arrested for attacking the South Bank statue of Nelson Mandela in the mid-1980s, Edmonds refused to answer the arresting officers in English and spoke to them only in German. While locked up in his cell, he sang the Horst Wessell continuously for three hours until the Superintendent came to see him with a glass of water, remarking, ‘Your throat must be sore. Would you like to see a doctor?’
In early 1990, I was voted onto the National Directorate of the National Front, one of the youngest people to be so in the history of the party. Paul Ballard told me excitably that it could be my first step towards becoming leader of the party. I was not allowed to vote on the Directorate as I was a party employee and employees had to serve the party. If I wanted to become a voting member of the sometime thirteen- to seventeen-strong ruling body, I would have to stand for election at the next AGM. My stock had risen even higher with the appointment. I realised that with my full-time employment and position on the Directorate I was capable of wielding some respect among Nazi circles. At the South London meetings of the BNP that I continued to attend, Edmonds would address me from the top table in search of approval or perhaps support and, no matter what Edmonds ever said or did, he would always have my support because of his selflessness to the cause.
The likes of Phil ‘the thug’ Edwards and Barry Roberts, old-time NF and BM activists from south London, would sit next to me at the meetings and ask me questions afterwards. Roberts had been one of the first people I had met on joining the NF. A skilled worker in his late thirties, he was a thoughtful and secretive man in a difficult marriage to a younger woman that I felt made him appear emotionally bankrupt. It was he who first introduced me to Edmonds and drove me to all the weird meetings as I was being slowly introduced to that world. Roberts was involved in anything that could be considered mildly interesting to the Nazi cause. His old mate, Phil Edwards, was roughly the same age, perhaps slightly younger, equally thoughtful and fair as Roberts, though better known because of his active and violent past.
Edwards was selfless, honest and committed to nationalism, with an ability to turn on the violence when necessary, though not beyond reasonable debate either. Neither Roberts nor Edwards liked Anderson. They were both committed National Socialists, absolutely disgusted by the things I told them about working over at the NF. Like many National Socialists who progressed through the ranks of the early NF and British Movement and all the hundreds of offshoots and discussion circles, Roberts and Edwards were staunch anti-Semites, maddeningly so in fact. Both managed, however, to live relatively normal lives, popping in and out of the movement when it suited them, mixing with old Mosleyites in the East End or going to meetings of the League of St George. Their hatred of Communism was virulent in a throwback to the 1960s. It was people like Roberts and Edwards who made Nazi life interesting. Edwards often gave me a rundown on the history of the punk movement, the Bromley scene as it had been known.
Edwards was very unhappy about the involvement of Mr X, who he called ‘that red’ in the National Front. Some people felt ‘X’ deserved a good kicking, not our undivided attention. The fact that he was a former SWP activist and anti-fascist, gave the NF the impression we were making inroads into mainstream life and gave the realists very uncomfortable feelings that we were in fact deviating from our ideological distrust of the mainstream.
Was the far right going to be hijacked by the Tories again? Anderson certainly appeared to be sending feelers out in that direction, courting a Conservative Party member and old Tory friends on some church council from Oxfordshire over dinner, pouring the man’s wife drinks while another senior member almost raped her! The more dedicated racialists were deserting the NF in light of its apparently growing liberal afflictions. Anderson felt more comfortable in the company of Tories; actually most far-right leaders, including Tyndall, felt very comfortable in the company of Tories. The highly influential Tory rightist, Adrian Davies, cultivated friendships with members of the far right, myself included, to support his myriad, bizarre right-wing organisations. It was he who invited me to all the meetings in the House of Lords, and Tory constituency meetings. A balding Cambridge graduate with a plum so strong you would have thought him an equerry to the Queen, Davies had flirted with the BNP in the early 1980s and ruined his chances of ever being selected as a parliamentary candidate, despite his solid right-wing Tory credentials. He was one of a few Tories moving around behind the scenes of organisations, pulling out ‘good’ members for discussions on topics of mutual interest.
His was the sort of company that Anderson aspired to keep, though Davies thought Anderson terribly low class and lacking in backbone. Knowing of my friendship with Davies, Anderson had instructed me to keep on good terms with him and the Tory right, though it slightly perplexed him that he had not yet been approached. Davies, too, sounded warnings about Mr X, claiming that it was near improper to allow someone of his ilk to exercise influence, particularly on the Chair of the NF. Davies had waited and waited for years for the NF or the BNP to grow up and appeared at the time to be busying himself with grabbing members with potential for some future project.
For the life of him, Anderson could not understand why a fellow Oxbridge type like Davies would rather spend time with people like Roberts and me than with him.
When the anti-federalist movements began in earnest in Britain in the early 1990s, Mark Cotterill was one of the first to break from the NF and form his own, essentially Conservative right aligned organisation, The Patriotic Forum. His affiliation to the Conservative Party was immediately approved. Brady and Acton also straddled some of those organisations through their friendships with members of the Conservative right. Davies was cultivating members of the far right who he felt capable of running small independent organisations able to challenge mainstream Conservative Party thinking and possibly able to persuade certain constituencies to appoint a member of their caucus as a prospective parliamentary candidate.
Mr X’s protestations that the NF should have as much right to television time as the Communist Party certainly struck a cord with Anderson. To protect the name National Front he decided to register it with Companies House in Wales as a limited company. I went up to East Ham Library for him and dug up as much information as possible, and rang as many branch activists as I could to get them to send proof that the NF was actually national, an apparent prerequisite. The six NF branches that had achieved local notoriety in the past year sent us cuttings from their local papers for us to present to Companies House to prove we were indeed national. Upon opening the NF’s application, a civil servant apparently became so distressed that they called on their union representative to take action. Companies House went on strike over having to handle local newspaper cuttings bearing the name NF, even if said cuttings mostly carried headlines along the lines of ‘Local NF member convicted of indecent exposure’.
Within hours of the strike, BBC Wales were on the phone to the office wanting a televised interview. Anderson was so excited he cut himself shaving before racing up to the BBC for his interview via satellite. It was terribly exciting stuff, but it was also unlikely that we had any members left in Wales to video his appearance. When Anderson returned, he acted with the sort of airs and graces that would make you think Melvyn Bragg had taken him to dinner and fondled his loins under the table. Anderson lay back on his couch, not caring that his arse touched the floor and the crotch in his pants was ripped, and folded his legs. He was a natural, they’d loved him. ‘I had to wear make-up, obviously,’ he said. ‘But I think it’s fair to say I nailed the interview perfectly, like a natural. You know I’m very good on television.’ Then he told me how as a teenager he nearly dated the spunky former Tiswas presenter, Sally James.
Ian Anderson and Martin Wingfield became the proprietors of National Front Printers Limited, at a cost of one thousand pounds to the party’s rapidly plummeting funds. If the company didn’t trade within one year, it would become null and void. It becomes particularly null and void when a private printer does all the printing for the company for his own benefit and not the party’s. As the NF no longer had a business side to it, we counted that as £1,000 spent on getting Ian onto television.
At the same time, the BNP continued to turn the East End into a racial minefield throughout 1990. Weavers School played host to two violent and noisy public meetings in support of BNP local election candidates. Phil Edwards turned up at one meeting, belting demonstrators on the way in, before sitting peacefully at the back to listen to the speeches. The NF’s John McAuley was turned away and attacked at the second meeting, by both BNP and anti-fascist demonstrators. At the same meeting, a skinhead asked from the back of the room what was to be done about the American guest who had just touched his willy in the toilets and all hell broke lose.
That year, an East London schoolboy named John Stoner was involved in a fracas with an Asian student and was stabbed, becoming a martyr to the BNP and acting as ‘proof’ that the traditional East Ender was under attack from the Asian invasion. One of Stoner’s cousins was Conrad Happe, an overweight and obnoxious fascist. He was so moronic he was dangerous, with a silly bumfluff beard. Because he knew Stoner, the BNP elevated Happe to be some sort of authority on the situation. Stoner remained silent on the issue of the stabbing, but his grandfather and Conrad were both helpful to the BNP. Grandpa spoke at one Rights for Whites march used to stir up the Stoner issue, and all he could do was complain, ‘Things ain’t ’ow they used ta be ’round ’ere.’ Jewish graves in the East End were desecrated, including one where a BNP activist was the caretaker. The BNP stepped up distribution of copies of its hate sheet denying the Holocaust, and the NF struggled to keep itself together.
As a sort of distraction, Eddie and I went to Trafalgar Square for the release of Nelson Mandela early in 1990 to see how the left was getting on with their stuff. Tony Benn reckoned they were the most emotional scenes since the end of the war and, rather like we would have acted on that day forty or so years before, Whicker and I were abusive to all and sundry. We jumped on a Peace Bus that was circling the area and had a conversation with the driver that went something like: ‘What the fuck are you doing? Do you wanna smack in the mouth? Drop us at the square.’
Once at the square, we mingled with the throng outside the very embassy where, for years, NF members had bared their fists at anti-apartheid demonstrators and smashed placards and heads against the pavements. Apartheid had meant there were always plenty of reds to slap around when one was in the city and feeling frisky. Once the NF had stood over a Troops Out picket outside an army recruitment office at Charing Cross and the organisers of that picket went to get help from the 24-hour picket outside the embassy. Upon the arrival of London ANC, Eddie piped up, ‘You needn’t have bothered coming here, we were just about to come and see you.’ I remember the embassy picketers being rather relaxed about the whole thing. They knew that every Saturday somebody was coming to attack them.
In amongst the throng, Whicker and I screamed loudly, ‘Hang Nelson Mandela!’ and the crowd blew their whistles in approval, shook our hands and hugged us in the sort of hyped-up hysteria that makes television evangelists rich. ‘Mandela is a black bastard,’ I shouted loudly for all to hear, but they wouldn’t acknowledge it, so Whicker and I got carried away with the emotional crowd until there was a slight crush. I put my boot into the chest of a Paul Weller lookalike and Eddie appeared to grope the breast of every woman on the square. Squeezed against each other amongst all the tears, we could not help but admire the resolve of our enemies who for years had maintained a non-stop picket outside the South African Embassy, in the face of daily violence and intimidation. To make our point, however, whatever exactly it was, we punched a man selling copies of the Militant newspaper to the ground and I stamped on his fingers. No doubt they put this down to some left-wing sectarianism. That evening we relayed the whole story, right down to the feel of hard nipples on Eddy’s coarse hands, during another well-organised piss-up.
I went to my first Directorate meeting straight after the influx of new funds, at a King’s Cross Hotel close to where the Director of Public Prosecutions was later found kerb crawling. Before leaving for the hotel (in the new minibus!) Steve Brady called in for a cup of tea over at Ian’s. While Anderson bathed upstairs, Brady asked me for Mr X’s number. I didn’t have it. Upon Anderson’s reappearance, an uncomfortable negotiation took place. ‘X’ had tried making contact with Brady over the Armagh [UDR] Four, a sort of Protestant equivalent of the Guildford Four or Birmingham Six. Anderson was furious on the inside that Mr X had tried to go direct to Brady and not through him.
In exchange for Mr X’s number, Anderson decided that Brady would have to back him up at the meeting. I stirred the tea in disbelief as Anderson told Brady to say nothing and go along with whatever he would declare at the meeting. ‘You too. You say absolutely nothing,’ Anderson demanded of me. Number exchanged for favour, we set off for King’s Cross.
It’s funny to see men who have long criminal records and are mainly illiterate, don glasses and behave as if they were running the government. My new title was Secretary to the Executive Directorate of the National Front, and men whom I had got drunk with until we’d fallen over, politely nodded in my direction as if we were merely acquaintances sharing mutual political respect for each other. This was supposedly our future cabinet. Once the handshaking was over, some stuck their large hands into bowls of complimentary mints, filling their pockets. Others filled up on sugar lumps and tea bags, stole pens and note pads, looking for anything that was not nailed down.
Before the Directorate’s meeting, the five-person Executive met in private, as in all nationalist ‘democratic’ organisations, to stitch up the meeting beforehand. Halfway through the boring proceedings of reading the minutes from the previous meeting (these were held quarterly) and the regional reports (‘Birmingham and West Midlands branch have initiated a move to remove all pint glasses from the Union Jack at branch meetings!’), Anderson grimaced and announced he was in financial trouble and needed to borrow a sum of money. Then he coughed. My mouth fell open in surprise and everyone present – most regional centres bar Leeds & Yorkshire, where the regional organiser was always excused – looked towards Steve Brady for an outburst. Brady nodded in agreement with Anderson.
‘Steve’s seen the papers the bank has sent me. I need £8,000 to help with my mortgage, otherwise I cannot continue to be Chair of the party.’ There was a silence, until Brady finally found himself and spoke up: ‘Yes, I’ve seen the papers, I saw them this morning at Ian’s house, it’s very up-front.’ This must have been a code for Tom Acton (another editor of Vanguard) to explode: ‘£8,000? The party can’t afford that.’ Anderson was unmoved. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s a very tough job being Chairman, and I very rarely bill the party for all the hours I do. I will sign a document if you wish, binding me to pay it back.’
Things got very uncomfortable with Acton, a former accountant, absolutely furious about what he told me a year later was blind theft. Nash gritted his teeth but stayed silent, while the financially-strapped Wingfields went along with the plan uncomfortably. Acton suggested that a solicitor be consulted to draw up an agreement but Anderson refused, saying that it would cost the party money it couldn’t afford. He said that he would draft an agreement at home that Acton could check if he wished. The money was his and there was nothing anybody was going to do about it. For me, it was like the final kiss of death to everything I believed in the National Front. I sank into my chair, the members would be furious when they found out, but the party’s ruling body had just sat there and said nothing on their behalf. I didn’t know whether it was true or not about Anderson’s financial difficulties but money was leaking out of the organisation on harebrained schemes already and nobody could give a toss by the looks of it.
When we finally moved onto business, there was some sharp criticism of a recent lull in national activities. The party had buried itself lately. In particular the Birmingham branch membership had been complaining at not having had the opportunity to smash up pubs in and around London for what felt like an eternity. Anderson agreed to a series of rallies around the country to allow the members to respond to their BNP counterparts. There was no doubting that NF rallies were easier on the eye than those of the BNP and less likely to cause pained embarrassment should someone cast an eye over the proceedings.
Since the events at Welling Library I had rung Searchlight maybe five or six times, always speaking to the same Geordie voice who would quietly note down what I said and say thanks very much in return. I knew other people in the party were obviously passing information to them and I suspected someone else on the Directorate was too. Would Anderson’s borrowing of £8,000 from the party’s coffers make it on to their pages, or would I do the decent thing and just break the confidentiality of the meeting and run screaming to the members instead?
I lay in bed and thought about it. This party was not going to achieve even the very tiniest of the things that it offered. It couldn’t even be a safety valve. Where did I stand, now that I had seen it sink to its lowest ebb? The BNP excited me as much as it terrified and worried me. It wanted to crush everything before it and in an opposite direction to that the NF took. Even when it was being openly Nazi, the BNP was still far more dangerous than anyone would ever know. I still believed in my race, still believed I was the victim of being born my colour and my class. Nobody else had yet managed to speak for us. And yet in three years moving between the NF, the BNP and all the small satellites where I was allowed to relay my fears and even, at times, encouraged to attempt to critique them, could I honestly say that the far right really spoke for me at all?
I needed this to work for me somehow. I needed men like Richard Edmonds and the psychopaths with heavy chains and flick knives in their pockets to prove themselves to me. How long could I wait, and what exactly was I waiting for? Did I really want electoral success, knowing that we would merely fill council chambers with drunken incompetents? My colleagues tended to view campaigning as a way to recruit others like themselves to strengthen the drinking club. Everything we believed was defended violently and angrily and every campaign was fought bitterly between visits to the pub and the police cells. If we were so ideologically secure, why did we have to have it explained to us why we opposed the things we campaigned against?
A St George’s Day rally was fixed for Bromley, and a huge turnout was required from all regional centres. It was definitely going to be a tough rally to pull off, given that Beckenham NF shared Bromley with a fairly old BNP grouping; though they were largely inactive, except when Edmonds held his meetings above a pub there or at an old football ground. For some reason, the local council permitted us use of the Civic Centre on the proviso it would be a public meeting. Anderson had privately hoped that the council would refuse a meeting, allowing us to stir up controversy over freedom of speech before the NF sidestepped Bromley to go to a hotel somewhere else, like Orpington. He was furious that the Tory council wanted the meeting to go ahead. ‘What now, another bloody pitched battle in Bromley High Street?’ he asked furiously.
The few activists in London and the south east got very excited in anticipation of a potential riot. For Terry and me it was a win-win situation. Lots of BNP members were bound to travel over to Bromley on the Sunday afternoon, ruck with the reds we knew would be outside the meeting and then somehow, marvel at the brilliance of a professional NF rally. We put rather imaginative figures on it, expecting that there was no way we could not get 3–400 people along. St George’s Day was our day after all, a two-fingered response to all the ethnic nonsense of Notting Hill Carnival, St Patrick’s Day and Gay Pride; a day when we could remember that we did have a culture, a history and something to celebrate. There was no way I was going to do any fucking Morris dancing or nonsense like that, but it would be a great day to get pissed and have a fight in the name of England’s first migrant worker.
I replaced the unknown Geoff Burnett as the guest speaker at the Croydon branch meeting that month and drew a good crowd. I was afforded the usual guest speaker privileges of free alcohol and travel expenses. I advised all members to be at the rally later that month and gave some waffling explanation about the NF’s transport policy that went down like the proverbial fart in a spacesuit. What was I thinking of? I also had to flog, on Anderson’s behalf, half a dozen packs of stickers and books. Barry Roberts drove me home in silence while I told him of my growing concerns about the NF leader. He was not impressed by my speech very much either, wondering what all the nonsense about trains and canals had to do with the evil Zionist conspiracy I should have been addressing. I begged him to bring some activists over from south London to help promote the rally and he grudgingly agreed. It seemed like as good a time as any to tell Roberts about the BM monies. His slim, flat features began to distort. He ran his hand over his bald head and then down over his mouth. ‘That’s not good,’ he said quietly to himself.
The proposed Bromley rally made few column inches in the local press. ‘Why on earth did they give the rally the go ahead?’ wailed Anderson again, throwing the local paper down with all of the other newspapers on his impromptu fourth estate shagpile. Neither the local press nor excited members were ringing. He began to panic that we would get turned over and there would be nobody there to witness it. I suggested that perhaps we had burnt our bridges with regard to casual nationalist muscle. ‘I mean, imagine if they did turn up, only to find that there was no chance to dance with the reds and we had done our usual and gone off to a hotel somewhere?’ I waited expectantly for his manic explosion, but he was back in the kitchen dipping into his favourite tipple again.
Terry Blackham drove over on the Monday before the rally to convince Anderson that it should go ahead. Ian was slightly more upbeat, though on the day before at the Brick Lane paper sale, Blackham and I hadn’t had much luck persuading people to show an interest in travelling over to Bromley the next week. ‘Too far to go, it’s Kent, not London,’ complained one BNP member. We did press drops that night around Bromley and I carefully raised my concerns over Anderson’s leadership with Terry for the first time. ‘What would you prefer Maff, a Nazi like Edmonds or Tyndall?’ He laughed to himself. ‘I fucking hate reds, niggers and Pakis the lot of them, but I don’t get the Jew business. I see Ian as someone I can take home to my mum who would seem normal. And we want our mums to vote NF, don’t we?’ The answer for me was surprisingly, ‘no’. The thought of my dear old Mum falling for Ian’s bullshit was appalling. Fuck me, was I becoming a snob? Was the NF all of a sudden not good enough for my mum? The conversation ended as quickly as it had started. I shot Terry a quick glance. Did he really think anything that we ever did was the sort of thing to make our mothers proud of us?
On the following Tuesday, a new Newham NF member who lived around the corner from Anderson came to see me. He lent me some money and bought me a packet of cigarettes. He was only a year older than me and covered in tattoos, incapable of walking to the shop without an involuntary outburst of violence. He took me to the pub, and I poured my heart out to him but he didn’t really understand. He was just a racist thug, overjoyed at being able to go to the house of the Chairman of the NF every night and drink tea in his living room. To take my mind off events, he regaled me with stories about beating up Asians outside the tube station and a shooting at the ski club in Becton in which he claimed he was involved. This complete fucking idiot had two birds on the go and was enjoying as many blowjobs, hand-jobs, gobbles, nobbing and shagging as he wanted. He told me to get a tattoo to impress the birds and start shagging to take my mind off my predicaments. He also advised I get a bigger knife for travelling home at night. ‘In case I get jumped?’ I asked. ‘No, to knife some Paki,’ he scorned.
On the Wednesday, Anderson printed some leaflets advertising the march and billed the NF for them. I went out on a pre-arranged date with a student whom someone had assured me – rightly as it turned out – would definitely shag me.
On the Thursday, I went to work feeling nauseous. Anderson looked rather pained by the whole episode.
On the Friday, I finished work early and went to lunch with Blackham and Anderson. Blackham and his brother would organise a dozen Palace supporters to provide security, though we are disappointed there has been no commitment by reds to protest at the meeting.
On the Saturday I was picked up by Blackham and we joined two car-loads of NF activists. We were going to meet outside the Churchill Theatre in Bromley to hand out leaflets about the Sunday rally. Anderson met us there with two large Union Jacks on poles. Thirty of us (the entire active NF membership for London and the south east) handed out leaflets advertising tomorrow’s St George’s Day rally and tried to sell newspapers. The public were hardly interested in what we had to offer or say on the subjects that really mattered to them.
On the way to get coffee I passed my old maths teacher selling SWP papers and we exchanged strained pleasantries. The SWP were having about as much luck as we were. Because no traffic passed through the shopping mall, I stood in the middle of the road handing out leaflets to uninterested shoppers. The press weren’t interested either and we hadn’t achieved any additional press coverage since the tiny announcement a few weeks before. Just as I was about to give up the ghost, a huge man took a leaflet. ‘What’s all this?’ he screamed, like a prom queen, pointing and shaking his fist at me. ‘Suck my cock you faggot,’ I began, before I was knocked flat on my face. I bit right through my lip and could feel the blood covering my face and neck. My nose exploded, my eyes closed and I couldn’t stand up. By the time I did, Barry Roberts was holding him bent backwards over some railings, while Anderson and Blackham and a dozen others piled into him with kicks and punches.
I was covered in blood, staring at this bastard and the lads beckoned me over. ‘Finish the cunt off, just finish him,’ Blackham urged me. The man screamed for help in agony as I stood, dazed and bewildered in the middle of a motionless high street, dazzled by the sun and the warmth of my own blood. The SWP came running but didn’t intervene as the NF crew turned to face them with their hands making beckoning motions. ‘Let’s fucking ’ave you too.’ They stood watching, motionless as NF members with shoes covered in blood left their victim battered on the floor to rot. Blackham walked towards me saying furiously: ‘Get over there and stamp on that cunt’s head,’ pointing behind him to the mess on the floor that still hadn’t moved.
A brave woman shopper went to the injured man’s aid while Anderson quickly started packing away. A dozen NF were now confronting the SWP who were moving away too, backing out of the area. Terry’s brother grabbed my arm and took me into the toilet to wash my face while laughing in it all of the way. ‘What a fucking punch, you mug; he fucking let you have it, didn’t he?’ Outside, shoppers were berating the NF, little old ladies and women with children pointing and gesturing at them, calling them bullies. Terry came into the toilet and looked at my face. ‘They’ve led him into the park. Clean up and let’s go kill the cunt.’
I should have gone to hospital for stitches; even today my lip will split right down the middle for no apparent reason and remain painfully cut for weeks at a time. Instead, the NF members chased the man through the park until they could run no more and decided to buy me a few drinks instead. It takes only minutes for something like this to become folklore and the subject of much banter. The poor guy never saw the rest of us and could be forgiven for thinking there would be only a handful of others there with me. By 6 p.m., a headhunt for reds in pubs was organised. ‘We’ll start at the Star and Garter,’ one tells me, ‘and we won’t let up till we find the bastards.’ I was touched. My faith in the brotherhood of man was renewed. We were planning to trawl middle-class Bromley on a Sunday night and smash glasses into the faces of anyone even remotely progressive, or with glasses or, worse still, a ponytail.
Overnight the story snowballed to the point where we had apparently fought hundreds of reds with knives and iron bars and people heard how I had been jumped, not by a burly gay man but by a gang of blacks. That night, the Ayran jungle drums were alive and active, and revenge was exacted on two innocent men, held down in an alley in Bromley and having their heads and limbs stamped on.
My teeth ached all night. My lips stuck to the pillow, even though I wasn’t trying to fuck it for once. In the morning a tooth fell out as I painfully and slowly brushed my teeth. I could not even open my mouth wide enough to brush. The stupid knife that had stayed in my pocket while I was punched the day before was replaced by a bigger one. After a night’s agony, I was convinced that today I would actually have to stab someone to get back my pride. I was so hungover, I could barely move or think straight. I felt so fucking ugly, staring miserably into the mirror at a pitiful teenager with stupid, broken dreams and crying like a girl.
Still Welling Library played on my mind. Those ladies would be celebrating my facial agonies and broken teeth if they knew what had happened in Bromley. At least I’d had my revenge taken care of for me by my comrades. Did we really attack a meeting of women and gleefully report and celebrate it?
The Bromley rally was more than peaceful. Filled mostly by long hard coughs and whispers, the hall was four times too big for the 110 people who made it to the rally, which included not a single member of the general public. A dozen east London BNP toured the area disappointed that there was not one red to be found, called us ‘wankers’ and went home. In those days there was no Sunday opening, so to be in or around Bromley Civic Centre on the day of the rally, you would have had to be attending the meeting. The Palace football crew did not show up which also annoyed the BNP mob who would have gladly done battle with them instead. Some people were out and about, just happening to be walking their dogs, hoping for a glimpse of some aggro, but none materialised. I sat at the very back of the hall manning the bookstall with my eyes black and my lip scabbed and disgusting, trying to hold a conversation with a man from Brighton who was trying to flog a couple of hundred dirty magazines to me.
Anderson paid tribute from the front of the room to members hurt in the line of duty, and I got a ‘Hear! Hear!’ from the crowd. I blushed and smiled until my lip split again and spilt blood onto the newly printed constitution. We recorded the rally on a small portable stereo but it was a pointless exercise without a background of anti-fascists screaming abuse. Like during school assembly, my mind drifted while the various teachers plodded through their speeches, occasionally raising titters, but mostly, in school tradition, simply exhorting people to do more work for their future, put more money in the collection, etc. If we had all worked a little harder at school, we would hardly want to be there, would we?
It was during the Bromley meeting that Anderson did the most disgusting thing he had surely ever done. He turned his attention to AIDS, the scourge of fornicators, homosexuals and drug users and declared it a ‘bloody good thing’, in almost Lutheran rhetoric, to solid cheers from men who hide their small willies while using the end cubicle in public toilets. This ‘bloody good thing’ had recently taken one of our members from Leeds, a haemophiliac. The member had donated £1,000 from his small compensation to the NF before his impending death because he had no one else to give it to. Anderson knew this, and The Flag described the member as having suffered an industrial injury, just to make sure that none of us could be tainted by the gay plague. The thought of Tina and Martin Wingfield handling the generous donation with rubber gloves is very unpleasant. No wonder most of the other letters they received contained human excrement.
My old friend Murph also turned up to the rally, though this time in the company of a very attractive young lady he had met through Adrian Woods, one of the Political Soldiers now running Croydon NF. She was very sexy, as I remarked to her, upon which she looked at me like I was a lunatic. I burped ‘Bollocks’, hoping that would attract her but it didn’t. Murph had a woman and I did not. She was lodging with Woods and was a devout racist and trainee policewoman. She was not impressed by my position in the Front though.
Tina Wingfield lied, claiming the rally had collected over £1,000. It was in fact just over £300 and we still had to pay a cancellation fee on the other hotel we had kept on standby. After the rally, Blackham and I stood in the doorway and bade farewell to our friends from Birmingham and the Midlands sauntering off to their cars, feeling downtrodden by the weight of failure resting on their collective shoulders, because they had driven all the way to Kent for little more than an exercise in boredom. Anderson gave me a lift home and asked if I had spoken to Mr X recently, which I had not. ‘Leave him to Terry and me, you concentrate more on the Conservatives,’ he warned. He also raised a smile by mentioning that Blackham and his girlfriend were babysitting ‘X’s’ children. ‘It’s a terrifying thought isn’t it?’
Nash, Murphy and I met above the Golden Lion in Waterloo, went upstairs to the pool room and racked up the balls. Nash had a large file, the ‘Anderson Files’, a series of records Nash was keeping on Anderson’s betrayal of the party. The file was no secret, but to Anderson it was a joke, something he felt did not physically exist other than in Nash’s mind. Murph and I chatted about the torrid love affair he and the policewoman were engaging in in the room she rented from Adrian Woods and his wife. By all accounts it was all hot and sweaty, while downstairs Woods and his wife would fight bitterly over the sound of a screaming child and the barks of a large and aggressive Rottweiler.
Nash suggested a whole list of ways we could manoeuvre against Anderson and push the party back into the hands of the members. Who was going to help us do that? Nash could not think of anyone willing enough to help. So it was left to me, the party employee and supposedly Anderson’s right-hand man, Paul Nash, an energetic but uncharismatic Directorate member and, for some reason, Barry Murphy to do it. Nash reeled off ten party officials who he knew wanted Anderson removed. Nash was terrified that the BNP was going to make a breakthrough before we did. In the twenty-three years that the NF had been going it had not had one single elected official on even a Parish Council. I thought about Nash’s energy and enthusiasm for saving the NF, whilst it seemed that Murph had been to the meeting only to boast about shagging.
Through Adrian Davies, I spread the word to Cotterill of the growing dissatisfaction at Anderson’s leadership among London members. Cotterill phoned me at home and asked discreetly if I would be willing to go to Torquay one weekend and possibly take Blackham with me. It was difficult to say clearly, but I intimated that Blackham would not be in favour of any anti-Anderson ideas that Cotterill might be shaping. Halfway through the phone call I stopped listening completely and was overcome with an enormous wave of despair. The idea was to get influential street soldiers like Whicker on side, very discreetly and while doing all of this, maintain my position in south London NF and at the party office.
I realised that I did not want any of this, I didn’t want to save the NF. It felt as if my stomach had been ripped out, I was empty. I really couldn’t give a toss about saving the NF or the BNP. What was going on? I put the phone down as it suddenly felt as if my world had turned in on itself. Violence fucking hurt, I could see my battered face in the mirror but that was not bothering me too much. It had certainly been the best punch to connect with me in over three years, but this was hardly my first black eye or split lip. There and then nothing about the NF or even the BNP seemed to matter. I had been ringing Searchlight occasionally, every time I had these pangs of guilt, which had started immediately after the Welling incident, but I had also been struggling with how blasé I was at times about how easy and enjoyable it would be for me to put certain people onto lorries or trains heading off ‘east’. Not that we openly said there would be death camps for one moment but it was fucking obvious. I steadied myself in front of the mirror. ‘I am still a National Socialist, I am still a white Aryan, part of the master race,’ I assured myself, then went to bed and had a wank.
The party was fighting the mid-Staffs by-election that year, when the first seeds of dissent started to show. There were three market towns in the constituency of mid-Staffs and we had a separate active team to cover each. In one town I spent three solid hours on the loudhailer breaking race relations laws and exhorting middle-class shoppers to vote NF. Towards the end I was shouting into the microphone: ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Labour,’ while smoking Woodbines and whistling to young girls. ‘Show us yer tits love, and vote National Front!’ It may have accounted for our incredibly low vote, but it did give me a chance to suss out the situation in the Midlands, and surprisingly I found the regional membership was split down the middle.
People like John Hill, the legendary thug who ran the region and in whose house the party’s national information phone line was kept, had lately taken to punching members in the face for dissenting or, worse still, attending BNP meetings. I stood in Litchfield market with my loudhailer wrapped over my shoulder telling him how ‘The NF’s fucked. Anderson is fucked, the whole party is fucked.’ I think I’d finally managed deadpan. He stood face to face with me, his large flat nose up close to my more Aryan model. ‘I’m gonna talk to John about this,’ he whined, ‘John can fix it up,’ to which another Birmingham NF member quipped, ‘No he can’t. He doesn’t give a toss.’ This dissenter, who would stand in Torquay with Cotterill as his election agent, was later attacked by Hill at the annual conference when the party was heading for its demise.
For the rest of the campaign I trailed up hills to small housing estates with new Fords parked in the driveways, accompanied by a dozen Birmingham members kicking over milk bottles and trampling through daisies, handing out leaflets and barking, ‘Hello love, Vote NF’ to the inhabitants of middle England.
Whicker defected to the Corrective Party, and followed their candidate, Lindi St Claire, around the market, asking her questions about her past as Miss Whiplash. This was more her constituency than ours anyway. Whicker stood in the town square with his large hands thrust deep into his pockets giggling to himself when not handing out her leaflets, while we sat in the pub watching him. Perhaps Eddie was forming a Whiplash/Sledgehammer Alliance along the lines of the LibDem Alliance of the time. She beat us, but was quite gracious about it, even when we stormed the church hall to protest at not being invited to address the electors at hustings. Perhaps she could sense that we were half-hearted about the whole affair. It had cost the NF something like £3 per vote and our newly-founded local branches folded soon after.
Still I traipsed over to east London every day with my head down, wondering what it was that I believed in. I hated blacks and Asians, but I didn’t actually know any. They were everywhere and it offended my eyes just to see them. The way they walked and the way they spoke to each other. They were so ignorant, they had absolutely no manners and they had as good as polluted the East End of London with their foreign sounds and smells, their aggressive mannerisms, shit music and a total lack of respect for real local people and their cultures. What did they want from us, what had we left to give them that they didn’t just take when they felt like it? And what about us, the great, maligned white working class? Where were our middle-class knights from the councils in shining armour, coming to impress upon us the beauty of the things we said and thought, sang and fought for? Why was integration a case of us accommodating people who did not even want to learn our language? I was a long way, a very long way from boldly shaking hands with these invaders and throwing down the welcoming prayer mat for them. I had an idea about an England I had never actually known, but had heard about. In this England our front doors were left open and we borrowed cups of sugar and minded each other’s children. We worked hard and played hard in our small industrial nation and married the first girl who let us put our hands up her skirt. No, these cunts could never be a part of it.
Cotterill had been charged with scheming to remove Anderson, but was found out very quickly. A system of spying on colleagues in order to curry favour in the upper echelons of the cult was a sickness that affected the movement from top to bottom. People who would back you up in a fight and break every unbroken pint glass to defend your back, would quite as easily stick a knife in it if they thought you were thinking something you shouldn’t be, or in some cases, thinking about thinking about something you shouldn’t.
One day at work, not long after the mid-Staffordshire by-election, Anderson rounded on me. ‘What do you know about Mark Cotterill? Is he with the BNP now?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I replied.
‘If you hear anything about Cotterill, I want to know about it.’
And almost immediately Anderson began plotting against Cotterill. He summoned me into the living room and sat back on his arse-less couch and pursed his lips. ‘You may need to go down to Torquay and do some digging on Mark Cotterill. I have another man there already doing the same thing so it will be good if you two can meet up and exchange notes.’ He was having a laugh, surely? Whenever he was uptight or confused, Anderson started talking nonsense. ‘At this juncture we cannot afford to have someone in the party who is potentially going to cause problems.’
He was actually digging, not on Cotterill, but to see if there was anyone else plotting against him who he could buy off, or so I suspected. The trip never happened because I demanded the train fare and some extra beer tokens up -front. Like my wages that week, and most others, it never materialised. Anderson was offended. Business was picking up though. I was also drunkenly promoted to sub-editor of the second issue of Lionheart, but was removed from the job because I did not realise notwithstanding was one word.
One of our new bits of business, in a classic example of Anderson’s double standards, was a job for the Sri Lankan community, printing a book that he was incapable of doing on his limited machinery and technology. It was an attack on the Tamil Tigers written by a neurotic Essex GP. She kept Anderson pinned in the living room for hours at a time explaining her beliefs, and continually changing the text and artwork. For the first fifteen visits Anderson kept his cool surprisingly well, bending over backwards and being charming, until, on the sixteenth visit, he went ballistic. I was in the back room staring and swearing at the blank computer screen when I heard Anderson explode. The Sri Lankan woman started screaming back and as I flew out of the back room he was trying to remove her from his house, with some difficulty.
‘You cannot do this. You cannot do this,’ she cried. I picked up her handbag and threw it over both of them as they struggled in the doorway. It landed and spilled its entire contents into the road. Then we pushed her into the front garden and then through the broken gate as she punched, kicked and bit the pair of us.
‘I’ll do what I want. Fuck off you Paki,’ he retorted and we turned and walked back into the house.
She pushed her lips through the letter box and shouted, ‘I want my money back, bastard,’ in answer to which Anderson threw open the door and screamed, ‘You haven’t even paid me you fucking witch,’ and began chasing her up the street while she made noises like an impaled pig. I made myself busy stamping on her handbag’s contents, but I couldn’t find her purse. Anderson returned to stand at his broken front gate swearing at her car as it shot off. He then stood with hands on hips, master of his own domain.‘That’s the last time,’ he swore as he pushed past me. ‘No more Pakis. This fucking poll tax will see me right.’
The poll tax dispute was a godsend. We churned out thousands of leaflets for the unsuspecting autonomous community groups, whilst simultaneously mailing out stickers and leaflets to racists who hoped the poll tax would lead to some form of ethnic cleansing. Officially we were against poll tax, although in reality we loved it. All, of course, except for those of us who could not afford to pay it.
For a while, Anderson thought about giving up the printing for good. Mr X reckoned he would get £5,000 for a story about him printing the Labour memberships but of course it was not enough. Plus, the assorted incarnations of the British Movement were hot on the trail of their money now and it became the subject of intense scrutiny. Ian started to refuse to go to the Lane on a Sunday in case they were there.
Mr X submitted some articles on music and eating faggots or something, which I thought was very unfashionable. ‘X’ was another exponent of the idea of the English being cultureless fools living in old England as a nation of shopkeepers, doffing our caps and squaring up to our opponents under the Queensberry Rules. Maybe it was his SWP past, but he had very defined ideas about class; that we should actually like the screaming uselessness of Oi! music and the blandness of English fare. As a matter of course, however, ‘X’ felt it appropriate to search out the best Indian tucker at the same time in a column for his official employers.
Mr X attended the Beckenham branch meetings, as a result of which almost the entire party hierarchy began going there too, giving their full attention to his searching questions from the floor. He was struggling hard to find out what the NF’s policies actually were. Any racist could be a supporter, but what were the policies of the party? I could have told him the minute he started asking questions: make them up as you go along. There aren’t any.
Almost as if to pay a compliment to Mr X, London NF planned a day at the seaside in Bournemouth, all cockles and whelks and kiss-me-quick hats, traditional English Beano-style. In honour of Only Fools and Horses we christened it the jolly boys’ outing. Now my aunties used go to Eastbourne every year for a bit of r ‘n’ r and a dry sherry, until they were ninety-one and eighty-three. My old school friends, on the other hand, used to go to Spain, drink half the national debt and have sex with girls called Alison. A poxy day trip to the south coast looked like being my great adventure. Even the geriatric aunties could do better than that!
We go to Bournemouth, without a hint of sex in the air, and trail from pub to pub in the pissing rain, spending the proceeds of the Beckenham branch meetings’ collections on Fosters and Woodbines. We started drinking at eleven, while Mr X and his family headed to the beach with Blackham and his girlfriend, for one of those family days with bucket and spade. When we bumped into them, ‘X’ grinned and passed quietly by, as if the damage had not already been done. It was not by being seen with us in pissing Bournemouth that he would be found out, but by attending dinners held to remember Sir Oswald Mosley in London with Blackham. The two men dined together as Lady Mosley recalled her late, black-shirted husband. Lecomber and other Nazis at the dinner could not believe their eyes that he was there. John McAuley almost choked on his meal in horror. One or two people at the dinner even considered attacking him, recalling his staunch lefty credentials.
The Bournemouth trip was an endless afternoon of drunken punch-ups between thirty NF members. Eventually the police rescue one of our mob stuck on top of a steep hill, while we all stand at the bottom baring our arses at bemused holiday-makers. The beauty of drunkenness is that you can never piss your pants because you know you can relieve yourself anywhere you feel comfortable. And comfort is so easily found. While the police coax the man in the Tranmere shirt down from the hill, we all take a piss on the footpath, trying hard not to look at each other’s willies.
Later we fought a running battle with some locals in a pub, throwing glasses and balls off the pool table. I caught one of the locals smack in the face with the eight ball, before being weighed down by an ashtray planted smack on the back of my head. The fighting came to a halt as one of our number pulled a large knife from his carrier bag and began waving it at the horrified locals. ‘D’you know who the fuck we are?’ he screamed at them, backing off. ‘D’you fucking want some of this? You’re out of your depth, cunts.’ The barmaid was crying her eyes out and the locals were trying to placate the knife-wielding Nazi. ‘Leave it out lads, come on,’ began one, but the knife was thrust at him again. We easily outnumbered them, but not one of us told our comrade to put his knife away.
The barmaid was hysterical, ‘I’m calling the police,’ she wailed and the locals began jumping up and down telling her not to. Casually the knife was returned to the carrier bag and we walked out slowly, breaking everything that we could on the way. The barmaid quickly slammed and locked the door behind us. Outside the pub, Murph was running his hands through the WPC’s hair while they sat on the bench in the, apparently romantic, drizzle. ‘Thanks for your help, you Irish cunt,’ he’s told as we shuffle past looking for another pub. They sat next to each other on the coach trip home and things got very fruity between them. The old organiser sulked in a seat next to me while everyone sang along to a Diana Ross song on the radio. ‘X’s’ youngest walked the aisles, giving Nazi salutes before resting happily on Blackham’s knee. I couldn’t help thinking that this was the best and most terrifying group of friends a man could want.