Initially, Derek Beackon, who went on to become the infamous first-ever elected BNP councillor, was put up for the job of head of the new security team. Despite his advancing years, Beackon had never been involved in the NF but had come to the BNP in the late 1980s, after drifting in and out of versions of the old British Movement. I warned Searchlight that, now that the BNP was taking its security seriously, maybe I would be better off on the outside. Searchlight and I never sat down and properly talked about an agenda for me. I mostly met with them because I was drawn to the new – to me – art of adult conversation and the occasional posh cup of tea, served on a saucer out of a teapot. Of course they were judging me, but they never let me know it. If they wanted me to go somewhere, I knew I had to go. I knew deep down that I was spying on the people that spied on me and that someone, somewhere was telling them the stupid things that I did, but they never told me about it.
We took tea with club sandwiches and talked about music; it’s how I got to own my very first Billy Bragg CD. They were proper people who read books. And I know that sometimes when I left wherever it was we were meeting, they followed me all the way home or to whichever pub they thought I was safe in. I must have told them a hundred times that I was walking away, and a hundred more times, a phone call from a fascist colleague would drag me back in, because all I had was angry mates and polite conversations with Searchlight.
Over at the BNP office-cum-bookshop in Welling, Tony Lecomber was pushing very hard for the death of the NF and he gladly saw me as a willing contributor. The BNP was growing fast and Edmonds was always at the front of the shop entertaining the curious and the voyeurs alike. Some people knocked on the door and wanted to chat in the doorway, some even panicked as Richard tried to hurriedly usher them into the shop. He may have been tall, bald and imposing and perhaps a little mad, but he was polite, educated and generous too. He’d give anybody goods straight off the shelves, whether they wanted them or not.
Out the back of the shop, Lecomber immersed himself in his own business. He’d begun writing long and tiresome articles for party publications that were as monotone as his conversation. His grudge against the NF was personal. After his release from prison, he’d tried to ingratiate himself with the NF. He’d been shunned and privately accused of being state. He was a serious weight around the neck of the BNP’s precious public image. Tyndall, himself no stranger to wanting to blow things up in his youth, encouraged Tony not to let his conviction weigh him down. In public, the BNP would refer to it as an ‘experiment in fireworks’ gone wrong, or in Tyndall’s own words, ‘youthful indiscretion’. But a conviction for something so militant, particularly when he had been so young, was something Lecomber was immensely proud of. There was always an onus to prove yourself and the courage of your convictions, so he was not happy with people claiming he had rolled over for the state for a reduced sentence. It’s largely ignored now or, they hope, forgotten, but it was Lecomber who began pushing a slightly modern approach in the BNP in the early 1990s.
Tony recognised that no matter how the party as a whole may have felt politically, it was not going to grow further when, along with some people’s receptiveness to their anti-immigration policies, the party also had a completely justifiable image as mad Nazis. He wasn’t becoming anti-Nazi in any way, and he most certainly was not against the organisation being militant but he seemed to want to sit halfway between what the BNP had and what the NF wanted.
The NF was bankrupting itself continuing with profess-ional-looking publications and attempts at an image makeover. Lecomber had pushed for the BNP’s party paper, British Nationalist, to go monthly like The Flag and volunteered to help write and edit it, slowly reducing the grip of Tyndall’s hands on everything the party produced.
Lecomber had been pushing the BNP to fight more elections, to take on the NF and destroy it. Eddy Butler’s ‘Rights for Whites’ campaign in the East End had seen large numbers of disaffected locals flock to, often violent and always confrontational, BNP demonstrations and marches and this had to be transformed into votes. No one else in the BNP was particularly keen on the idea of elections, but they were doing slightly better than the NF was, as proved by selectively comparing election results.
Where Edmonds and Tyndall scoured the newspapers for evidences of Jewish conspiracies and ‘alien crime’, Lecomber scoured the same newspapers for opportunities, picking out instances of racial tension or inequalities that might offend whites. Edmonds scoured the court section, looking for Jewish names up on fraud; I stuck to the sports section and poked my nose around for membership lists. Parties like the BNP and NF always lied that their membership lists are well hidden, but they never were.
Lecomber even wrote to the very NF branches he had regularly antagonised, offering his services as a speaker at any forthcoming meetings. There was already some resentment against Lecomber over his meteoric rise, particularly as it seemed to come at the expense of the untainted Eddy Butler, an equally monotone but skilful organiser. Surprisingly, some of the more militant people in the BNP were the ones who hated Lecomber most. Tyndall was not daft however. He might have had convictions himself for running around with guns and Nazi uniforms in his distant past, but he knew that even Lecomber could not think of himself as leadership material.
A decision had been made to form a strong-arm security group – and news eventually reached Anderson. ‘What position are you and Eddie [Whicker] taking on this new security group?’ he shouted down the phone. I said that I didn’t know if it was up and running properly or whether it was mainly just an East End thing. Immediately he wanted me to spy on it and refuse to be a member at the same time! I told him flatly that he’d lost Eddie and he sighed. ‘Is there no hope on that front?’ Once more I was summoned to East Ham for ‘discussions’.
‘I’ve known Charlie Sargent for years,’ Anderson told me, while sitting on his couch. ‘I’m telling you he is not to be trusted. He’s into drugs in a big way and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was state.’ Why was everyone state? And why was the state supposedly so interested in us all of the time? We had a lot of tough talkers, lunatics and hard nuts but we hardly ran large-scale terrorist operations. We took, on the whole, a voyeuristic and occasionally helpful interest in our European colleagues’ violent terrorism and occasionally the odd idiot got himself caught playing with a gun in his bedroom or back garden, but we were responsible for little more state subversion than perhaps a gang of third division football hooligans. We were criminally inclined pub brawlers and occasional drunken racist attackers, but it was not as if we had organised the Poll Tax riots or London bombing campaigns like some of our opponents on the left had. Politically, we were little more than a poorly organised pressure valve built around obsessive personality cults.
A situation was developing in outer west London and Ian was wondering whether either Eddie or I could bring muscle over to help. I doubted it. The NF’s new branch had been run off its patch by a combination of the lefties, and young black males threatening them with knives. In any other instance ordinary people would just walk away and dump the idea of even attempting to make a breakthrough there but in the face of an enormous and exploitive BNP in both the south and the east of the capital it became necessary to defend the patch.
Despite instructions to ‘find out where’ by Searchlight, Anderson ventured nothing more. ‘It’s out of my hands,’ he said. I’d almost forgotten about it until Terry Blackham arrived on my doorstep early one morning a week or two later.
‘Fancy a drive to Hounslow?’ he asked, hopping from one foot to the other and rubbing his unshaven chin. I grabbed my favourite dark-green jumper and joined Terry and some of his mates for the drive. On the way over to Hounslow I broke the awful uncomfortable feeling in the car by acting the clown and cracking jokes. ‘You’re Matthew aren’t you?’ asks one of the blokes. ‘I used to get your bulletins, they were funny.’
The sweet sounds of Skrewdriver blasted out of the speaker as we sped up. Well, I was fucked now. I knew it was to be a ‘hit’ on some reds. Perhaps the long arm of the law would intervene as we all sipped lager and travelled as fast and dangerously as London’s roads would allow.
We parked the car in a back street and walked through town. Hounslow had a pretty poor, pretty un cosmopolitan market on a bland pedestrianised street. We strolled through town, only stopping so that Terry could make a phone call from a phone box. He returned with a smug grin on his face.
‘Ginger Rick’s with the local lads, they’ll be along in a minute.’ It was only just after ten and the sun was already burning. In the middle of the high street outside the main entrance to an arcade we found our pitch. The local lads were not to be seen. There were a few other people milling around, a collection of lefties from different parts of the Judean People’s Front who were remarkably late in setting up themselves. We went and stood right in the middle of them, Terry dropping his sports bag with a large thud, but they hardly noticed we were there. They were in their little sects, avoiding looking at each other, never mind bothering with us. Within a minute of us starting selling our papers, the number of reds began to grow, a good mix of ages and sexes but all white and all middle class, not the sorts of people that had been turning us over in recent months.
By now the lefties were getting organised, beginning to sort themselves into proper teams to sell their various papers. There were nearly twenty of them and we were right in the middle of them, just the four of us. Terry even managed to sell a paper. The buyer went straight to the lefties and waved it in their faces as he walked past. The penny dropped, albeit very quietly.
A young man from one of the groups walked around us to talk to another of the groups, who in turn followed him back to his group for a mini-conference. Then they walked towards another bunch of lefties who had already decided to pack up and go home. ‘Militant,’ said one of the NF blokes, nodding at the reds. ‘They’ll have a go.’
Everybody was a little twitchy. Terry had an enormous grin on his face, a grin that I knew meant he was about to explode into violence. I started getting nervous.
‘We’re too outnumbered if they’re gonna have a go,’ I hissed. ‘Don’t panic yet. There’s more to come,’ Terry replied, still grinning. From down the road come three members of the local NF, laughing and shouting stupidly, ‘Alright Terry, alright lads?’
Shoppers passed by oblivious to either group of political extremists preparing to do battle. The local lads were very, very cocky and began pointing out those amongst the reds those who had run them off their patch in the previous weeks.
The reds eventually began a chant of ‘Nazi scum off our streets’ and then I really started getting nervous. They were drawing attention to themselves, they were preparing to attack. From behind us, two cars pulled up and out jumped half a dozen men for our side. It was on.
Blackham let out a huge ‘Yeeees’ and off we went. I was mesmerised for a second because I couldn’t work out who was who but I did see the old pool ball in a sock being swung, and ducked for cover. The entire high street came to a standstill, as twenty-odd people rolled on the floor, screamed and threw punches. Searchlight’s instructions were in my head, ‘No bashing reds, no bashing anyone,’ but a cocky little bastard knocked me to the floor then came back for more, so I dove right into him. We fall on the floor in a grapple. Seconds later, the sirens started wailing and our cars started pulling away, leaving only six of us BNP and a lot of bloody, messed-up people. My green jumper was torn to buggery and my jeans had blood on them. It was time to depart.
As we ran down Hounslow High Street, some public-spirited citizens tried to stop us.
‘They were IRA supporters,’ I protested.
‘Fucking IRA supporters, mate, that’s why we gave them a kicking,’ said Terry in tandem.
My legs were so heavy I could barely run. A red grabbed Terry’s arm again, so Terry threw a fistfull of loose change at him and brandished a hammer in his face and we made our escape. At the time there was no back exit from Marks and Sparks in Hounslow, so if you’re ever shoplifting there, don’t try and make your escape through it. We ran around the store for a second, before we ventured back out onto the pavement and walked past four running bobbies. I dumped the bloody jumper in the bin and began to walk calmly down the road, but the noise of the sirens was coming closer and someone was shouting ‘Roadblock, there’s a fucking roadblock.’
I fixed my eyes firmly ahead, confident that without the jumper no one would be able to pick me out. ‘The police might put one of them in a car and come looking,’ Terry warned and calmly walked into the first pub he saw, heading for the beer garden. I suggested we jump over the back wall, but it led nowhere so I then suggested a drink to calm matters down. The barmaid told us knowingly, that the police were everywhere, so she’d give us this drink but then we’d have to call a cab and leave.
We took cabs out of town, passing close enough to see the police cars and ambulances at the scene. At another watering hole, we dissected the punch-up. ‘We had to give a little back to the reds,’ said Terry, standing over the group. The order had obviously come from up top that the dogs had to be let off the leash for the day. It was like sex for a married man.