The riot only rated a couple of small column inches in the Independent On Sunday, with a large photograph by the photographer who I had persuaded Nicky not to stab. Maybe if it had been Brixton and not Bermondsey and the marchers white not black, the pages would have been full of condemnation. What a strange place we lived in though, in the 1990s we still had black and white areas and everybody who lived in them lived in some kind of endless tension that seemed only to be exacerbated by their relationship with the police.
I met Searchlight outside the train station near my home. I handed over a typed report of the Bermondsey riot and read a day-old copy of The Guardian on the drive into town. Tea and scones lightened the mood a little as we went through the details of the riot. The ability to get away with a march in Thamesmead and cause a riot in Bermondsey were huge successes for the BNP. This was to mark a swing in direction. Some demanded that the BNP jackboot must now tramp much harder south of the river, it must pay attention to the distraction of racism and not to the attraction of racist votes in east London. For the anti-fascist movement, Bermondsey appeared to represent a complete disaster. Poorly planned and executed, it had hammered home the very message it was trying to conquer; Bermondsey was white and must remain so.
The BNP in the East End was now huge, larger than the entire National Front. Once Edmonds and the rest of the BNP’s London leading lights decided to move their main activities south of the water, the BNP membership still continued to drink, meet and rampage up and down Brick Lane most weekends. Some in the BNP felt they should encourage violent mobs in south London, rather than bore themselves with trying to govern people in the east. Lecomber couldn’t see why they couldn’t do both, but BNP members found electioneering a painful distraction. When it worked, it raised their profile and attracted people to the cause, but so few of these new people were ever prepared for the disastrous election results that followed. The electoral evidence still pointed to the fact that the fascists needed a race riot.
There were also sporadic riots breaking out in areas like Cardiff where there were BNP members present. They weren’t all racially motivated but significantly, a large number of rioters were young and white.
Over in Welling, Edmonds was talking big about Bermondsey. The NF’s presence had been a little annoying to his members from the East End, who had been assured the NF was finished.
‘Can’t you persuade them to lay off Bermondsey? We’re finding NF stickers covering ours,’ he told me, stooping forward. ‘Some of the young men we have are pretty aggrieved about the way the NF are following our activities. Tea?’
Anderson had also planned to stand NF candidates in the East End at the next general election, including the seats where Tyndall and Edmonds were planning to stand. In retaliation the BNP were going to stand against NF members in the Midlands. With the NF’s campaign now wavering and falling well below the intended fifty candidate mark, it looked as if, between the two parties fifty-odd people would stand in thirty-odd constituencies. Lecomber even began advocating, in a ludicrous article in Spearhead, that in areas where there was no racist candidate, nationalists should vote against the incumbent to cause instability. A couple of thousand wasted votes nationwide were hardly going to destabilise the country, I thought, but from behind his glasses he looked serious. ‘If you hold any sway at all in the NF these days, dissuade them from standing against our members. We’re hardly large enough between us to afford this.’
I went and got a job, which pleased and shocked everyone but me. In return for a reference, Anderson insisted I run the NF’s bookstall at this year’s AGM. He had as good as begged to me to do it. The Curry House Five had booked themselves a celebratory trip to Spain and poor little Ginger Rick was just not up to the job of handling cash transactions. Plus, people had been asking questions as to why I had not been at various meetings that the NF had been trying to throw together over the last few months.
The NF as good as died on its feet at the Ibis Hotel, Euston. Whicker and I manned the redirection point at Euston Station as the sixty attendees shuffled off to the hotel, looking bewildered. Where was everybody? Was this it? I had ruined the NF. Months and months of leaks and cock-ups, ambushes and arrests had destroyed their confidence. I knew everyone in the room, knew their aspirations, their fears, their perversions. Martin Wingfield had declined to attend, as had Tom Acton as a protest at Anderson’s decision to stop The Flag being printed at Hancock’s. The Nashes did not turn up either. Croydon NF sent the only three people who wanted to still be members, while Birmingham sent a dozen of its drunken finest, most of whom were out on bail. Leeds had hired a car to get them to London, but the designated driver had got so pissed the night before he had failed to pick the car up in the morning and left the other members stranded outside Leeds train station.
It was appalling. Anderson sat at the top table with a miserable look on his face, surrounded by the few remaining supporters he could trust, and stared blankly over the heads of the remaining few. Even his bodyguard and lapdog Blackham hadn’t bothered to turn up, having headed off with the other Curry House hooligans to Spain. The NF was dead.
Anderson began his Chairman’s address by attacking the BNP, ‘the imbeciles’ who had stolen his moment. The BNP was the enemy of the NF, not the state, not the immigrants who had taken his members’ jobs, not the Jews who controlled the media, the real threat to him was the BNP.
As we stopped for light refreshment, in barged Lecomber, Eddy Butler and a few BNP heavies. They wanted to come into the meeting but Anderson instructed Whicker to throw them out.
‘Call this democracy? Everyone is welcome to attend the BNP AGM in October,’ shouted Butler, as Whicker and I moved them out of the room. No one inside wanted to come out and fight them. Instead, Eddie and I stood at the bar with them and took their leaflets.
‘Where’s Blackham, then?’ asked Wells, pretending he wanted to fight someone who, if he had been present, would have ripped his head off and shit down the hole. The remnants of Croydon NF came out into the bar, embarrassed at having been in the room. They were leaving, they’d seen enough.