Aftermath
The changes and modernisation of the BNP was a thoroughly Griffin piece of work. Labour and the left described him as all kinds of things, opportunist among them. That he may have been and be, but he built a fascist party right under their noses on the very council estates that the left were abandoning faster than their ideology. Labour’s ongoing dislocation from the working class, in particular in England, was happening during a quite benign economic climate. The far left want us to believe that the national growth of the extreme right was solely due to a difficult economic climate, but how did that explain gains in Burnley, Bradford and Barking and Dagenham for the BNP? Probably the dirty word, class.
The BNP had a clean-up. It swept its outright Nazism under the carpet and gave itself a good old-fashioned overhaul. The Wingfields returned from their mysterious time in France to take up arms with Griffin again, presenting themselves as decent, thoroughly British parents, and not as the degenerate wife-swappers Griffin had previously portrayed them as.
Labour became more and more unpopular and further and further dislocated from its roots. And those in charge didn’t seem to really care. Some who did, walked away whilst those who remained seemed to be burdened and consumed with polling figures about the party’s polling performance in the middle grounds. It was like catching water with a tea strainer. For some, the warning signs were clearer.
I’d never heard of the Lehman brothers when on warm Thursday night in 2006 I stood not four feet away from the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook as he swaggered unsteadily to his feet to attempt to berate the controversial journalist Andrew Gilligan, who had exposed a rather ‘arty’ film Barnbrook had made in his youth. Barnbrook had just won a seat on Barking and Dagenham Council and throughout the course of the evening I had watched horrified as he was joined by another ten (soon to be eleven) of his moronic brethren on the council. Barnbrook had no idea who I was. I was just a plump, scowling anti-fascist. We’d never met before. Barnbrook was part of the new breed of the BNP. Light on rhetoric and ideology but high on personal embarrassments with an arthouse-film skeleton in the closet.
I was driven to the count by Dagenham Labour MP Jon Cruddas in silent misery as Labour pollsters reported the flood at the polling booths as the evening wore on. What The Guardian called the ‘White Van Brigade’ – angry, white, working-class voters – were rushing home and casting anti-Labour votes with venom. The former architect of New Labour had been one of the first to work with Searchlight and its Hope Not Hate campaign the previous year when, with only a handful of activists, the Searchlight office had emptied into Barking and Dagenham to deliver our Daily Mirror-sponsored tabloid to counter the BNP’s racist onslaught on the doorsteps.
This night, we were braced for only eight of them (elected BNP councillors): moronic, ugly and idiotic, swaggering and slurring into Nazi folklore and putting B&D in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. If they had stood more candidates, they would have taken far more seats and possibly caused irreparable damage. Barnbrook was trying to berate Gilligan, but he couldn’t get the words out properly. Not for the first time when I’d seen Barnbrook in public, I concluded he was pissed; I’d been watching him the previous year when he took 17 per cent of the vote against Barking MP Margaret Hodge in the general election. Some ‘Hollywood’ anti-fascists had felt it better to go to an anti-BNP pop concert in Trafalgar Square that year and not do the hard work on the ground. Failure to confront the rise of fascism by hard work had long been a cause of the BNP’s rise.
I wondered if Cruddas felt responsible: were he and the New Labour he’d helped create actually the problem here and everywhere that the BNP was rising? Over time, his words and actions would go on to prove that he probably did. Perhaps it wasn’t the idea, just the application of the New Labour ideology. Perhaps Cruddas and co. had a bad midwife of their own? He fought the BNP tooth and nail, even when it got quite ugly, even when it made him unpopular with his colleagues. He never backed down once.
I had returned home to fight the BNP after all. Some eighteen months before, the BBC had finally given me my documentary. They’d rescued me from ten years of barbecues and casual sex in the sunshine of Australia and followed me home to document me facing my demons and the rise of the supposedly ‘respectable’ far right. Searchlight had offered me a small desk in the corner of their cramped offices from where I could front up their preventative work in the community, but even on my first day at work I had trouble getting into their offices because the security guard thought I looked ‘like a fascist’.
The BBC called the documentary Dead Man Walking, probably on account of my mate Noel drunkenly grabbing the TV camera in one of Melbourne’s better bars and declaring that (‘A Dead Man Walking’) was what I was for going home. They then filmed Noel and his wife and all of my closest friends watching another documentary I had done for the BBC a couple of years before called Life Etc with Rosie Boycott, where I owned up to my previous life in the dark and drudgery of England where I had some thirteen years before had my secret conversion. ‘More Austin Powers than James Bond,’ Noel’s wife had suggested, while ‘Big Gay Ray’ and Ron, the ‘sweet and tender’ Samoan, sat quaffing ales in stone cold silence.
My ex-wife declined to be interviewed. My mother and father refused also. My father described the whole idea as ‘far too painful’.
I left behind in Australia a lifetime of sunburn, emotional and financial traumas. I crammed into ten years more drama than most people could do in a lifetime. I’d left England with a one-year work visa with near-crippling work restrictions, met a woman, applied to stay and got married and then divorced. Wanked a lot too. I had lived as an immigrant, hardly the sort that faced the innumerable challenges of people of colour or different languages, but I had no qualifications and no repeatable history to offer either a wife or new country.
Initially I settled in St Kilda on Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay. Of course, it would later be immortalised by Billy Bragg in song, but in 1993, it was a rustic, bohemian paradise of heroin cafés, half-dressed prostitutes, Kiwi drug dealers, gangland killers, transvestites and stoned and horny middle-class English backpackers who got mugged and/or hooked on heroin with aplomb.
The ex-pat Irish community assimilated me while I gave rare and aggravating thought to pernicious Albion, so far away and unconquerable. Searchlight arrived monthly with horrible reminders of the fate that awaited me should I return home.
In 1997 I infuriated my former friends and colleagues by agreeing to give evidence to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Those Nazis who had previously defended me were driven from the movement as if they had collaborated with me.
And when all the drinking and all the fucking had run its course, I allowed the BBC to thrust me back into a dim spotlight in wet and damp England. Television cameras add forty pounds, you know.
In my absence, C18 had imploded murderously and the NF shuffled off of its mortal coil and then back again. Eddie Whicker had been driven from the movement and forced into early retirement, only partly as a result of his defence of and close friendship with me. Terry Blackham went to prison for gun-running for the UDA and for a while, ran the National Front from his prison cell as Ian Anderson finally exited the tiny stage.
The Searchlight I arrived back to had grown enormously. It now had five staff. Gerry Gable had moved himself ‘upstairs’ to become the magazine’s publisher, allowing a younger team to take over the day-to-day running of the magazine and the introduction of campaigning. During my ten years away, Gable had been among a number of people whose house had been attacked by C18, even being the intended victim of firebomb. He’d never moved. He starred alongside me on Dead Man Walking though he did insist I kept my trousers on at all times.
Nick Griffin had ousted John Tyndall in 1999 as Griffin saw the growing opportunities available to the far right not just in this country, but all over Europe as the fascist disease raised its ugly head again. If they could just dump their previous ideological baggage and, as he had almost begged in writing a couple of years before, their jackboots too, Griffin saw an opportunity to reinvigorate racism. He sounded exactly like his own nemesis Ian Anderson had done, and in doing so slowly but surely recruited most of Anderson’s former leading colleagues to the BNP along with his own and changed the BNP almost overnight.
The BNP’s shift to electioneering nearly brought an end to Richard Edmonds too. First he was in then he was out of the party as he struggled to cope without Tyndall’s tutelage. Tyndall then died in 2005, facing charges along with Griffin and one other of inciting racial hatred. He had also been involved in costly legal actions with Griffin over his expulsion from the party he had founded himself. He’d missed by a whisker seeing the BNP transformed to almost centre-stage of the immigration debate in this country. C18, who had eventually turned against Tyndall, Griffin and itself was gone. The BNP almost believed itself to be a proper political party.
The violence, terrorism, rapes and lies of the far right continue to this day. Now though, the arena is different. Nick Griffin is now an MEP along with Andrew Brons, formerly of the Flag faction.
Searchlight’s new editor was Nick Lowles. An investigative journalist and excellent strategist, but sadly a Leeds fan. To counter the BNP’s rise, as well as hammering them monthly along with the rest of the team with excellent exposés of the true nature of the BNP in the magazine, he started the Hope Not Hate campaign, the largest and most effective anti-fascist campaign in the country. He extended the challenge to fighting the far right right across the political spectrum, basing the heart of it in the trade union movement. For me, it was the most excellent introduction into community politics, empowering local people and local groups to defend themselves.
And though these are difficult times, Lowles and Gerry Gable afforded me the opportunities to learn about politics, to learn about real people and to also tour with people like Billy Bragg, work in prisons, travel to Spain with people like the great Jack Jones and have my voice heard, no matter how often they would disagree with what it said.
In January 2010, Nick Lowles promised me that we would remove the BNP from Barking & Dagenham Council. That seemed impossible. We were more likely to be looking at BNP MPs than a BNP defeat. But he kept his word. Hope Not Hate galvanised people right across the country not just to defeat BNP candidates, but to more than halve their number of councillors across the country. We removed every single BNP councillor from Barking and Dagenham and along the way, Billy Bragg came and confronted the ludicrous Richard Barnbrook on his doorstep. Lowles even confronted Griffin as he attempted to sneak out of the election count with his defeated councillors in tow. Some of the old-time BNP members tried to turn on me, shouting abuse at me. Eddy Butler even said I’d seen better days.
But there’s not a great deal of hope in my heart. The BNP isn’t beaten yet, they’re still churning out people with guns and bombs though we rarely read about it like we do when it is Muslims. These days they talk about a ‘civil war’ not a race war, and those arguments I had with myself all those years ago about who I am and where do I belong, are now almost like a national obsession. Identity and religion has almost totally replaced class in the minds of everyone. It seems these days that only the middle class want to actually be working class, anyway. Bastards!
Occasionally I get wheeled out to speak about life behind those flags and the grim reality of the BNP and their fellow travellers. More and more we find how little not just BNP voters but also BNP members know about the party; its roots, its history, its goals and what words like ‘civil war’ really mean. This is where the next David Copeland will come from; it’s where David Copeland started. Ignorant, unloved and feeling ignored. There is not and never will be a parliamentary road to what fascists want to achieve and their demands. No matter whether they’re wearing suits or jackboots, they are an anathema to me now more than ever. But the national obsession of the English working class of its own dislocation in the UK among the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots is growing.
How identity politics replaced class politics in those ten absent years I spent in Australia is breathtaking. Why BBC3 moved the story of my stupid life – Dead Man Walking – to later in the evening to fit in a Newcastle match in the Inter-Toto Cup is still annoying. But the explosion of identity politics from groups like the English Defence League, and the seeming inability of many to understand it as well as counter it effectively, is the most worrying thing we face right now. Because they are working class, because they are overwhelmingly white and from the football terraces, it’s almost as if no one wants to tackle their message head-on. And it is the Muslim community that faces their threat, daily.
I’m not in hiding any more. The EDL call me a ‘fat Communist’ and, bizarrely, the BNP say I’m a liar and an alcoholic as well as a Zionist and a Communist. It’s not the sort of fan club I thought I’d have twenty-odd years ago. My dad and I meet once a week for lunch and a pint and he thinks I’m something to do with the Labour Party, and also a Communist, obviously. We don’t talk about my childhood, but we talk about his, sometimes. We’re both getting old and I guess I’ll end up looking like him in thirty years too. He tells me his neighbours play bongo-bongo music and never go to work, apparently. He says we should send them all back. He’s an Irishman and I am an Englishman with two flags.