PAUL HOLBOROW Lewisham was a decisive moment in the fight against the Nazis but the Socialist Workers Party suffered a barrage of press abuse. The Paymaster General, Shirley Williams, was prominent in denouncing us, and Michael Foot, who was the employment secretary, said, ‘You don’t stop the Nazis by throwing bottles or bashing the police. The most ineffective way of fighting the fascists is to behave like them.’ We were branded the ‘Red fascists’. But the message from all quarters was basically, ‘We don’t agree with the Socialist Workers Party but we do agree the Nazis have to be stopped.’ And so Jim Nichol, National Secretary, myself and the founder of the SWP, Tony Cliff, decided to set up the Anti-Nazi League, which was to be a single-issue united front focused on stopping the rise of the Nazis.
RED SAUNDERS The Socialist Workers Party and some of their leading intellectuals, knowing their history – ‘They Shall Not Pass’ in Cable Street, and the Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood in the thirties in which Dorothy Parker was a founder member – decided to form a broad-based organization. People said the Anti-Nazi League was a front organization of the SWP. It couldn’t have been. It had to be broad-based. SWP activists were strong, committed anti-fascists so you had to have that central core. Once they started to roll it was a real juggernaut.
PAUL HOLBOROW There was a tradition in British Labour history of ‘anti-leagues’ and we wanted to make it straightforward and use the pejorative title ‘Nazi’ in order to pin the description on them from the beginning. The Anti-Nazi League arose out of a period from 1970 through to 1977 whereby there had been the growth of the National Front under Martin Webster and John Tyndall. Martin Webster in particular was a very effective organizer and dragged the National Front from their openly Nazi origins to making a serious electoral challenge. That reached its high point on two occasions: in the West Bromwich by-election in May 1973 when Webster got 16 per cent of the vote; and secondly, in the GLC elections of 1977 when the National Front got 119,000 votes and knocked the Liberal Party into fourth place in about thirty-one of the ninety-two constituencies.
COLIN BARKER Some people said it was too stark but actually it was its selling point. We said, ‘That’s what they are. They’re Nazis.’
PAUL HOLBOROW Within their ranks they had people who denied the Holocaust; John Tyndall said, ‘Mein Kampf is my doctrine,’ Martin Webster said, ‘We are busy building a well-oiled Nazi machine in this country.’ The essential point is that there was an umbilical connection between their leaders and their forebearing Nazi predecessors.
PETER HAIN The National Front was an overtly Nazi organization. We had photos of some of their leaders wearing Nazi regalia. I put my reputation on the line. I’d only just joined the Labour Party and there was suspicion about the Anti-Nazi League’s SWP connection on the back of Lewisham. You can have your disagreements about the parliamentary or the revolutionary socialist road but what mattered was unity in action against the threat of the National Front. There are a lot of people on the left who are all-or-nothing people and I’d always been an all-or-something person; that in going for 100 per cent you constantly fail to succeed. I’d rather aim at a more practical lower level and achieve something. I tried to build bridges and we pulled people round when they realized that this was an organization that was more than just opposed to anti-Semitism. And that it was the best way of exposing, attacking and getting into what the NF was about. It was a very simple message and it just caught on. Suddenly this popular movement developed.
PAUL HOLBOROW I was organizing secretary, and the key person I drew into the project was Peter Hain, who had a good reputation running press campaigns, particularly in opposition to the earlier South African rugby and cricket tours. Through Peter, Neil Kinnock joined the steering committee. So we had the hard left represented by the SWP, Peter Hain who represented both the young Liberal and Labour Party element, and the third key component was Ernie Roberts, who was the assistant general secretary of the Engineering Union and represented the trade unions which were heavily influenced by the Communist Party. And then we got the Indian Workers’ Association aboard and several other key Labour MPs.
PETER HAIN Neil Kinnock was quite important in stabilizing the Labour Party.
NEIL KINNOCK I was a young backbench Labour MP and the Anti-Nazi League was pretty unpopular in some quarters. People said, ‘We’re not in the 1930s. What is this bloody nonsense?’ But eventually we got people from trade unions and the Communist Party and then the Labour Party.
COLIN BARKER It made electoral sense for Labour to have a big anti-fascist operation to undermine the National Front. They were mindful of the forthcoming election. After Neil Kinnock, two dozen Labour MPs signed up.
PAUL HOLBOROW We had a very successful launch at the House of Commons followed by a number of press stunts. Manfred Roeder, a former SS officer, came to launch his book in London and I burst into the press conference with an ANL poster, which made the news. Also there had been the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar, which had prompted John Kingsley Read, who was the former chairman of the National Front and a councillor in Blackburn, to say, ‘One down, a million to go.’ Read was charged with racial incitement. And at the Old Bailey, Judge McKinnon acquitted him. I stood up in the public gallery and shouted, ‘Your remarks have led to the acquittal of a Nazi . . . it’s an affront to black people in this country.’ I was grabbed by seven policemen and marched out of the building. So that also attracted huge publicity and made the front page of the Evening Standard.
As a result of Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party had a party political broadcast in 1977 devoted exclusively to the dangers posed by the National Front. Neil was much more radical than he subsequently turned out to be and therefore we had very good information about the internal discussions inside the Labour Party. They were worried they were going to lose votes to the National Front. Always, the backbone of fascist movements is the lower middle classes: small businessmen, shopkeepers, people who are the first to feel the cold winds of economic depression and recession; people not buying in their shops, savings being eaten away, not being able to maintain their respectable slot above the working class.
COLIN BARKER I was charged with setting up a Manchester branch and he wanted me to get academics on board. I phoned up this guy called Valdo Pons who was a white South African and a lecturer in sociology at Hull University. He said, ‘My parents recently died in South Africa and up to now I’ve never signed anything because I didn’t want to compromise their situation, but now I can. Furthermore, I’ll give you a list of all the academics who I think will sign as well.’ I wrote to them all, and all but one of them said yes. Then we heard that Glenda Jackson had signed. Oh wow! All those professors were suddenly terribly pleased: a famous Royal Shakespeare Company actress. Then we got Michael Parkinson but he later withdrew his support, as did Melvyn Bragg and the footballer Jack Charlton, because an edition of the youth paper of the Anti-Nazi League used the word ‘fuck’ in a poem.
PAUL HOLBOROW It was alleged Michael Parkinson objected to the expletive. And Jack Charlton was quoted saying, ‘It seems the League has set itself up as an organization that intends to meet force with force, and I’m not going along with that kind of thing.’ We also had a stiff argument with Arthur Scargill, but the row was very quickly ababted.
PETER HAIN There was initially hostility from the Jewish community. I went to see the Board of Deputies who were hostile to the Socialist Workers Party because of its quite aggressive anti-Zionist stance. Searchlight was initially hostile for the same reasons. They both came on board, but there was a certain reserve amongst others, which was fine.
PAUL HOLBOROW Miriam Karlin was important because the Jewish community was split on how to deal with the Nazis. Miriam was a very prominent Jewish actress and an active Zionist. It was an incredibly delicate issue because the Board of Deputies was also obviously pro-Israel. I was very honest with her and said, ‘I’m an anti-Zionist, but what unites us is opposition to the Nazis in this country.’
PETER HAIN People look back at the Anti-Nazi League and think it was a fantastic success but at the time it was quite hard launching and establishing it. We were strongly opposed by a lot of the established anti-racist groups because they saw it as ideologically unsound under the anti-Nazi banner. They thought you weren’t dealing with institutional racism, which I didn’t dissent from, but my view was, ‘What is the most effective strategy at this particular moment?’ It was an organic growth from below which is what excited me. There was a central committee but it wasn’t dictating or controlling. If you were living in Melton Mowbray or Bognor Regis and you wanted to set up an ANL, you did it.
NEIL KINNOCK Within months we had School Kids Against the Nazis [SKAN], Teachers Against the Nazis. Skateboarders Against the Nazis.
WAYNE MINTER We had a Skateboarders Against the Nazis sticker in red and green with chevrons; the perfect size to stick underneath your skateboard so when you did a rampart you’d see these colours go WHOOSH!
ROGER HUDDLE We had Firework Night Against the Nazis, Bus Workers Against the Nazis, Postmen Against the Nazis, Women Against the Nazis. And they all had hundreds of different badges that they wore to work: in the factory, in the office. It was more and more difficult for the Nazis to open their mouth. We got a lot of SKAN kids from an all-girls school in Walthamstow, where the NF was really strong and selling their paper on the street. They occupied the school hall so they couldn’t have their meeting. Tony Cliff always used to say, ‘The reason you get a Nazi is because the person that hurts the worker is in government and you can’t get hold of them, you’re powerless, so you turn on your neighbour.’
PAUL HOLBOROW We had near forty occupational subgroups: Vegetarians Against the Nazis, Students Against the Nazis, Civil Servants Against the Nazis, Miners Against the Nazis who in Yorkshire went to work with ANL stickers on their helmets. And Teachers Against the Nazis, where the ILEA [Inner London Education Authority] and the NUT [National Union of Teachers] issued teacher packs about the dangers of the Nazis and the Holocaust. You could become a member of the Anti-Nazi League and people would send you ten shillings or £500; some people gave us £5,000. We never had a problem with donations. There was one paper merchant in Stratford who gave us all the newsprint we required, and their lorries would drive up outside the print shop with huge rolls for us to print leaflets on. It was a huge operation. I was absolutely focused on using every method possible to broaden us out and to get activists involved. I’ve calculated we produced ten million leaflets with many different colours and templates and we had up to forty different leaflets to match. We had the slogan ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom.’
COLIN BARKER The National Front was going to march in Hyde but the incredibly reactionary Chief Constable of Manchester, James Anderton, banned it. Instead, Martin Webster had to walk solo and was protected by 2,500 police. A young Asian woman, Ramila Patel, from the Bolton Asian Youth Movement, walked in front of Webster as he was having his ‘right of free speech demonstration’, holding a placard that said, ‘This man is a Nazi.’ It was beautiful. We had a demonstration outside where the National Front was having a public meeting and this box of badges arrived: bright yellow with a red arrow. They sold like hot cakes.
GEOFF BROWN I was the guy who always made sure there were enough leaflets and badges. Within a few months you couldn’t walk through Manchester without seeing people wearing badges. If you were anybody in Manchester and you were on the left I reckon we got you. We tried to have a very light touch. This was not an organization which had endless meetings. There was lots of activity. We had paint-outs where we’d knock on doors and say, ‘There’s racist graffiti in the park: can we get together and clear it up?’
COLIN BARKER I gave out leaflets to children at the local secondary school and the headmaster came out and berated me. I argued back and the kids were really enjoying the confrontation. On the Sunday afternoon of the paint-out several dozen people came, and the cleaning materials were provided by Granada Reports. Their presenter, Bob Greaves, asked Violet Carson, who played Ena Sharples in Coronation Street, to sign up and she said, ‘How dare you ask me such a question.’ She was a Tory through and through. Jim Allen, who was a Trotskyite, was writing the scripts for Coronation Street and in one episode when Ken Barlow returned from an evening class his wife said, ‘What did you learn?’ ‘We read about Trotsky.’ ‘And what did you make of it?’ ‘I think he was right.’ That was the extent of what Jim could politically smuggle in.
GEOFF BROWN There was a Youth Against the Nazis conference and they decided to make 21 March 1978 a national day for leafleting outside football grounds. Peter Hain said, ‘We must take our banners onto the football terraces to oppose their Nazi banners and their racist chants.’ I remember us going to Old Trafford to leaflet there. We had a special badge made: ‘Reds Against the Nazis’.
PAUL HOLBOROW The National Front was interested in football fans because they thought they were into street fighting. Racist chanting in the seventies was common at football grounds when there were very few black players, so it took some courage to leaflet those places.
WAYNE MINTER It started at Nottingham Forest where the NF had a big following. Brian Clough, the team manager, was completely non-racist and was fantastic, not least because of the club’s initials, NF. He introduced Viv Anderson as captain and he became the first black player to get into the England team. Anderson used to get barracked with banana chants. Clough walked out onto the pitch and addressed the fans: ‘I will not have racism in my club. I’m not standing for it.’ He became one of the first sponsors of the Anti-Nazi League. And then Tottenham, who obviously had a problem with fascists because of their huge Jewish following, formed Spurs Against the Nazis.
COLIN BARKER When Clough put his name to the statement it was front-page news in the Daily Mirror. And the same day Jackie Charlton signed. It was a real breakthrough. All of a sudden we were real news, and we hadn’t done anything yet.
GEOFF BROWN Clough said, ‘When you tread in something on the street you don’t talk to it, you scrape it off your shoe. Nazism is just as much a disease as cholera, leprosy and smallpox and it must be must treated to stop it spreading. I believe the Front must be removed from the life of this country and I will play my part in whatever way I can.’
COLIN BARKER When you joined the Anti-Nazi League you got the famous statement by Pastor Niemöller on the membership card.
ROGER HUDDLE Paul Holborow said, ‘We need a logo for the Anti-Nazi League,’ and David King came up with the red arrow and the slogan ‘Never Again’, which was taken from the anti-Nazi movement in Germany in the 1920s when they would stencil a red arrow over the posters in the street.
PAUL HOLBOROW David was highly influenced by Weimar Republic iconography and he did a number of key posters for us. He was a nightmare to work with because he was such a perfectionist.
NEIL KINNOCK The ANL was very deliberately and quite aggressively using artwork and evocative photographs. We had one poster that gave the result of a local government by-election in Stepney and Poplar, where the National Front had got 19 per cent of the vote, with a big picture of Auschwitz. Then we used a photograph of Waffen-SS in helmets and jackboots. We unmercifully and relentlessly went after the National Front and their connection with the history of fascism. But we never stood for organizing or attempting physical assault.
PAUL HOLBOROW The National Front was a legitimate political party in the eyes of the state, which gave them protection. But the National Socialist Party in Germany was a legitimate political party, so our argument was simple: if the National Front were allowed to march then we meet them and mobilize the maximum number of people to block their way, just as we had done at Cable Street in 1936. We didn’t want to draw a line between people who wanted to physically confront the Nazis and people who wanted to propagandize against them. The formulation in our founding statement had been very carefully worded: ‘. . . wherever the Nazis attempt to organize, they must be countered’.
COLIN BARKER The purpose of the Anti-Nazi League was to bring the largest number of people out into an open declaration against the Nazis and build a counterforce against them in elections.
GEOFF BROWN Matching violence with violence was a question of, when was it appropriate? Most people who got involved in the Anti-Nazi League never saw any violence at all. We didn’t break the National Front physically.
PETER HAIN We had a policy of confronting in the Anti-Nazi League which was very controversial: if you’re going to march we’re going to be there; we’re not out to cause violence; we’re not out to attack the police; but we’re not going to let you march. Similarly controversial was the policy ‘No Platform for Nazis’. In other words, town halls or student unions shouldn’t agree to allow them to book their halls to preach their message. I remember a story in the Sunday Times, saying ‘Peter Hain and the forces of darkness’. This was about a year after the ANL had been launched. If that article had come at the beginning it could have been very difficult for us. We ran the ‘Pull the plugs on Nazi thugs’ campaign because the National Front were entitled to a party political broadcast. It turned into an issue of free speech. I was arguing that ‘You can’t defend free speech to preach hatred and violence and racism. That is not free speech. It is a method of attacking.’
COLIN BARKER Margaret Thatcher was running on a very right-wing ticket and came out with that famous quote on World in Action in January 1978, ‘. . . people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world, that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.’ That was racism. She was talking about a minority; 95 per cent of the population being swamped. Thatcher was bidding for the right-wing vote. This was polite racism.
NEIL KINNOCK I would be the first to acknowledge for all the wrong reasons, by giving a strong appearance, that Mrs Thatcher fully comprehended the anxieties of the British domestic population and by using that word ‘swamped’ she mitigated the impact of the National Front.
GEOFF BROWN The National Front responded: why vote for the copy when you can get the real thing? We had a very clear distinction between right-wing politics and fascist politics. Fascism is a movement aiming to physically smash the left and trade unions, and the National Front were using physical violence to break up meetings. It was a constant issue.
CLARE SHORT Thatcher further said, ‘If you want good race relations, you have got to allay people’s fears on numbers . . . what Willie Whitelaw said at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, where he said we must hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration because at the moment it is about between 45,000 and 50,000 people coming in a year. Now, I was brought up in a small town, 25,000. That would be two new towns a year and that is quite a lot. So, we do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration.’ It was clearly racist. She went for the Union Jack and a lot of that disgruntled working-class, lower middle-class racist vote went to her.
COLIN BARKER You had to physically protect a meeting. You never had to do that against a Tory, however racist they were. I was in a meeting in Bolton where everybody was in fear of their lives because there were fascists banging on the windows trying to break into the building.
PAUL HOLBOROW We weren’t interested in Tory support. And indeed Malcolm Rifkind, the Conservative MP, on several occasions tried to join the ANL and we evaded his solicitations. We were a Labour movement and a student community-based organization and the hatred of the Tories was deep-seated and emblematic.
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GEOFF BROWN Rock Against Racism had been set up earlier but the question was, ‘How are they actually going to get the masses out onto the streets?’
RED SAUNDERS You’ve got to link RAR and the ANL together. One wouldn’t have had the mass impact without the other. The reality was we were going to get our hands dirty. We were not going to be purists. I believe that society is about class. That’s why we were so radically opposed to the National Front, because theirs is a nationalistic race analysis whereas we believed in internationalism. We believed there’s class in society and that we’re not all in this together. It’s different if you’re from this class or that class. It was inevitable that as it went on and it grew there was more and more of an element in the supporters of RAR who didn’t like the revolutionary socialist element. Some band members would be, ‘What is all this fucking left-wing shit?’ Some of them hated politics. They weren’t sophisticated enough so they’d think all left wing was communism or Stalinism. They had no idea we were libertarian and into sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
ROGER HUDDLE The Anti-Nazi League was the mother and Rock Against Racism was the child; not that the ANL gave birth to RAR, but ANL was by far the more important organization because it wasn’t a meeting of youth culture. ANL was for all workers. Its agitation and its propaganda was much broader. How would RAR get nurses from the hospital? The Anti-Nazi League went to the hospital. But the people giving out the leaflets were the SWP. So there was an organic link. The SWP understood to fight Nazis you had to have hope. And the hope is in numbers where people don’t feel isolated and atomized and alienated but they feel strong, together and united. But Rock Against Racism gave the Anti-Nazi League its core street feel and its imagery, which came from people like me, Red and Syd, who had come from cultural backgrounds. Unofficially, RAR was the cultural wing of the ANL.
PAUL HOLBOROW Rock Against Racism had a great flair and a huge energy and was outside the traditional way the left had previously organized. They were rallying the young punks mainly to an anti-racist position which in itself was quite a challenge, because there were bands who undoubtedly flirted with Nazi ideas. I was aware of punk and pop culture and I was interested in any avenue that would get through to the kids and stop white kids being pulled towards the Nazis. Music was extremely important but RAR was a much smaller organization. The Anti-Nazi League had branches in every town and city across Britain. I would go and do meetings three or four times a week around the country where two or three hundred people would turn up.
PETER HAIN Rock Against Racism wanted to do bigger-scale concerts and we wanted to do anti-Nazi politics. We were sisters and brothers together and we went on our parallel tracts, distinctly, but joined together, and music provided a basis for that dialogue. RAR knew they couldn’t deliver without us and we knew that RAR was absolutely indispensable to us because otherwise we were a conventional political campaign. We didn’t have that ability to break through to the world that wasn’t interested in politics. There was an important role to be played by making a stand in a public place together but I was always more interested in outcomes rather than striking a pose. People were saying, ‘What can rock musicians do?’ I was interested in what was going to have a practical result. The ANL was reaching the people that would actually do the organizing for these events: the political backbone; the organizational backbone; getting the leaflets printed; the penetration out into the community.
KATE WEBB The ANL was not RAR. The Anti-Nazi League was a political mobilizing organization: a mainstream anti-fascist organization. It had none of the cultural, aesthetic stuff. We were much more anarchic and we needed their structures and organizing capabilities. They had much stronger roots and connections up and down the country, so in smaller places if you were in the ANL group you might also be in the RAR group.
RUTH GREGORY The ANL didn’t really get the cultural side of things but they did stand aside and say, ‘You know what you’re doing,’ so you’ve got to give them that. RAR was totally autonomous. We had a sticker saying, I and I against the British way of life; the Anti-Nazi League wouldn’t have understood that. We saw it as a direct lineage from the days of Empire and colonialism. You get the message across because you have all your banners and badges. You have a whole array of ways of doing it and you try and do it through music. Tom Robinson used to say something on stage but most of the bands just came on and did their set. It was the whole atmosphere.
WAYNE MINTER We wouldn’t have direct political speeches on stage. There was always a stall at every gig, and the politics was in Temporary Hoarding. We’d be selling that and we’d give out any that were left to people who didn’t have any money. We were disseminating anti-racist information. Red, who’d introduce the bands, might make the odd comment but he certainly wouldn’t preach to people from the stage. We were much too sussed for that. You don’t educate young people politically by debate necessarily. You educate them by example and by feeling; if they’re in a situation where what they’ve been told or what they might have thought before is contradicted, then that is the best sort of education. I think people are naturally good. The best thing about humans is they help and get on with each other; you set up situations where that’s reinforced and celebrated. That’s what RAR gigs were. They were very loud, rebellious fun. That’s a pretty strong political statement. Most political parties and particularly fascist parties are all about control. It’s about telling people what to do and how they should live their lives. Obviously society needs agreement and some sort of order to function so that everybody gets a fair whack, but there’s a point where you’ve got to oppose that. I think we had the right balance.
JOHN DENNIS There were always stresses and strains between Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. They had a political agenda. It was not a cultural organization. We wanted a cultural movement that had a political relevance. The ANL had one mission, which was to stop the National Front being elected, and quite rightly focused on that: ‘You may be a racist but you’re not a Nazi. Don’t vote National Front.’
