In Britain in the 1970s, the fascist National Front was on the rise–recruiting in the tens of thousands, making electoral victories, and perpetrating/fomenting mass violence in the streets/schools/workplaces against people of color, immigrants and leftists. A popular anti-fascist and anti-racist movement developed, decisively defeating the NF by 1979. Rock Against Racism (a cultural movement that galvanized hundreds of thousands of anti-racists through thousands of Rock Against Racism concerts) and the Anti-Nazi League (an anti-fascist group initiated by the Socialist Workers Party that became a mass organization of tens of thousands, supported by virtually every significant left-wing organization and many national unions) were part of this broader movement and played important roles in defeating the NF.
In his new book Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976-1982, British historian and socialist David Renton examines this history. You can stream our interview with him or read the transcript below.
Allston Pudding: How do you define fascism?
Renton: In general terms, I define fascism as a specific form of reactionary mass movement. Reactionary related to the politics, this is about taking all the things which make life desirable from the point of view of the left, all things which make things more equal… From the point of view of the fascists they want to strip all of that out and take it all away. But there have been lots of reactionary movements in history. What’s different about fascism is it combines that with, “We’re doing mass politics,” which certainly, I’ll leave out what’s going on with fascism and the far right today, but until very recent times, fascism stole its model of how to do mass politics from the far left, whether that’s the far left in the 1890s or the far left in the 1930s. So fascism is about parties, it’s about mass movements. There are lots of people who try and do reactionary politics through parliament, or through very small group organizing and don’t really try and turn it into a mass movement. Fascism is about using a mass movement of people to take away democratic and social rights from the vast majority of people.
AP: So what were the conditions in England that made it possible for the far right to become a serious threat by the early ‘70s?
R: Well one of the first most basic ones was—and this isn’t one which other people talk about—but when I look back at this period it just seems really obvious to me one of the most important ones was it was just pretty close to the Second World War. I was maybe five and six at the same time as the things which I’m talking about it my book. I didn’t see them first-hand. But I remember the culture we had in Britain in the ‘70s and it was absolutely saturated with images and stories about the war. And some of them were stories about how great Britain was, about British soldiers, how great they were, how great Churchill was, but a lot of them, at the end of the decade, were about fascination with Nazi Germany.
Maybe some of your listeners have come across a famous essay Susan Sontag wrote called “Fascinating Fascism,” which is about the photography of Leni Riefenstahl, and how she reinvented herself after the Second World War taking images of things which weren’t on their face about fascism at all but retained a fascist aesthetic. In the ‘70s in Britain, you came across images of fascism in comics, in cartoons, in children’s books, and of course a lot of what my book is about is that happening through music, through bands who saw themselves on the left as anarchists or antifascists or whatever, but were absolutely fascinated by images of the Second World War and were playing it out again and again in their music, and wearing images like the swastika.
And then beyond that you had a period of mass migration to Britain and Europe after the Second World War that’s largely come to an end but there’s still this massive fear about Black people coming to Britain. And that’s actually the immediate context when there’s sharp periods of electoral success for the National Front. There’s panic around people coming to Britain from Malawi, tiny numbers of people, like two families actually come here but that’s enough to launch a press scare about migration, which causes the National Front to get between where it stands generally between about seven and ten percent of the vote in local elections, in 1977 40,000 votes in Leicester, and it makes them feel like they’re just about to become maybe the third main party in British politics.
AP: The places where these refugees were coming from like Malawi, Kenya, and Uganda—these were former British colonies, right?
R: Yeah, there’s a particular thing which happens in all these colonies, which is essentially, when you get self-government in the 1960s, the vast majority of the population is African, and so the first leaders who emerge are all Black African leaders. The most famous or infamous example of that generation of leaders would be Idi Amin in Uganda. One of the weird things about how colonialism’s worked is it’s racialized all sorts of intermediary groups who, between the white settler population and the Black African population, there’s particular whole bunches of people who’ve come over as traitors from India. That’s happened in Kenya, Uganda. One of the reasons why in Britain, when literally two families, that’s all it takes, are found in this one hotel in Crawley, people say “Oh my god, there’s gonna be lots of Malawian Asians coming here—” There’s just this is assumption that in Malawi there’s hundreds of thousands of Malawian Asians who’ve got British passports who are gonna be able to come to Britain. In fact, there were probably around a hundred families with British passports. The number of people who’s gonna come here was tiny. They’re people who played a very niche role within colonialism who were entitled to come to Britain, do come to Britain, and are absolutely surprised and shocked and devastated to find this huge racist uproar when as far as they’re concerned they’re just returning to the mother country.
AP: Jumping ahead to Rock Against Racism, it comes from this mixture of people from punk, from reggae, and organized socialists. Could you speak to, on the cultural front, what was going on with these subcultures, and what did it mean for, you know, this was the first generation of youth that was more racially integrated in England?
R: I’ll do reggae, then punk, then lastly the socialists… There’d been reggae bands in Britain and ones who had a whole great deal of success for about 15 years. There’s a song “My Boy Lollipop”, it’s number one back in ’64. We’re talking now like ’76, ’77. So there’d been reggae bands for a long time but the whole way it’s been until very recently, just immediately before the events and history in my book is that the reggae artists have come over from the Caribbean, they’ve sort of toured Britain and gone home, and they’ve been sort of like exotic arrivals with a foreign culture. And sometimes groups of white youths have attached to them. You had a brief skinhead movement in the ‘60s, which probably was actually pretty anti-racist at that time, unlike the skinheads at the end of the 70s. And obviously you also had Black youth listening to reggae bands and being psyched by them, thinking this is music that speaks to our experience.
What’s starting to happen in ’76, ’77, you’re starting to get a bunch of British reggae acts—Aswad, Burning Spear, Matumbi—I mean there’s just dozens and dozens of them. And they’re going to be some of the key acts which absolutely get really excited by Rock Against Racism—Linton Kwesi Johnson—all these people become identifiers, go along to meetings with the Rock Against Racism committee. And at the same time as Rock Against Racism, and in part because of Rock Against Racism, you start to see a transformation in the audience for British Black reggae bands. What breaks down is the idea of, if they’re going to perform, there’s gonna be a Jamaican band headlining, or if they’re gonna perform it’s gonna be an all-Black venue.
There’s a very famous Clash song you’ve probably heard, “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais,” and one of the things that Joe Strummer talks about in that song is going to Hammersmith Palais to hear a reggae band play and being literally the only white guy in the audience. This is breaking down really fast, and one of the reasons why it breaks down is that Rock Against Racism, which starts very small like all left-wing campaigns, but by say ’76 it’s putting on carnivals with a hundred to a hundred-fifty-thousand people, and it becomes this significant force within the music industry, and one of its absolutely automatic rules is you cannot put on a Rock Against Racism gig and have more white bands than Black bands. You cannot put on a RAR gig and have it ending with a white band. It’s got to be absolutely equal footing for Black musicians. And then what you start getting is white bands playing, you know, punk bands being influenced by reggae trying to bring harmonies into their music and pauses and things like that. And obviously also you get, at the end of the period I’m talking about, you get things like two-tone. For the first time, you get properly integrated Black and white bands playing properly integrated Black and white audiences. So that’s kind of reggae and post-reggae.
In terms of punk, the book’s starting probably in real terms around Summer of ’76. Punk really takes off in Britain in the Autumn and Winter of ’76. A key moment is when The Sex Pistols go on the Bill Grundy show, [Grundy] tries to make advances on one of the women in their entourage, they try and stand up for her, they swear at him. And this leads to all sorts of press headlines that fills them with fury, this shocking idea that seeing people swearing at a presenter live on stage is on the front-page news… This kind of breaks punk into mass consciousness. And then over the next few months, very quickly you get The Sex Pistols starting up, touring, collapsing, new bands coming to the fore like The Clash who are gonna go on and play the first Rock Against Racism carnival. So punk started, but there’s like this bat off going on for what punk will mean. Key punk influences like, David Bowie is giving interviews saying Adolf Hitler was the first rock and roll superstar. The Pistols, when they’re on the Bill Grundy show, one of their entourage has got this huge swastika on. There’s this complete ambivalence and anti-politics about punk which hasn’t sorted itself out.
And then finally, the last bunch of people you asked about were the political activists. They were people around Rock Against Racism who said, look, we want to set up a movement. But the one thing I really do want to emphasize is this first generation of politicos, it really wouldn’t have worked if it was just six randomly chosen Marxists. They were Marxists who’d been doing cultural production. They were photographers, they were designers, they were people who’d been involved in radical theater, and whose primary modes of political expression weren’t the written word, weren’t interest in theoretical articles. They were people who were all capable of doing that stuff, but their first thing was culture, and what they’re trying to do is a cultural intervention. And they’re influenced by Marxist politics, but it really wouldn’t have worked if it had just been six random paper sellers going, “Let’s put on a benefit to say Eric Clapton’s a racist.” That wouldn’t have taken off in the way that Rock Against Racism did.
AP: Going back to how Rock Against Racism actually started, there was this period where far-right ideas were being expressed in pop culture like you mentioned with Bowie, and—what was that particular moment that catalyzed its launch?
R: Well the key moment was Eric Clapton going on stage in Birmingham and giving this drunken, rambling, racist rant that basically, the core thing he was saying is everyone had to vote for Enoch Powell and kick all the foreigners out. And people found this absolutely shocking. We’ve got all sorts of witnesses who were there, who talk about what it was like, who talk about being baffled. But also, the difference between the Black and white people in the audience… Young Black people are just going, “Oh my god, he’s talking about getting me out,” and their white friends not turning around at that point and really going, “oh yeah that was disgusting,” but kind of looking away and not knowing how to engage with it.
So he says this stuff, it’s reported— it’s not massive news but it is picked up, particularly by the left press, who get a hear about this, make this news, and get angry about it. And then the key moment, there’s a photographer called David Saunders—Red Saunders—who’s been involved in radical theater. He writes a letter to all the main music papers in the country, at a time when something between a quarter and half a million people in Britain are reading the music press. It’s at the height of its influence, it’s never had more again than it had at that moment. And he writes for all the papers saying—he writes this absolutely brilliant letter saying, “Who shot the sheriff Eric? It sure as hell wasn’t you,” referring to Eric Clapton’s famous cover of “I Shot the Sheriff.” This guy is someone who’s made his name and his money out of copying a bunch of Black artists, how dare he then say that he supports Enoch Powell. And there’s just lines like, ‘We’ve got to have a rank-and-file of music to kick out the racist poison,’ and calling on people to support rock against racism.
We’re never gonna know exactly how many people write in, there’s different numbers, but it’s somewhere between 400 and 1000 people who send in letters saying, “Yeah, we want to be a part of this movement.” And then they start meeting, they try and turn the people who sent the letters into local groups, and they start beginning the process of creating originally a very small movement and what ultimately will become a mass movement.
AP: You write that up until 1974, when anti-fascist student Kevin Gately was killed in Red Lion Square, many people didn’t recognize that urgent need to confront the far right, and it reminded me immediately of how in the U.S., you know, up until mid 2017, the alt-right was kind of treated as this novel phenomenon by the media, it wasn’t well understood outside the left, and that all changed when Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville. And right here in Boston you had this decisive defeat for the nazis following that. It got me thinking, could you talk about, what’s that process by which the far right came to register as a threat in popular consciousness, so that it was possible for that letter to take off in 1976?
R: The first thing, bear in mind the letter’s not about the National Front, the letter’s about Eric Clapton, so it’s not like—the letter isn’t in itself the moment when you get an anti-racist consciousness as it were simplifying itself down to an antifascist consciousness. But that is going on parallel at the same time. To my mind, I think what’s going on is, there’s a process—it’s really hard to map, because I’m talking about a thought process which is taking place in tens of thousands of people’s lives separately—but there’s a process going on, and the people where it’s most important and it’s felt is in I think young Black British people’s lives. That at one point in the early 1970s if you talked to them, say like, “What’s the most important form of racism you deal with,” and they’d say, “It’s immigration police, it’s the police themselves, it’s—” we have something called Sus laws which is kind of the forerunner of Stop and Search, racist profiling of Black people. If you talked to people in the early ‘70s, they’d say, “This is what racism is about.” And likewise, when Rock Against Racism talked about racism, they always made it very clear they weren’t an anti-fascist movement, they were an anti-racist movement. And they wrote things saying this is what we stand for.
But by the end of the ‘70s, I think in just tens of thousands of people’s heads, the focus has changed. And the reason why it changed is—there’s not a single moment like you talk about in Charlottesville—there’s just a learning process lots and lots of people go through, particularly people who are at school talk about, suddenly racism’s coming to life in a direct, immediate way, that suddenly there are a bunch of white kids in a way there wasn’t before, beating up Black kids in the playground… The same things are happening at workplaces. There’s an immediate, violent racism, and every time the violent racists are challenged by their behavior, they have a thing, they can justify themselves by saying, “Look at the National Front, I’m a National Front supporter, I’m a National Front member,” whether they are or not.
And in the same way in the States that the alt-right became the way in which all these racists could justify themselves and suddenly had a label, and felt like they were big because they were part of a movement… The same thing happens in Britain. There’s just a really sharp increase in that immediate violent street racism, which a far-right party deepens and justifies. One of the metaphors the far right uses about itself—it’s the name of their magazine—is “spearhead.” What they mean is they intend to be the spearhead of the general advance of racism and of authoritarianism, but for the moment they’re focusing on racism. And there’s a moment in the ‘70s where just a whole bunch of people go, “Yeah, that’s what’s going on.”
Now it’s also true as the decade goes on, and by the time the National Front’s defeated, there’s actually kind of a movement back to an anti-racist as opposed to an anti-fascist consciousness. A lot of the people involved in the Anti-Nazi League go on to get involved in things like campaigns to stop people from being deported, campaigns to allow members of the family to be reunited with members of their family who are in Britain. So there’s a movement back from an anti-fascist to an anti-racist consciousness.
There’s no iron law here which says anti-racism is better than anti-fascism, or anti-fascism is better than anti-racism—there are times when a more anti-fascist form of anti-racism is necessary. And essentially there’s a flow of mass consciousness around ’76 and ’77 going, yeah, we’re just not gonna be able to win what we want in terms of say, stopping deportations, unless first we deal with this problem. The racists are getting loads of votes and that means the government feels it’s gotta pander to them, and that’s driving a process of racism. We’ve gotta stop this, and then we can deal with all the other stuff after.
AP: So, jumping to 1977, the Socialist Workers Party initiates the Anti-Nazi League. How was that—you know, Rock Against Racism was more of a cultural intervention… What was the function of the Anti-Nazi League?
R: Where the Anti-Nazi League comes out of is a particular demonstration which happens in August of ’77, where the National Front tried to march through a part of southeast London, which is very mixed, Black and white area… They bring out about 800 people. They’re confronted by maybe three or four thousand anti-fascists, some of whom, it’s just a general mobilization of the left in that city which is London, some of them just local Black youth, absolute turn on the National Front, smash the streets, tear apart their banners. And the news ends that night with pictures of this National Front supporter who’s this 76-year-old woman sobbing on the street after being beaten up by people who were probably 50 years younger than her. Now that moment, in a sense, the left’s initial response is to be quite jubilant. You know, we’ve got this physical victory, and it’s a physical victory which both left and right are still talking about 40 years after, it’s a really important physical victory, but there’s a difference between a physical victory and a political victory. You mentioned Charlottesville earlier. It’s not a welcome thought on the left, but at Charlottesville, the right showed up there in certainly equal and possibly larger numbers, used more violence than the left—their people probably came out of Charlottesville thinking, whoa, we beat our enemy off the streets. But what happened is they had a complete political defeat because people got shocked by what they’d done to Heather Heyer, and that took up to Trump, and he had to justify himself and he couldn’t justify himself, and we all know that story.
But what I’m saying is in Britain, on the left, people realized that you couldn’t just out-violence the fascists. If you did that, there’s all sorts of danger of political defeat following, because people would say, “That level of violence is unacceptable.” And that started to happen in Britain with the Labour Party in government, senior Labour politicians denouncing the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], calling them red fascists, demanding bans on the left from holding particular demonstrations, sort of vague suggestions that maybe the SWP would be banned. After all, in France, the equivalent Trotskyist group had been banned just a few years before. These things could’ve happened.
And what the SWP did was they turned around to the Labour Party, the much more significant, more large, more moderate force, just a little bit to the left of the center, but in Government—they turned around to the left of the Labour Party and said, “We want to form some sort of alliance with you to combat fascism. And so the Anti-Nazi League… It’s kind of interesting trying to work out, was the SWP becoming more moderate by talking to the Labour Party, was the SWP just looking for someone to kind of shield them when they were gonna carry on doing physical confrontations? If you talk to different people who were on the national leadership of the Anti-Nazi League, you’ll find people who were in the Labour Party who, what they thought was going on was that the SWP was coming to them on their terms and making deals to do less of the physical confrontation. Equally you’ll talk to people in the SWP who thought, no the Labour Party was coming around to our terms and they were willing to work with us, they were never gonna stop us doing physical confrontations.
And it’s just a matter of fact that the physical confrontations continued, but suddenly it didn’t just feel like a little bit of the far left was doing them, it felt like the whole left was united around it. And bit by bit, even the bits of the left who’d been most resistant to this—the Communist Party, who really didn’t like the idea of a Trotskyist group having all this publicity and were the last group… Everyone on the left came on board behind the Anti-Nazi League and it became a movement of 50,000 members, almost every national union affiliated to it, dozens of MPs [members of parliament] and celebrities supporting it.
AP: How did the Anti-Nazi League relate to Rock Against Racism? Directly, they worked together on the carnivals, but also, did RAR kind of help create the conditions for mass membership in organizations like the ANL?
R: I think there’s a sense in which Rock Against Racism helped to shape the general conditions, that there was the youth generation out there that was increasingly confident and coherent in its anti-racist politics. Definitely Rock Against Racism did that. But I think in reality, that wasn’t the only thing contributing. You know, I’ve talked about Lewisham and stuff like that, I’ve talked about this general shift in consciousness going on at the same time, so there were like two or three different things that were all background things fitting together. Really I think Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League work on the carnivals in ’78. And that’s essentially it. But it’s not just the two London carnivals. There were carnivals of 40,000 people in Manchester, 10,000 people in Edinburgh, 80,000 in Cardiff and so on.
The key thing that Rock Against Racism brings is that when the Anti-Nazi League is just getting going—it’s had all this publicity, people know it’s important, know all the MPs are supporting it—they say let’s do something to make this… let’s put this in the big time. And they have this idea of essentially putting a couple bands on a moving stage on a lorry driving through London and calling it a carnival. And they go along to RAR… who’ve got much bigger ambitions than that. They say, “Why don’t you help us do this?” [RAR responds], “Yeah, look, we’ll organize it for you. We’ll make it a carnival. We’ll take it a bit further.” And then they turn it into something on a completely different scale in terms of going along to the bands which have had number ones in the last few weeks, bands like The Clash who are clearly the most exciting cultural thing that’s just getting going, going along to people like Sham 69—who’s a band who the right-wing skinheads listen to above any other—and persuading them to support the carnival, and Jimmy Pursey [of Sham 69] to get involved with it. They have a much bigger, more ambitious notion, partly because some of the people have been through the ‘60s and remember the huge festivals in the ‘60s. They remember that, and they want to do something on that scale. And I don’t think that the Anti-Nazi League, without their involvement, could ever have been that bold or ambitious, or certainly not that quickly could’ve realized there’s that much audience out there for what they’re trying to do.
AP: There are a ton of moments in your book that are quite revealing about the role of the police, whether it’s police arresting Socialist Workers Party members after they’ve been ambushed by nazis, or 2,500 cops protecting a one-nazi march through Hyde. Could you tell me a bit about the relationship of the police to the far right?
R: On the left, we often think that all that ever happens is the police basically are there to be just an auxiliary of the far right in any sort of protest moment. And I always sort of try and dislike that, because the police aren’t there actually to do the far right favors, they’re there to do politicians’ bidding, and they’re there because—we don’t have in Britain the whole weird nexus you have in the States about free speech being the most inviolable constitutional principle and so if the police weren’t protecting the nazis they’d be letting down the founding fathers or something. We really don’t have that idea here. But it just is a matter of record that at this point the police are going through an extremely authoritarian phase, and this predates the stuff with fascists and anti-fascists.
For example, the Chief Constable of Manchester at this point is a man called James Anderton who’s got really quite weird personal/political/sexual politics of his own, something which the anti-racist anti-fascist movement notices. But he’s someone who’s absolutely committed to really making the police in Manchester a serious paramilitary force. At this point, for example, Britain’s still fighting the war in Northern Ireland, people are dying every couple of weeks in army attacks or terrorist counterattacks. In Manchester, James Anderton—and this is the British Police force, which notoriously, we don’t have guns—in Manchester, James Anderton buys more guns for the police force than the police force has for all of Northern Ireland. There’s an authoritarianism there which is completely unimaginable to people who didn’t live in the 70s, and it’s about fears of terrorism, it’s about fears of in ’72 and ’74 we’ve had mass strikes which have brought down the ‘74 Heath government. There are all sorts of nutty conspiracies on the edge of the police, retired police officers, retired army officers, with all sorts of plans about how you have to have the military and the deep state planning independently of the politicians. So all that’s part of the context in terms of the police willing to play such an overt role.
One of the things—you just mentioned Hyde—one of the things which really shocked me was even just this year when I was finishing up the book, I thought well I’ll go off and dig up the home office records to find out how on Earth did the police sell to the politicians the idea that they’d get all these thousands of police to protect one single fascist doing a solo march when he’s someone that politicians hate and that police don’t have particularly high regard for either. One of the things which really shocked me actually was finding kind of right wing labor politicians—I suppose they’d be the equivalent in the U.S. of like the DNC or something—actually having meetings with the police and agreeing to a plan where the police would tell the press that they weren’t gonna protect the fascist march, that they were gonna ban the fascist march, but behind the scenes they were gonna tell the fascist he was gonna march and they’d give him every police officer he needed so no matter how many anti-fascists turned up, he’d still be allowed to march. So the police officers talking to senior left-wing politicians, giving their agreement to lie to the public on a mass scale, and… [laughs] This is all in the national archives, I was genuinely quite surprised to find it had been that blatant.
AP: One of the recurring things you write about is graffiti, how in moments when the far right was confident and growing, fascist graffiti was almost omnipresent, whereas when the left was in motion there were organized efforts to paint over fascist graffiti—I’m interested in hearing how that was this contested space or measurement of how confident the sides were.
R: One of the reasons why I talk about that is again, that that was something I was too young to be involved in the events—I was probably between five and ten years younger than the very youngest activist I’ve interviewed for my book—I mean I remember what it was like being in London, just going around the streets, and seeing that horrible NF sign which would be “N” and “F” with the horizontal lines written into the “N,” but what anti-fascists did is they just competed with each other to come up with “NF =…” whether that was “No fun, no future,” or whatever, as ways of making that graffiti look ridiculous. One of the ideas the people had for, very early on, once you get the Anti-Nazi League, people said we’ve got to have a symbol, and they come up with the idea of an arrow with three quills at the back of it. And that’s an idea which was taken from the old 1930s and the anti-fascist symbol with three separate anti-fascist arrows. But one of the ideas was… it’s something you could paint really quickly through an NF symbol to paint over it and show the anti-fascists being in town and they weren’t gonna take any of that nonsense basically.
So it’s certainly something that people did, but I suppose if anything it’s actually quite hard to find a lot of different people who talked about that experience as a particularly unique experience. I think there are some children’s stories which were written about the experience of painting out racist and fascist graffiti. I’ve come across them. But essentially it’s just something that the movement did. Sometimes you leafleted the gig, sometimes you painted out NF graffiti, sometimes you held anti-fascist street meetings. It’s just all part of the repertoire of different things that local activists could do.
AP: So the key moment for all of this that all of this builds up to is the 1979 election. What happened in that election, and what was its broader significance and legacy?
R: I’d love to just simplify this down and say one thing is the National Front got defeated. The truth’s a little more complicated than that. There were about two or three different things going off at once, and some are good and some are bad. The first thing I want to talk about is just during the election, there’s a National Front meeting in Southall. About 20 National Front people get into the meeting, they’re busted by police, about 8,000 demonstrators outside and probably equal numbers of police officers fighting demonstrators. At this point, that sort of ratio, 400 anti-fascists for every NF supporter, that was becoming more and more common. The NF has been worn down by attrition. But, Southall ends that night, and it’s a very political Black community in which the Indian Workers Association, which is loosely associated with the Indian Communist Party, has been a presence there for decades and has probably majority support in that local area. So when all this fighting takes place, that’s why there’s such large numbers of anti-fascists mobilized. But the day ends with the killing of one particular anti-fascist teacher, originally from New Zealand, who’d come to Britain about a decade before and taught in East London, called Blair Peach.
So the first thing the anti-fascists have to deal with in the general election, just days before the general election Blair Peach is killed. There have only been three deaths of protestors on political demonstrations in Britain since the Second World War—two of them happen in this period, Kevin Gately in ’74, Blair Peach in ’79, were anti-fascists killed by police officers… So this was an enormous thing… This mass movement tried to throw all its energy and resources into properly celebrating Blair Peach’s life, properly getting the police officers who did it to reveal their names, and maybe even to get them prosecuted, but it didn’t quite go that far and it’s only in the last few years that we’ve even been able to say for certain which officer did it. But the first thing that happened was Blair Peach was killed. That’s just, if you’d spoken to any anti-fascist on May the 7th, 1979, they were grieving that. That was the biggest thing in their heads.
The second thing which happened is Margaret Thatcher gets elected. And obviously this is a key moment in the establishment of neoliberalism. It’s a kind of vanguard moment of neoliberalism and its spread internationally. She along with Reagan are gonna be two of the right-wing governments which do the most to turn global politics to the right in the 1980s. So again, you can’t just go straight to “anti-fascists have the victory.” This is a moment where politics is moving quite sharply to the right when you’ve had a Labour government where very large numbers of working class people are turning against it, where there’s mass political disillusionment and anger which was turning inwards, and that’s enough to get Thatcher elected.
One of the great books that’s written about this period is by a guy called Dave Widgery, and it’s called Beating Time. And it doesn’t just mean beating time like the obvious sense beating out a rhythm, he means beating time in the sense that the time this movement was built in was a hostile time, that you’d expect almost everything to have ended badly. And lots of things did end badly. Thatcher gets in, and that helps keep moving politics to the right over the next decade.
But the third thing, I’ve left it for last, is the National Front get absolutely devastated. They stand 300 candidates. Where they stand they barely get 1% of the vote. I think 100 of the seats where they stand and they stood before, their vote falls by a minimum of 50%, in most places by 75%. They’ve been dealing with such long-time problems of physical confrontation from the far left, they’ve gambled everything on the idea that if they have a really good election, that will at least enable them to remain significant. They’re absolutely smashed in the election, and within a year they’re split into three separate warring factions which never properly reconcile.
And essentially for the next 10 or 12 years in Britain we don’t really have to face the problem of fascism. I’m not saying we don’t entirely have to, there are still small fascist groups, but they’re not a force in politics, they’re not significant players, they’re not doing what they had been doing over the previous decade, which was always giving mainstream politicians a reason to attack further to the right. Their role doing that is taken away from them, and it’s taken away from them by… to some extent voters returning to the conservatives, you can’t get away from that. But the single most important factor in terms of their political defeat was there was a mass movement harrowing them everywhere, and just makes them unpopular with the vast majority of people, and that’s why they go down.
AP: One of the things I didn’t ask about earlier which I meant to was, you had this period where nazis were attacking South Asian and Black communities every day—what were some of the ways that those communities organized in kind of self-defense formations?
R: Yeah, there’s a process of organizing self-defense organizations which predates the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism. For example, one of the main Black political organizations in Britain I suppose is kind of the equivalent of Black Lives Matter, but it’s a bit more intellectual, it’s not the totality of a movement, it’s just one bunch of activists within the totality of a movement—it’s a magazine called Race Today. And from ’74 to ’75, they’d been arguing for the formation of Black self-defense patrols and networks. So if you’re in an area, say East London, where there’s a real risk of fascist attack every evening, you know Fridays and Saturdays are the worst nights for it, so just on those evenings in the local community you’d organize a bunch of people to steward, patrol around the area. And so if, for example, just two or three fascists tried to do it, you have no difficulty whatsoever in just kicking them out of the area.
But obviously, that sort of thing, that’s really important and anti-fascists and anti-racists helped support it and generalize that approach… But there are problems with it and one of the problems with it is it’s a perfectly decent strategy if you’re dealing with the far right sending three or four people out on a lone little expedition attacking people… One of the things that you start to see as the ‘70s wears on is much more serious attempts to foment almost like mass race riots. You have one of them down Brick Lane in East London led by a man called Derrick Day from the National Front, where they literally try and send two or three hundred people down the road smashing every single shop in sight. And then that’s more than a self-defense movement can realistically defeat. And that’s why the self-defense movements were important, but there comes a moment where you need a mass movement, and you start to see that at the end of the ‘70s as well.
AP: In the broader history of anti-fascist and anti-racist struggles, have there been other cases to your knowledge where a subculture played such an out-sized role in building the forces against it?
R: Oh, that’s a really interesting question [laughs]. I haven’t really thought of it like that. I don’t think it was like that in the ‘30s—I’m just gonna do this off the top of my head—I don’t think it was like that in the 1930s. There’s kind of little hints of culture around the edges of anti-fascism in Britain in the ‘30s but it wasn’t a subculture doing it to the same extent. In the 1930s we have the Battle of Cable Street and Olympia and they’re just much more conventional left movements built by things like the Communist Party. In the ‘40s we have the 43 Group, which is essentially a movement of returning Jewish ex-servicemen. I really don’t think there was a culture building a mass anti-racist consciousness around it. And in a sense, there didn’t need to be because Britain just fought in the Second World War. I mean actually the vast majority of people got that fascism wasn’t a great thing, and when they saw anti-fascists physically attacking fascists, they didn’t go, “Oh dear, defend their free speech rights.” They got that they too and their families had been involved in fighting fascism, they got why people would do it.
There was an attempt in the early ‘90s to recreate Rock Against Racism kind of on a new basis around a different kind of music. There was a new relaunched Anti-Nazi League—there wasn’t new Rock Against Racism at that point, but there was kind of an Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism carnival. Some of the old bands from the ‘70s played there. But the most interesting thing was they tried to get new bands with different styles of music. Bands like the Levellers who played a very particular kind of punk-inflected indie music. And it was very notable that maybe half the people who were at that carnival were people from that subculture rather than just generally the left. So you can see that, but I’m only really talking about a single event now rather than a mass movement. And obviously there have been attempts to use, say grime for example in the same way. Grime artists here solidly came out behind Labour in the general election. There have been attempts by some anti-fascists to kind of involve grime in today’s anti-fascist movement, but I think at a much lower level.
Whenever people ask me what would be the cultural thing now—this is a slightly different question from the one you’re asking, but when people say, “What would be the cultural equivalent today?” I think what we’d be looking for would be onliners, games players, games makers. A lot of the people that I talk to and I try to keep an eye on and I’m really excited about are things like, in Britain we’ve just had an independent union of coders and game-makers set up, and it’s really noticeable that the milieu they’re in is one where there are a lot of far-right people, and so although they’re trying to be a trade union, they’re constantly having to put out propaganda against the far right. I find them quite exciting, I think you can kind of see an echo.
But… yeah, probably it’s happened in other countries, but I can’t think off the top of my head of other examples in Britain where it’s been as successful as the ‘70s.
AP: I’m glad you brought up gaming and the internet, because that was… my next question is, I keep thinking about how this new, rapidly developing and evolving cultural milieu with video games and all those internet forums kind of crystallized this modern current within the far right, and I was wondering what your thoughts on that were.
R: Yeah, it seems to me really obvious that that’s taking place. I’ve got two kids, you know, let alone where they get their games, where they get their TV from is through Youtube, and then if you look at the way which the Youtube algorithm works, Youtube pretty blatantly took a conscious decision to not silence far-right voices and even to promote them, to give them a lower level of scrutiny than other kinds of political people uploading films onto Youtube. Obviously there’s stuff with Reddit. And obviously there’s the stuff with Gamergate. All of these are part of the process.
Sometimes I come across well-meaning lefty people who write about the present moment and say things like, oh the alt-right has never produced a cultural moment in history and they compare it to the ‘60s and they’re like, the left in the ‘60s had all these great bands. And like, yeah we did, but our relationship to culture then is really pretty similar to the right’s relationship to forms of culture today. And it’s pretty obvious that—I think you talked about it—some of the really successful anti-fascist moments there have been against Charlottesville type people, if you were to leave that and think well we’ve got the streets, we’re ok, I think people would be making a real mistake. It’s really clear to me that the far right is so deeply entrenched online… that there’s going to be a constant process of people going from that into offline, on-the-street activity, unless at some point people start formulating a plan for challenging them there. And challenging them not as outsiders—you never win that battle if you try to take back a culture and you’ve got no history and immersion in that culture. The people who will do it at some point will be people who care about that culture and are passionate about it, who love it and say I’m not just gonna let these creeps carry on taking it over.
But one of the things I really love about the ‘70s is that you read the memoirs of people who wore swastikas and they confront it now, they go, “I don’t know why I wore it, I’ve never been a racist all my life, maybe I thought it looked pretty. But I tell you what, I really shouldn’t have done that.” And you come across that in the memoirs like Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols, Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees, all these artists who wore a swastika again and again and again are now going, “That wasn’t me, that’s not the real me, I totally disassociated myself from that.” That’s kind of what we want, we want in 10 or 20 years time Pewdiepie will have… We want that guy going, “Listen, I did some really stupid stuff with Pepe the frog, and you know I really shouldn’t have done that.” We want them disassociating themselves.
So how do we do we it? I’m not pretending that the left knows how to do it. We don’t know how to do it, but that’s what we have to learn how to do. What we do know is that people have been in a similar situation before and have been a minority—or not necessarily a minority in early punk, but been in a situation or cultural milieu that could have gone in a good way or a bad way, and they intervened and turned it in a good way, and we know how that process is done in broad terms. Maybe people listening to this have any ideas, they should start doing it themselves.
AP: Are you broadly familiar with the organizations outside of the U.K. that drew influence from Rock Against Racism, and even in many cases took the name?
R: One of the things I’ve never done is I’ve never properly studied the history—like there were about half a dozen… There was Rock Against Racism obviously in the States, there was Rock Against Racisms all over Scandinavia, there was a French organization which took an English name, “Rock Against Police” in France, but was a movement of North Africans and Berbers. There was Rock gegen Rechts in Germany. In Australia, it was taken up by a bunch of Aboriginal artists and people have told me a bit about that. But say for example in the States, all I’ve vaguely picked up is that I understand for example bands like The Dead Kennedys went through a bit of the Rock Against Racism experience, and it helped to influence where some of their songs came from. But I’ve never particularly tried to study exactly what happened with that milieu I’m afraid.
AP: Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you want to talk about?
R: Not really, I’m just really glad to have done the interview, and just to say, the book’s out there, I’m thinking about coming to the States maybe in June or July to do talks around it. If listeners are interested and want to get in touch with me to make that happen, I’d absolutely love that. Maybe give a shout out to Red Wedge, a magazine in the States… they end up putting a lot of their content online. It goes on Patreon first, but it does all eventually end up free to view. I really like their stuff, and I think they’re quite exciting in terms of the way they try and do culture, although they’re not trying to do culture in the kind of mass way I’ve been talking about in this interview. I’ve got an article coming out for them in a few weeks just about this movement. So if people are interested in what I’ve been talking about today and want a slightly more detailed version, that’s there and that will be free as well as obviously it’s a book.