Far-right cross fertilisation, then and now

The current cross fertilisation between the many strands of the far right has a parallel in the 1970s when the Conservative Party leadership came under siege from the Monday Club, whose MPs, who held the balance of power in Edward Heath’s government, were trying to impose their ideas on the party. It failed then because Heath refused to be blackmailed by supporters of Ian Smith’s illegal racist regime and admirers of Enoch Powell for his “rivers of blood” speech about immigration. Their ideas enjoyed wide media support, which gave rise to violence in the streets against Asian refugees from Uganda and Kenya, and the growth of the National Front.

It was probably the heightened interest in the moves behind the scenes in preparation for the launch of Andrew Brons’s new party that brought out a larger than usual number to the seventh annual memorial meeting for the Nazi leader John Tyndall, who died in 2005.

Attendance has varied but this year 91 people made it to the 55th Division Club in Preston on 13 October. They were subject to strict rules of behaviour and barred from some areas to prevent a recurrence of the drunkenness that marred last year’s event and offended the club’s regular clientele.

As over 150,000 trade unionists marched along Regent Street and Piccadilly in London’s West End on 20 October, nearly 80 people, ranging from ultra-right Conservatives, to activists in several fascist organisations were gathering in the nearby East India Club.

They were there for a day-long conference hosted by the Traditional Britain Group (TBG) and the Quarterly Review, on the theme: “Another country – is there a future for tradition?”.

In the wake of the Anders Breivik case, do you think there is there a serious terrorist threat coming from the far right in Britain?

If you check out the Home Office’s official assessment the threat of a terrorist attack in mainland Britain today it will almost certainly be at least ‘substantial’, meaning a ‘strong possibility’, and the history of the UK over the last two decades suggests that any such attack could indeed be by right-wing extremists. For example, the London Olympics could have been a target as much for white supremacists opposed to multiculturalism as Islamists who hate the ‘West’. However the permanent potential for attack has rarely materialised in actual acts of violence, Islamist or right wing. It is also misleading to think of the far right as a homogeneous subculture, since it is much more fragmented and uncoordinated than the Islamist right. As a result the threat of right-wing attacks is paradoxically both serious and minimal simultaneously. Breivik, though radicalised by both a real and virtual far right sub-culture in Norway, had to operate as a lone wolf precisely because of the lack of any coordinated revolutionary movement of the extreme right, and thus his case emphasises both how statistically unlikely a right-wing terrorist attack is and how serious it is when it happens (the same could be said of David Copeland or Timothy McVeigh).