Looking at the postwar period in Great Britain, one might well be undecided about which decade was worst for the emergence and success of racism and racist politics. Was it the 1940s, when Mosley established his extreme-right Union Movement and already, through inter-racial confrontations like one in Deptford in 1949, it was becoming clear that Britain's newly emerging black population was not universally welcomed? Or the 1950s, which were associated with high levels of overt discrimination in housing, the labour market and public facilities, with increasing racial violence (including notorious incidents in Notting Hill and elsewhere in 1958), and with growing pressure from the political mainstream to restrict immigration from the Commonwealth? Or the 1960s, when it finally became apparent that Britain could not retain even the illusion of its tolerance, after the success of racist campaigns by the Conservative Party (as in Smethwick and Slough) in the 1964 general election, the disturbing levels of support achieved by an earlier British National Party (it won 9 per cent of the vote in Southall in 1964), and the mass support given to Enoch Powell after his April 1968 "rivers of blood" speech? Or was it the 1980s, when racism became ever more sanctioned by the state through increasingly restrictive legislation on nationality, immigration and asylum? Or even the 1990s, which have seen the continuation of the exclusionist legislative trends from the 1980s and also new moral panics on issues such as political asylum and East European Roma? Of course, arguments of this sort are futile and in any event may be resolved only by having agreed common criteria but probably few would dispute that it was the 1970s that saw the most disconcerting extreme-right political racism in Britain. This is because such attitudes seemed likely, in some localities, to bring into the political mainstream extremist and often psychopathic individuals who wanted to expel Britain's increasingly established ethnic-minority communities and who in many cases also subscribed to Nazi sympathies and a traditional antisemitism of the most violent sort. For the 1970s were undoubtedly the decade of the National Front (NF), which as an electoral phenomenon of the extreme right was more widely successful than the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s, although the absence of national regimes elsewhere in Europe sympathetic to the NF meant that it was never perceived as a potential threat to the state as was the BUF in the 1930s, and so it was less observed and infiltrated by the official surveillance apparatuses.
The NF had been formed in late 1966 to early 1967 from the amalgamation of several earlier racist or extreme-right groupings, including the League of Empire Loyalists, an earlier British National Party, and the Racial Preservation Society, to be joined by John Tyndall, Martin Webster and others from the Greater Britain Movement, a tiny group of overt Nazi sympathisers. The NF made a modest impact in local and parliamentary by-elections in the late 1960s. By the 1970 general election, although it had a candidate in only ten constituencies, some of its areas of later strength were already apparent: parts of London, the East and West Midlands and West Yorkshire. The more successful NF branches had been established by the early 1970s. The party's earliest activists had placed themselves and the NF to the right of the Conservative Party and had assumed that the NF would appeal predominantly to disgruntled ex-Conservatives, but the 1960s were to prove that a more significant source of support would be racist voters. Many but by no means all were working class in origin, and many - but again by no means all - were usually Labour voters; they were often in inner-city working-class areas or on peripheral council estates, especially in provincial cities such as Leicester and Wolverhampton. In fact, the NF was one of the first extreme-right parties in Europe to use crude expulsionist anti-black and anti-Asian racism as the prime basis of its electoral appeal. Of course, during the 1960s, especially in his 1964 and 1968 Presidential campaigns, George Wallace had successfully used an analogous appeal in the United States based on segregation, but most extreme-right parties in Europe had initially been most vehemently anti-communist or anti-American and had particularly solicited support from displaced groups likely to respond to anti-communist or pro-colonial appeals, such as postwar German expellees from Eastern European or French ex-colonists from Algeria. Only in the 1970s did most continental extreme-right parties turn more exclusively to anti-immigrant or xenophobic tactics, inspired in part by the apparent electoral successes achieved by the NF in Britain. By the early 1970s the NF was well implanted in a number of provincial cities and in some western boroughs of London such as Brent, Hillingdon and Hounslow. In a notorious 1972 Uxbridge parliamentary by-election, when public reaction to the arrival of expelled Asians from Uganda was still at its most intolerant, the NF candidate was openly assisted by members of the Conservative fringe organisation, the Monday Club, and won more than 8 per cent of votes cast. At a by-election in West Bromwich in May 1973 Martin Webster, the party's National Activities Organiser, won more than 16 per cent of votes cast in a low-turnout contest. The two general elections of 1974, particularly that in October, were remarkable for showing new centres of NF support based on London's inner and extended East End, which became the NF's most consistent location of strength, having for more than a century been intermittently drawn to political movements against one-time immigrant groups, whether Jewish or Bangladeshi. In 1975 the NF was threatened by a split, which had some parallels to the one that was to occur in 1998-99 inside the French Front National between Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Mégret. A group around the former Conservative John Kingsley Read, whose power base was Blackburn, founded a breakaway party called the National Party of the United Kingdom (NP) in an attempt electorally to marginalise the NF. The split was often interpreted at the time as being between the self-avowedly one-time nazis in the NF, such as Tyndall and Webster, and the moderates. While it is true that the moderates often pointed publicly to the Nazi-sympathising origins of some NF leaders, it would be a mistake - as with the Le Pen/Mégret split - to regard the breakaway group as having been any more moderate on the issues of race and immigrants. Searchlight was one of those who at the time rejected this simplistic interpretation. In any case, in the longer term, the breakaway party failed. It had some local strength in Deptford and even succeeded in electing two councillors in the 1976 district council elections in Blackburn, though one was quickly disqualified and the NP failed to win the consequent by-election.
Despite the split, 1976 was the NF's most successful year. With the public sensitised by sensational mass-media treatment of a number of immigration-related events, the party polled well in local elections in several provincial cities in early May, including Leicester, Bradford and Wolverhampton. These successes, impressive for an obviously extremist and racist party though without actually producing elected councillors, continued in local and parliamentary by-elections through 1976 and into early 1977. However, although it was not realised at the time, by mid-1977 the NF's electoral bubble was beginning to burst. There had been, perhaps providentially, no London borough council elections in 1976, but the NF's performances in the Greater London Council elections of early May 1977 did provide considerable publicity for the party and evoked much concern, especially on the left, about the danger it posed. The party fought 91 of the 92 constituencies in the Greater London area, winning overall more than 5 per cent of votes cast and scoring 19 per cent in Hackney South & Shoreditch. These results were one factor leading to the formal foundation of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in late 1977. In reality, some of the danger had already passed, although the ANL may well have accelerated the electoral decline of the NF or successfully prevented any recovery after its fortunes began to wane. In local elections in May 1978, associated with a lot of anti-NF publicity material from the ANL, it became very apparent that the NF was not holding all its support. Although it fought numerous contests - including almost all wards in the London boroughs of Enfield, Islington, Hackney, Haringey, Tower Hamlets, and Waltham Forest - it nowhere came close to winning a seat and, where comparisons with the previous year were possible, its average support was almost always reduced. In the 1979 general election the party put all its resources into an electoral effort but, despite an earlier boast by Tyndall in the party's one radio election broadcast that "in some places we shall beat the Liberals", nowhere did this happen and the NF's total of 303 candidates averaged a humiliating 1.3 per cent of votes cast in their contests. The party then imploded, disintegrating into several different groups and factions in 1979 and 1980. Its earlier leaders lost control as a disgruntled younger generation manoeuvred for power. Webster was suspended from membership amid insinuations about his sexual orientation that had previously been muted. In January 1980 Tyndall was obliged to resign his chairmanship, to be replaced by Andrew Brons. In June Tyndall left the party, first to found a so-called New National Front and then in 1982 the British National Party (BNP). Even the institutions of the state moved against the NF. A Department of the Environment inquiry supported an attempt by Hackney Borough Council to expel the party from headquarters that it had acquired in Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch. In early 1982 Joe Pearce, scion of Dagenham, a leader of the Young NF and editor of its notoriously unpleasant journal, Bulldog, was gaoled for six months for a breach of the Public Order Act 1936. Even an attempt by the NF during the early 1980s to eschew electoral politics and to emphasise itself as a racist presence on the streets ultimately failed to rebuild the party, partly because the rival
British Movement (BM) pursued a similar strategy, although some of this street-based approach persisted in skinhead groups and contributed to the growth in Britain of the neo-Nazi music scene. Why then did the NF emerge to prominence in the 1970s and decline into a groupuscule in the 1980s? There is no doubt that large sections of the public were intolerantly sensitised to immigration-related stories in the 1960s and 1970s, especially because of their treatment in local and national media. Moreover, the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially after the 1973 Oil Crisis, were the first period since the 1950s when it became obvious that the economy was not under the control of the government; economic crises recurred regularly and successive governments were unable to prevent them or shield the public from their unpleasant consequences. It is not difficult to see how governments that had demonstrably lost control of the economy were vulnerable to the suggestion that they were equally incapable in other areas of public concern, such as immigration control.
An anti-system party making exclusionist and expulsionist promises could exploit such feelings. By the same token, however, it is difficult to sustain electoral support based on a single issue such as crude racism, particularly if nothing seems to change as a result of voting for the party and its candidates fail to get elected. Maintaining longer-term support requires a relatively sophisticated ideological base, which the NF failed to provide to its mass electorate. The party's leadership was increasingly besmirched by repeated publicity concerning its past and continuing Nazi sympathies and the NF did become increasingly disreputable in the eyes of the public through its association with violence, as seen at demonstrations against it most famously in Lewisham in 1977, Brixton in 1978 and Southall in 1979, the last remaining long in the public consciousness through the controversy surrounding the death of Blair Peach. While polls at the time revealed that many people were ambivalent about the tactics of confrontation of anti-fascists such as the ANL, there is no doubting the widespread suspicion towards any form of political violence and any party associated with it.
However, the most compelling reason for the NF's demise from the late 1970s was the stance of the Tory party under Margaret Thatcher. A one-issue party is particularly susceptible to the co-optation of its only basis of appeal, especially by a more successful larger one. True, the Conservative Party was exclusionist rather than expulsionist, but there is no doubting that its Leader's talk about "swamping" and its very visible application of immigration control, called for in Opposition and effected once in power, successfully drew off the NF vote. The fact that this is the principal single reason for the NF's decline is perhaps a particularly unpleasant irony of its 1970s history. |
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1976 Martin Webster leads a National Front march in its heyday
1977 Anti-fascists protest against NF march at Wood Green in North London
1977 Anti-Nazi League founded
British Movement founder Colin Jordan
1979 British Movement on the march.
1979 British Movement leader Michael McLaughlin jailed for inciting racial hatred
1979 Anti-fascist teacher Blair Peach, killed by police as he protested at an NF election rally in Southall
1978 Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher makes her infamous statement that white people were frightened of being "rather swamped" by people of "an alien culture"