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Author: Searchlight   |   Date: April 1980

The Front enters the Brons Age: Searchlight puts Brons in Perspective

Andrew Brons is now the new chairperson of the National Front, elected unopposed after the resignation of John Tyndall. He is the obvious choice for a party, or a faction of a party, very conscious of their image to their own followers, let alone to their opponents.

Brons is married to an active nationalist woman and has a family. His job is to lecture at Harrogate College of Further Education in government and politics. The principal of the college, Mr Drake, who has known him since he was a student at the same place, described him to us as "a very pleasant chap, always on time and never politically biased in the classroom situation". The deputy president of the Students Association there confirmed this and said, yes he was an amiable type who never tried to influence students' political views.

Brons has obviously been scrupulously careful to maintain his clean image. In a sickeningly deferential piece about him in the Times (1.3.80.) he is described as young, articulate and presenting a "different image from the neo-Nazi thuggery that has clung to England's various nationalistic parties". But one look at Brons' past shows him to be in the running with Britain's top fascists during the last twenty years.

When he was a teenager he was a member of Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement. He passed this off in the Times interview as "a bit of youthful folly and rebellion". We reproduce two letters below written by Brons in 1965 to Colin Jordan's wife. We think they give some idea of the mentality of the youthful Brons.

British fascists since the war have followed a very similar trail. When they realised that overt sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis was not going down very well with the British public they tried another tactic - to create an organisation with a respectable veneer.

In a letter to American Nazi, William Pierce, in 1967, John Tyndall writes:

"To be frank, I do not believe that a movement with an open Nazi label has a hope of winning power either in Britain or the UK in the forseeable future. I have therefore sought to modify the form of our programme though not, of course, the essence of our ideology. "
(For the full text of the letter see Searchlight No.38.)

Brons is evidently concerned with the structure and ideology of the National Front. In a 'seminar' in Leeds recently he is said to have highlighted the need to put NF ideology of racial nationalism and its scientific base into a more structured form and to make their view of the world and future society more ordered and coherent.

In the January edition of Spearhead 1980 he has written the first of two articles on "The Factual Propositions of Nationalism". This makes more than plausible the claim by fellow NF members to respect Brons but find him very boring and hard to follow. Basically he states his belief in hereditary ethnic differences and the relative constancy of human nature. He concludes, "Our task is to educate an elite who — because they know where they are going, ideologically speaking, and who above all believe totally in why they want to get there — can never be lured down the byways of our enemies".

We challenge Mr Drake and Brons' students to go on defending this pleasant chap, this amiable type, who regularly shares platforms with people who deny the murder of six million Jews in the last war and who has been all his political life part of a ruling clique of fascists that actively encourages violent harassment of black people and Jews in this country. It does not matter who the man is or however mild his manners — the fact is that he has travelled the same paths as his contemporaries John Tyndall and Martin Webster and that he fits into a brand of British extreme right wing racists along with the rest and worst of them.

© Searchlight Magazine 1980