Reader article: A journey worth making... (Part One)

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Atreus. We welcome any contributions (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste) from our supporters. Please send your articles to us at lancaster.uaf@zen.co.uk

Only one thing surprises me about the current rumpus within the BNP.

That it took so long to happen.

The far Right's ability to rip itself asunder in vicious internal division is the one consistent thing about it. And I should know, because until comparatively recently I was one of them.

Allow me to take you on what was, for me, a long journey to enlightenment, one that began in the early 1970's when, fresh out of school and newly into work, I was inducted into the ways of casual racism and homophobia.

I was a country boy. You could count the number of 'coloured' people I'd seen in my life on the fingers of one hand, and they were nearly always the bus drivers who travelled the route from the city (which shall remain nameless) to our village and back again. The city was somewhere I didn't really know and had few reasons to visit. In those days your mum caught the bus in to do the shopping and buy your clothes every Saturday. To work, though, I had to go into the city.

It was a huge culture shock. In the outer suburbs you'd see the odd black face or an exotically dressed Asian woman, but as I got to know the city better I realised there were whole districts where immigrants had a significant presence. And it shocked me.

At work you would routinely refer to these immigrants as "w*gs", "n*gg*rs", etc. Everybody did, and there was always talk of them "taking over". Work also brought me into contact with the first homosexual man I had ever met, a slightly effeminate quality control inspector who was probably very conscious of the remarks and the sniggering going on behind his back.

I didn't see any of these people as being completely human. They definitely weren't my equal.

Somewhere along the line I became interested in Germany's Nazi period. The more I read up on it, or saw on television, the more I realised how close to German National Socialism my own hardening views were. I became very critical of what I saw on television or read in books, and one day so upset my father with what I thought of as my "fairness" towards wartime Germany that he angrily shouted that if the Germans had come to England I would have been a Quisling.

At that time, he was probably right.

On a day out to London I was standing outside Euston station and noticed some stickers plastered over a bus shelter. They were very colourful, and I could just make out the words "Stop Immigration, Start Repatriation". This was my meat! I went over to read the stickers. It was the first time I'd ever heard of the National Front, and I carefully noted down their address: 50 Pawson's Road, Croydon.

As soon as I got home I fired off a letter asking for information, and about a fortnight later there was a knock on the door. It was the organiser of the local group and his wife. Knowing that my parents wouldn't be very happy to have them indoors, I kept them outside where we talked for nearly an hour. They left me with a copies of "Britain First" and "Spearhead", and gave me directions to the pub where the group met. I couldn't wait, and the same day posted off my membership application.

It was a coincidence that my membership card arrived on the same Thursday I was due to attend my first meeting. I was pleased and proud, and as I chatted to the other members of the group before the meeting began, I knew I was Home.

The meeting itself was a bit boring for a 19 year old, but the drinking and the socialising afterwards more than made up for it (the NF was big on drinking). There were fifteen of us in the group at that stage. Two of them had been in the National Socialist Movement with Colin Jordan and John Tyndall, another had been in Jordan's successor British Movement, and the two oldest members had been in Mosley's BUF.

They all regaled me with their memories of far Right derring-do stretching back to before the war, and if there was one thing that came over it was that almost everybody in the group had some degree of sympathy for German National Socialism.

Over the weeks we started delivering leaflets door to door on Monday nights, and on Saturday's began selling "Britain First" and "Spearhead" in the city centre. This activity brought us to the attention of the local "Reds" belonging to the International Socialists (as the SWP called itself then) and the International Maxist Group, and pretty soon we weren't so much selling papers as fighting a weekly war. To my own surprise I found I could handle myself very well.

We put on members and became a fully fledged National Front branch, our meetings in early 1974 attracting over thirty members (though our paper membership was about 120). We began to cooperate with nearby branches when selling our papers, and our numbers dissuaded the IS and IMG from attempting any physical confrontation. We weren't averse to "culling" them, though. For every paper seller we had two or three others watching, and if they could isolate a stray Red for a bit of quiet retribution, they would.

The February 1974 General Election really made our branch. We pitched in with our Birmingham comrades, who were fighting three seats. By then I'd been elected on to our branch committee and was entitled to attend West Midland Regional Council meetings. At my first WMRC I realised that not everybody in the NF gravitated towards National Socialism, or at least, not in public.

There had been an influx of ex-Monday Club types, exemplified by Tom Finnegan, a powerful, persuasive man, who brought their experience in the Conservative Party to the National Front. Mostly they were racist to the core, but they were also pragmatists. Members like me saw John Tyndall and Martin Webster as living links to the Nazi past. Influential members like Tom Finnegan saw them as impediments to progress, and the influence of people like him began to seep into our branch.

Though we didn't stand a candidate in February 1974, we did benefit from the huge number of enquiries that came as a result of our election broadcast. We regularly had new people at our meetings, most of them former Tory activists or voters, and soon had to find a bigger meeting room. We didn't stop to think what this increase in membership might mean.

The next big activity of 1974 was to be a march and rally in London, on June the 15th. I don't need to repeat what happened there, other than to say "Red Lion Square".

Those of us who'd been on the march were cock-a-hoop at the publicity, and fired up by the rousing speeches of Tyndall and Webster in Conway Hall. But there were grumblings in some quarters of the home camp, which we didn't take very seriously.

There was also the tragic death of student Kevin Gately, which overshadowed the day. To us, he was just another Red who had got what he deserved. Five years later the death of Blair Peach at Southall brought out similar expressions of sympathy.

A march in Leicester came next, with more violence and more publicity. It ended with a meeting in a school, where John Tyndall gave the speech of his life. There was also a television film camera in the hall, and we were soon to find out why.

Our branch was well prepared for the October 1974 General Election. Unfortunately our candidate was a virtual illiterate, but he was the only one prepared to stand. His agent knew what he was doing, but privately we knew we had to keep our candidate away from the press and never let him go near a public platform. At a WMRC meeting before the election one of Tom Finnegan's associates approached me to ask if I thought our candidate was up to the job. I had to admit he wasn't. Then he asked "Is he a Nazi?" which I thought was strange, and finally, "Something bad is going to happen, very soon."

The "something bad" turned out to be the infamous (to the far Right) "This Week" documentary, "The National Front", where the Nazi pasts of John Tyndall and Martin Webster were exposed for the whole country to see. It didn't faze me, I already knew that, but for our newer members it was a real problem and they were determined to do something about it.

Standing a candidate in the October 74 General Election was almost the last positive thing we did for a long time. The party was fracturing along its internal "Tyndallite" and "Populist" fault lines.

I had no idea how well organised the Populists were. Being a known Tyndallite I was kept in the dark over the furtive meetings taking place in the West Midlands region, and went to that year's annual conference completely unprepared for the stormy nature of the proceedings. JT attempted to make his speech and all hell broke loose as the Populists chanted "Nazi, Nazi!" And then JT was deposed in favour of Kingsley Read. As quick as that.

I couldn't believe it.

The acrimony at the top spread down to our branch. We were seriously divided, and the two camps only ever came together at branch meetings which became set pieces of factional power play. By June 1975 our activist base had shrunk and the paper membership was in freefall. In July, after attending a meeting addressed by John Tyndall, I was voted off the branch committee. We were being weeded out, but following JT's orders did nothing that might earn us expulsion. Local activities virtually ceased, as there was no point in bringing in new members only to have them leave when they saw how divided we were.

What I should say at this point is that if anybody thinks the Populists were anti-Nazi in any specific sense, then they weren't. Before the splits we'd all sit in pubs discussing the Second World War from the German side, and sounding off opinions that could only be described as Nazi. The difference was that the Populists were desperate to hide any outward show of Nazism. One of their leaders, in an attempt to persuade some of us into their camp, made no bones about his admiration for National Socialism, but: "We've got to get to power before we can do anything about it, and to get to power we must have a clean image."

Quite a lot of people went along with that. Quite a lot of people are still going along with it in the present BNP.

I remember the second half on 1975 as a quarrelsome, vicious time. We hated each other. The only thing we had in common was that we hated blacks, Asians, Jews and homosexuals more (except we Tyndallites weren't so prepared to lie about it).

Things came to a head in January 1976, when elementary procedural mistakes by the Populist faction on the NF's National Directorate led to them losing control and leaving to form the National Party. Different regions and branches were affected in different ways. Our branch divided very badly, and there wasn't much love lost between us.

With JT back at the helm we began an exhausting round of activities. These were meant to boost morale, to rebuild the party, and above all to destroy the National Party. Luck was with us in that year. It was a year of multiple immigration scares, each of them helped along by the media and leading mainstream politicians.

We took advantage of each scare as it came along, and the structure of the NF (activist based and quick to react) ensured that we regularly made the headlines. We didn't always care what sort of headlines, so long as we eclipsed the National Party. While the National Party attempted to sink roots and develop an electoral machine, we were here, there and everywhere, soaking up the support they needed. Though they won two seats on Blackburn council that year we knew that their membership was slowly evaporating.

By late 76 it was obvious that the NP was finished, and in dribs and drabs they began to return to the fold.

I was almost alone in opposing this. As far as I was concerned, we'd just rid ourselves of a destructive disease and here we were injecting it into ourselves again! But I was overruled, and had to accept that people who had stood candidates against our own just a few months before had the same say as I did. It was galling. With some like minded comrades I settled down to a few beers, certain that sooner or later we'd split again.

Our branch never returned to the harmony of early 1974. We treated each other correctly, but there was always an air of tension that sometimes exploded into open hostility. It usually happened because the activists tended to be Tyndallite, while the ex-Populists were good at raising funds, but also good at telling us what they should be spent on. They didn't like us getting into scraps with the Reds, and they tried to dictate what I should put into my press releases (I was Press Officer at the time). And, for the sake of a slightly late payment into our bank account, they deposed our Tyndallite organiser and replaced him with one of their own.

It was obvious we weren't going to last long like this. We knew that nearby branches were in a similar condition, but HQ liked to pretend that we could all get on together, and told us to focus on raising a full slate of candidates for the next general election.

That gave the ex-Populists in our branch the leverage they needed. They were far more experienced in fighting elections than we were, and it wasn't long before I was the only Tyndallite remaining on the branch committee. Somehow we struggled along, but not without a lot of bitching, and all the time the local Reds were paying us more and more attention. It was a brave man who openly tried to sell "National Front News" in the city centre, even when protected by other members.

Activities outside of branch meetings were really suffering. Delivering leaflets became a risky business because the Reds always seemed to find out where we were within half and hour of our starting, and even branch meetings became secretive affairs as we were forced to move from venue to venue, booking under a false name each time.

In August 77 came the Lewisham march. Half way down to London our ex-populist organiser called a rest stop, which nonplussed us as we were cutting it fine anyway. So we arrived in Lewisham late, unable to join the march, and got ourselves mixed up with the Reds, who were being baton charged by the police. We had no choice but to dump our banners and hide our badges and pretend that we were part of the mob we despised.

Despite the Reds getting the blame for the violence, the publicity we got from Lewisham was all bad. Even the party leadership seemed to know it (but would never admit it). Though it wasn't the NF attacking the police on that day, many members who'd made the march said that they'd noticed a change in the police's attitude. Until then individual policemen were completely neutral, sometimes even friendly at NF marches. At Lewisham their attitude was one of barely supressed anger, and many NF members were roughly handled by the police. The marching party had gone on for too long, and it wasn't funny any more.

I don't remember exactly, but it was at about this time that No Platform came in (or was enforced more vigorously), and the NUJ instructed journalists not to report the NF and its activities unless in a negative light.

That really hurt us. It was something we couldn't fight and had no answer for, other than to continue making a noise by marching and demonstrating, which just brought us more negative publicity. We were really frustrated by that, but otherwise things seemed to be moving forward. We had Excalibur House, money was coming in, we put on members, and had our election targets to meet. But it wasn't the same. The old comradeship had gone.

We were very confident before the 1979 General Election, though. Martin Webster assured us that we were going to attract "hundreds and hundreds of thousands of votes", and we worked hard to achieve them. While we were focussed on that our internal contradictions were disguised, but only temporarily. We weren't fazed when Margaret Thatcher told the media of the public's fear of being "swamped" by a tide of immigrants, but we should have been. When two of our members left to join the Conservatives we Tyndallites saw it as vindication for what we'd been saying all along, that Populists were just Tories and could never be Nationalists.

The lead up to the election was a violent time. We couldn't hold public meetings anywhere without meeting violent opposition, but it never stopped us trying. Our "public" meetings always filled up with Reds, who we were legally bound to admit to publicly owned property. We'd protect the platform and place stewards all around the hall waiting for things to kick off, which they usually did very quickly. Then we'd pitch in not particularly caring who we thumped. My response to this was to do the same to them, and we disrupted as many left wing meetings as we could.

Come election night, reality dawned. We'd been thrashed. 303 candidates (if my memory serves) and not one of them got a decent vote. It was a shattering experience.

The blame game began, and the old divisions and the old arguments were quick to surface. At about the same time rumours of Martin Webster's homosexuality began to surface, with the circulation of photostats of statements various people had made alleging seduction attempts by him. And if there's one thing your average White Nationalist hates as much as a black, it's a gay. I was horrified, and wondered how Tyndall could continue to associate with Webster.

What I and most of the party didn't know was that JT had broken with Webster when the rumours were confirmed, and in the minds of most members Tyndall and Webster went together like bread and cheese. That gave the founders of the National Front Constitutional Movement a better opening than they otherwise would have had.

The NFCM was the sneakiest attempt to form a splinter party while pretending it wasn't that I've ever come across. In our depleted ranks the ex-Populists still had four out of five committee places (I was the fifth), and meetings seemed to be conducted as normal, except that sometimes, after the words "National Front", the words "Constitutional Movement" were tacked on. I asked what that meant, to be told "We're just supporting an internal Directorate attempt to change the party structure."

A quick phone call confirmed that the branch was actually operating outside the authority of the Directorate, and had to all intents and purposes joined a separate political party. It was obvious that a lot of secret meeting had gone on. I moved quickly with the only two other members to remain loyal and gathered up as much branch property as I could, but we lost most of it.

And there we were, just the three of us remaining in a branch that could once hold meetings of up to eighty. It was the same in other parts of the country. The NF seemed to be evaporating.

When we went on Webster's marches (there was one in Nuneaton, I think) we were only going through the motions and making up the ever dwindling numbers. Even the Reds didn't pay us much attention any more, and the whole point of marching seemed to have been lost. For me it was like being part of a beaten army fighting on to preserve its honour.

I was in touch with JT regularly at the time, and knew by now that he wanted Webster out. The plan was to change the constitution of the National Front, and to operate the party on authoritarian lines.

And so we reach the true genesis of the British National Party...

Atreus

(Part two tomorrow)