The rise and decline of the National Front

NF marching in the 1970s

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the National Front became the most active fascist movement in Britain for decades. A splinter from it, the British National Party, would briefly win 55 council seats in 2009, but never reached the same level of street activity.

The lineage of the NF goes back to the British Union of Fascists (BUF), founded on 1 October 1932, and repressed and wound up on 23 May 1940.

It was led by Oswald Mosley, a former Tory MP who had changed sides to Labour in 1922 and, in 1929-30, had been a minister in the minority Labour government led by Ramsey MacDonald. Mosley demanded protectionism and state funding to deal with unemployment. His policies were rejected – the orthodox economics at the time demanded cuts, not Keynesian-style spending - and he founded the New Party, taking a small number of Labour MPs with him.

The New Party was an unstable coalition of confusion. Founded in March 1931, it quickly folded and was wound up in 1932 after a poor showing in the general election of October 1931. For Mosley it was stepping stone towards fascism.

Oswald Mosley visited Mussolini and fascist Italy after the failure of his New Party and found what he was looking for.

The BUF followed in 1932 and initially attracted some mainstream bourgeois backing, including, famously, from the press baron, Lord Rothermere, who personally wrote the Daily Mail’s front page article, “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” (8 January 1934). The BUF openly (and against Mussolini’s advice) organised a paramilitary wing, the Blackshirts.

Mosley’s BUF programme included turning parliament into an advisory body; supervising the press; banning strikes. The economy of his Corporate State was to be managed by a National Council of Corporations formed from employers, consumers and unions. Full employment and economic growth would, apparently, abolish class struggle.

There was open, deliberate violence against anti-fascist protesters at the BUF’s Olympia rally, in June 1934, which was one factor is stripping away “respectable” Tory fellow-travellers from the BUF. The BUF claimed 40,000 members in 1934.

Mosley’s movement was a young movement. District leaders were normally in their 20s or 30s. A survey of 103 leaders revealed that 60% were ex-armed forces; many BUF election candidates were displaced professionals who had worked in the British empire.

Aside from small gains in Lancashire the BUF failed to recruit many unionised or industrial workers. In so far as it did recruit workers it did so from those in weakly organised sectors and with a “deferential attitude”, where foreigners were more likely to appears as bosses or competitors. (Mosley, by Robert Skidelsky). The BUF had an Industrial Section (slogan “Power Action, not Industrial Action”) and its members were asked to form groups in the trade unions.

From inception, but especially after 1936, the BUF was explicitly, violently, antisemitic. Mosley was married to Diana Mitford at Josef Goebbels' home in 1936; one of the small number of guests was Adolf Hitler. A signed photograph of Hitler and a line drawing of Mussolini hung on the walls of Mosley’s BUF office.

The BUF’s name was changed to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists in 1936.

On Sunday 4 October 1936 the most famous confrontation between the British Union and anti-fascist protesters took place East London. Adapting the slogan of the Spanish anti-fascist workers fighting Franco, the left declared, “They Shall Not Pass!” 3,000 fascists, protected by 7,000 police were stopped, fought, and defeated by 200,000 protesters during the Battle of Cable Street. After Cable Street the 1936 Public Order Act was passed which banned political uniforms and aimed to prevent paramilitary groups aligned with political organisations from organising. Its original aim may have been to restrict the BUF, but the provisions in the Act have mainly been used against the left and trade unions.

Although the anti-fascist victory at Cable Street was a great morale booster for the left, 2,000 East Enders joined the BUF in the immediate aftermath of Cable Street.

The fascists were not driven from the East End altogether. Between August 1936 and December 1938 the BUF held 2,108 meetings in the East End, home to 150,000 of the 350,000 British Jews. And the BUF continued to march. For example, a year later, on 3 October 1937, a mile from Cable Street, south of the river, the BU attempted to march through the centre of working-class Bermondsey and was met with barricades and bricks.

The East End of London was the only area in the country that the BUF could plausibly claim mass support. Many BUF members in East London were small traders, and a disproportionate number were furniture makers.

Although the BUF won a small number of council seats in the 1930s it was never close to winning a parliamentary election. In the 1935 general election, the party did not run candidates. It advocated abstention, and declared “fascism next time”.

By 1937, as capitalism had stabilised in Britain and those members of the ruling class who had considered Mosley’s movement as a possible auxiliary to the Tory Party had retreated, the fascist movement was in crisis. Mosley sacked 110 of the 140 headquarters staff in one afternoon.

In 1937 William Joyce (the future Nazi collaborator Lord Haw-Haw, hung as a traitor after the war) split from the BUF to found the Hitlerite National Socialist League. The NSL was wound-up in chaos in 1939 and Joyce left for Nazi Germany.

By 1939 the BUF had around 9,000 subscription-paying members.

In September 1939, following the declaration of war against Germany the BUF was proscribed. Under Defence Regulation 18b 750 members of the BUF, and a small number of activists from smaller fascist groups, were interned following waves of arrests. Oswald Mosley was arrested on 23 May 1940, together with other leaders and organisers. A bigger wave of detentions took place in June and included Mosley’s wife.

Mosley’s policy was opposition to war with Germany, stating Britain should come to an agreement with Hitler and that the Jews and Eastern Europe were not worth British troops dying for. Publicly Mosely told members not to impede Britain’s war effort.

Mosley and nine BUF leaders were held in Brixton prison and 24 women fascists were locked up in Holloway. Most were eventually billeted in a camp on the Isle of Man.

Most fascist detainees were released towards the end of the war after it became clear that the Allies would win.

What the BUF had managed to do, however, was to create a fascist cadre. Many hundreds of fascists were committed enough to go into detention and emerge unrepentant. This is the key to understanding the reinvention and re-emergence of fascist and crypto-fascist organisations in the 1950s and 60s. The new movement was created and carried by people who had learned their fascism in the BUF.

After the War

The disruption and repression of fascist organisation in the Second World War, and the political damage caused to any people or groups linked to Hitler and the Holocaust, limited the possibilities of far-right political organisation immediately after the war. Many British people considered Mosley and members of the British Union to be traitors.

Mosley resumed open political campaigning only in 1948, founding the Union Movement to bring together far right fragments, many of which were led by ex-BUF members. Mosley and the UM advocated corporatism, trade based on the British Empire and a pan-European nationalism, and the integration of the European states to exploit Africa. Outside of the East End, UM candidates scored badly in elections and the UM dwindled.

Also eager to escape accusations of Nazism, former BUF leader and editor of Blackshirt A K Chesterton founded the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), on the right-wing edge of the Conservative Party, in 1954. Chesterton combined support for white rule in Africa with antisemitism, anti-Communism and anti-Americanism. By the end of the 1950s the LEL more and more emphasised anti-immigrant racism. The LEL acted as a gathering place for future fascist leaders, using the shadow of the Tory party as a respectable cover. John Tyndall and Martin Webster, future leaders of the National Front, were among the younger members. Colin Jordan (who had been a member of one of the post-BUF groups in the mid 40s) left in 1957 because Chesterton rejected his proposal to ban Jews and non-whites from membership.

The LEL exploited political space to the right of the mainstream Tory leadership which had accepted the inevitable loss of British colonies and, for the time being, reconciled itself to the welfare state. By 1958 the LEL had 3,000 members, although it declined sharply in the early 1960s.

Aiming to fill a similar political space, but organically Tory, rather than fascist entryists and satellites, the Monday Club was founded by four young Conservatives in January 1961. The Monday Club was pro-apartheid and anti-immigration. Within a few years the Monday Club had a few hundred members and the support of eleven Tory MPs.

By the late 1960s the Monday Club was more clearly a pro-free market, low tax, “small state” grouping, which made it distinct from the “corporatist” fascist groups.

In 1970 Conservative government six Cabinet members were supporters of the Monday Club. Club members included the MPs Harvey Proctor, Ann and Nicholas Winterton, Rhodes Boyson, Neil Hamilton, Peter Bottomley and Alan Clarke. The Club had the support of 35 MPs, a similar number of peers, and had about 10,000 members.

Immigration

By the late 1950s increasing numbers of Black and Asian immigrants were arriving in the UK, encouraged by government campaigns to recruit to the NHS and other public services. The numbers of Commonwealth immigrants were comparatively small: 8 to 10,000 per year in the early 1950s, and 35,000 by 1957.

Racist violence broke out in Nottingham and Notting Hill, west London, in 1958. And campaigns against colour bars began to take place. In 1963 Black workers won a campaign to allow non-white workers to work at the Bristol Omnibus Company against a colour bar which had been backed by the bus workers’ union, the TGWU.

The Tory government passed anti-immigrant legislation in 1961. In the 1964 general election Peter Griffiths, the Conservative candidate, ran an explicitly racist campaign and in the Smethwick of Birmingham, defeating the Labour incumbent, against the national trend and with a 7% swing.

Griffiths' election impacted on Enoch Powell, who realised racism could be used to electoral advantage.

The fascist and racist right had also orientated sharply to anti-immigrant racism. Racist white residents’ organisations were organised and gained strength.

John Tyndall had been advocating fascist unity for several years. In his journal, Spearhead, he wrote, “Union is not only desirable, it is essential to our success. But at the moment the Right cannot see the way to unite…. What the groups can do is at least negotiate methods of cooperation.” (January 1965).

In March 1966 Labour won a general election landslide. The far right concluded that there was the possibility for a new party occupying political space to the right of Edward Heath’s Tory party. Over the summer of 1966 the main leaders of the fascist and crypto-fascist right discussed a far-right unity project, advocated by A K Chesterton. They met at Chesterton’s Croydon flat.

Chesterton rejected including Colin Jordan as an overt pro-Hitlerite who would tie a new right party too closely to the discredited German Nazis, and would limit the possibility for the rapid expansion of far right influence. And Tyndall – who had come into far-right politics through dressing up in Nazi uniform and had recently been arrested and jailed for possession of weapons - was considered undesirable by Chesterton for the same reason.

The National Front was founded on 7 February 1967. It claimed 2,500 members. 1,000 came from the British National Party of John Bean, a former Union Movement and LEL member who had parted ways with Jordan and Tyndall. 300 came from the League of Empire Loyalists, and 100 from a faction of the Racial Preservation Society. The new NF denied it would allow neo-Nazis into membership and stressed its opposition to non-white immigration, advocacy of Black repatriation, support for apartheid South Africa, and populist opposition to mainstream politicians.

In June 1967 John Tyndall announced the dissolution of his organisation, the Greater Britain Movement (GBM), and told his 138 members to join the NF as individuals. The GBM had been created in 1964 from a split among explicit Nazis and was named after a book by Oswald Mosley.

The GBM had campaigned for laws to stop “marriage between Britons and non-Aryans,” and for forced sterilisation of those with racial, mental or physical “defects”.

Tyndall was encouraged to join the new National Front by the ex-BNP grouping in the NF who had begun faction-fighting with Chesterton. Chesterton was accused of wanting a small, narrow, elitist organisation. Apparently, Chesterton objected to rowdy chanting.

Among Tyndall’s uncompromising followers was Martin Webster who would become a leader and organiser of the NF. Webster had been jailed for an attack on Jomo Kenyatta.

On 20 April 1968 Tory MP Enoch Powell made the "Rivers of Blood" speech in Birmingham. Powell denounced immigration and advocated it be reduced to “negligible proportions” and funds be provided for Black and Asian immigrants to be repatriated.

The Times called the speech “evil” and leading Tories threatened to resign from the Shadow Cabinet if Powell was not removed. Powell was sacked as Shadow Defence Secretary by Conservative leader, Edward Heath, who described Powell’s speech as “racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions.”

Powell’s cynical outburst had been preceded by a crisis for Kenyan Asians, and the Labour government’s shameful response to that crisis. Kenya had become independent in 1963 and had a significant Asian population most of whom had British passports. After the mid-60s the Kenyan state began a policy of Africanisation, which was hostile to Kenyan Asian people, some of whom began to move to the UK. By 1967 about 1,000 Kenyan Asians were arriving each month.

Panicked by racist agitation led by Powell and Duncan Sandys, the Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan, rammed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act through parliament in three days. The Act forced would-be immigrants to prove a close connection with the UK.

Immigration became the central issue in the British media. A poll at the end of April showed 74% agreeing with what Powell said and 69% believed Heath was wrong to sack Powell. Powell claimed to have received 43,000 letters and 7,000 telegrams expressing support for him in the two weeks after the speech.

On Tuesday 23 April 1968 the Race Relations Bill had its second reading in Parliament, strengthening somewhat the provisions of the 1965 Act, outlawing discrimination in housing and employment. On the same day London dockers struck and marched for Powell. Several hundred lobbied East End Labour MPs Peter Shore and Ian Mikardo. The MPs were shouted down and Mikardo was attacked.

As the journalist Martin Walker pointed out, “4,400 dockers struck but only 800 were on the march.” Dock organisation was in a poor way following mass redundancies under the Devlin report and the workers were demoralised. “By contrast the dockers refused to march against the Ugandan Asians in 1972, when they were united and confident following … the release of the dockers imprisoned at Pentonville.” (Martin Walker, The National Front).

Other groups of workers struck, and Smithfield 400 meat porters also marched for Powell. The porters were organised by Dan Harmston, a Mosleyite and member of the Unity Movement.

One effect of Powell’s speech was to push some right wing Tories into the NF. The NF stood 45 candidates in the local elections in 1969 and averaged 8%.

The Huddersfield organiser of the NF commented about the effect of Powell’s speech: “We held a march in support of what Powell said… Powell gave our morale and membership a tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke we were getting only cranks and perverts. After we started to attract …right-wing members of the Tory organisations.”

In December 1968 an internal survey of 412 Tory constituency organisations suggested 327 wanted immigration stopped altogether. Tory leader Edward Heath was shocked and responded by shifting to a more intolerant policy. Their 1970 manifesto included: “We will ensure that there will be no further large scale permanent immigration,” and offered “help to Commonwealth immigrants who wish to return to their countries of origin.”

In these circumstances the Monday Club grew, and was in the way of the new NF. Powell was never a member of the Club but was guest of honour at their November 1968 banquet. The Tory right was helping the National Front by cultivating racism in general society; however, by being highly visible and shifting Conservative policy, they made the Tory Party a more attractive destination for racists.

The NF and the workers

The fascist National Front had an awkward relationship with the right of the Tory Party. These Tories were pro-free-market, pro-US and NATO, elitists and often patricians, and sometimes favoured the Common Market (as the EU was then called). The fascists wanted to recruit from poorer layers and workers. They wanted members who would march on the streets and fight.

The NF had originally backed the Heath government’s anti-union legislation, the Industrial Relations Act (1971), criticising it for being too weak. Now they pivoted.

The NF conference in 1972 debated their trade union policy. The conference defeated a motion which advocated setting up a separate NF trade union in favour of a policy of working in existing unions.

The National Front was encouraged by a number of disputes in the early 1970s in which black and Asian workers were not backed by the unions, or when their racism found a sympathetic echo amongst white workers. The NF was also encouraged by the reactionary Ulster Workers’ Council strike in May 1974.

In October 1972, 500 garment workers in Mansfield Hosiery’s factory in Loughborough went out on strike because the Asian workers at the plant had been denied access to the best paid jobs on knitting machines. For many years the workers’ union, the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers, had failed to support them in their attempts to gain promotion. The strike lasted 12 weeks and the union, eventually, under pressure, did make the strike official. The victory of the strikers was made possible through the support of local community organisations, backing from Asian workers in other factories, and from the left.

The most notorious event was the industrial battle at Imperial Typewriters, Leicester, in 1974. Imperial Typewriters was an American-owned company employing 1600 workers in Leicester, of whom 1,100 were Asian. The Asian workers were denied bonuses the white workers received.

Following a May Day walk-out about 500 Asian workers struck for three months. The TGWU refused to officially back the strike. The TGWU locally stated that the workers, “have no legitimate grievances,” and a TGWU official added, “some people must learn how things are done.” Most of the strikers were sacked and the dispute was effectively ended by the factory’s summer shutdown. The next year the plant closed for good.

The major turning point for the labour movement was the widespread backing for the Grunwick strikers – mainly Asian and women workers – which came two years later. The long-running Grunwick dispute began in August 1976 in opposition to bulling management and for union recognition. The Asian women were backed on mass pickets by very large numbers of white workers, including large NUM delegations from the coalfields.

NF backs strikes

In December 1973 the Front had announced support for workers striking at London sugar refineries. The NF’s Newham branch went to the picket lines and the NF distributed 2,000 leaflets calling on the workers to take political as well as industrial action by joining the NF.

At the start of 1974 the NF had 30 branches and 54 groups across the country, mainly in south east England. In February 1974 the NF backed the miners’ pay claim, calling for profit sharing and partnership.

The NF demanded free heating for pensioners and a state pension tied to average industrial wages. The NF became “populist” and developed a populist wing of recruits from a Tory background. This unsettled John Tyndall, a crypto-Nazi who became NF leader in 1972. The Party did badly in the two general elections held in 1974. Tyndall was exposed in a television documentary as being in close contact with German neo-Nazis and was soon voted out as Chair of the Front, replaced by the former Tory John Kingsley Read.

Increasingly the NF was opposed by the anti-fascist and anti-racist organisations and committees which had been developed in most towns nationwide. On 15 June 1974 an anti-NF protester, Kevin Gately, a second year maths student at Warwick University, was killed in Red Lion Square, Holborn, central London, as the left battled the NF. The exact circumstances of Gately’s death are unclear, but it is quite likely he was killed by police who were defending the Front. Gately was the first person to die on a political demonstration in Britain for over fifty years.

By the October 1974 general election the Labour Party prevented any Labour candidate from sharing a platform with the NF. 120 Labour Councils banned the NF from using council halls. The TUC began to take a stand and raise a voice against the NF, calling it a “Nazi Front”.

The “populist” wing of the National Front hived off. Led by Kingsley Read, they formed the National Party in January 1976 taking 2,000, or one quarter of the NF’s membership with them. The National Party won two seats on Blackburn Council before shrivelling.

Rock Against Racism (RAR) was set up in 1976, in response to racist remarks made by Eric Clapton and David Bowie. The Anti-Nazi League, under the ineffective ownership of the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), followed in 1977. Big marches and rock concerts were held in 1978.

In October 1978 the SWP/ANL held a carnival in Brockwell Park, Brixton, while the NF marched against the Asian community in Brick Lane. Faced with a choice between mass opposition, on the streets, to oppose fascist violence, and the chance to recruit youth at an ANL carnival, the SWP went ahead with the event. Many on the far left – including our forerunner, Socialist Organiser - went to Brick Lane and stood side-by-side with the Asian youth. We succeeded in blocking the NF.

The ground was shifting from the NF when they attempted to march in Lewisham on 13 August 1977. The NF had been active in the area, running a racist “anti-mugging” campaign. Physical attacks, fire-bombings and attacks on left-wing paper sellers took place.

Over 1,000 fascists, protected by 5,000 police, were confronted by thousands of socialists, anarchists, trade unionists and black residents. The march was attacked and widespread fighting broke out. The police herded the Front round the backstreets and onto buses.

In April 1979 the police Special Patrol Group killed Blair Peach on a protest against a National Front election meeting in Southall. Left-wing and black community organisation had begun to remake the labour movement as a place which was anti-racist, and the radical movements had actively prevented the NF marching in Lewisham. That was part of the reason for the NF’s eclipse. The other element was that the Tory Party, under Margaret Thatcher, provided an attractive place for racists to assemble, closing political space Heath had left to the Tory Party’s right.

The NF split and declined after Thatcher’s 1979 election. One offshoot, the BNP, would have some small electoral successes especially around 2009, but mostly the far right has remained splintered ever since. On 13 July the "For Britain" movement, a splinter from UKIP which aspired to regain the ground of the BNP, formally wound itself up. Other splinters remain active.