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Any Colour as Long as It’s Black

After Millwall, debate gripped the BNP. Activists who had tramped the streets of London’s East End and seen first hand what a few thousand low budget leaflets, false rumours and some doorstep cajoling could do, wanted the party to throw its efforts into more of the same. If only temporarily, Beackon’s victory had shaken the idea that a vote for the BNP was a ‘wasted’ vote.

John Tyndall, the BNP’s leader, wasn’t so sure. He had tried the electoral route once before in the 1970s as chairman of the National Front and it had proved useless. This softly-softly approach wasn’t really what being in a fascist party was about. For all the talk of fair treatment and housing allocations and equal rights to Tyndall, fascism was street politics, and a far-right party like the BNP could only bully its way into power. Looking for allies, Tyndall’s attention lighted upon Nick Griffin, an activist who had recently been drawn into the BNP’s orbit. ‘The electors of Millwall’, Griffin wrote in a party magazine, ‘did not back a postmodernist rightist party, but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan “Defend Rights for Whites” with well-directed boots and fists.’1

This was exactly what Tyndall wanted to hear – which should have made him wary. Griffin, then in his mid-thirties, had an arcane personal ideology formed from a soup of foreign and British intellectual traditions, along with a proven ability to switch allegiances at opportune moments. In nearly two decades of political activity, this chameleon had shown he could come in any colour, as long as it was black.

Born in 1959, in Barnet on the northern outskirts of London, Griffin was the son of right-wing Conservative Party activists (his father, Edgar, a small business owner, had met Nick’s mother when they both turned up to heckle a Communist Party meeting in the early 1950s). Griffin received his early political education in the family home. It wasn’t, perhaps, an entirely typical childhood: Griffin says that by the age of fourteen, he had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, although he has often claimed that only the chapter on propaganda made any lasting impression on him. Nevertheless, Griffin described his parents to me as mainstream Conservatives who were pushed rightwards by the Heath Government that came to power in 1970, and were ‘increasingly dismayed by a Tory Government not doing anything to move the country back after Labour had ratcheted it leftwards.’

Above all, the issue that exercised the Griffins most, like many others on the Tory right, was immigration. For them, as for many others, the politics of the period were defined by the Tory MP Enoch Powell, in whose career were reflected the contortions of the British elite as it tried to reconcile itself to the loss of empire. Powell had set out as a vocal opponent of decolonization, but when that came to nothing, he reinvented himself as a champion of the free market and the free movement of labour: during his stint as health minister in the late 1950s, he was one of the first to encourage nurses from former colonies to move to the UK. As late as 1964, he declared, ‘I have set and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin.’ But when these new workers were not matched with expanded public services, Powell was one of the first to shape the resulting white resentment into a new political language.2

From 1965 onwards, Powell made a startling about-turn. After councillors in his Wolverhampton constituency expressed fears about the birth rate among non-whites in 1965, Powell demanded that Commonwealth immigrants be prevented from bringing their spouses and children into the country. When race riots in Detroit and other American cities erupted in the summer of 1967, he published a piece in the Sunday Express asking: ‘Can We Afford to Let Our Race Problem Explode?’ Then, in 1968, came a series of speeches that laid out the blueprint for anti-immigrant politics in the decades to come.

The first, delivered in Walsall on 9 February, conjured the image of a lone white child marooned in a classroom of immigrants. His misinterpretation of immigration statistics to back up his assertion foreshadowed the ‘numbers game’ now played by politicians across the spectrum. The second, in Birmingham on 20 April, was supported by an anecdote about an anonymous constituent, an elderly lady whose street had been overrun by blacks and who was now terrorised by ‘grinning picanninies’ pushing excrement through her letter box. Another anonymous constituent, Powell claimed, had expressed the fear that ‘in this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’ The third, made in Eastbourne on 18 November, explicitly linked race and nation. ‘The West Indian or Indian does not, by being born in England become an Englishman,’ stated Powell. ‘In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still.’ He invoked a ‘mass of immigrants, living in their own communities, speaking their own languages and maintaining their native customs.’

This was a new kind of racism; a departure from the old, imperial kind that insisted on the biological superiority of whites. Powell recast whites as victims, under threat from alien cultures. His speeches, relayed to millions of people across the country who had never experienced immigration first-hand, appeared to confirm their worst fears about the presence of non-whites in British cities. They also contained many of the features of subsequent far-right propaganda: a vulnerable woman, dirt, the prospect of invasion. When Edward Heath dismissed Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, it sent many of his supporters on the Tory right hurtling towards a new political grouping, the National Front.

In October 1974, Edgar Griffin, now living in Suffolk, took his wife and two teenage children to a National Front meeting at a pub near the football ground in Norwich. In the pub’s function room, in front of a genteel audience of about fifty people, a well-spoken young man gave a speech on immigration: why both main parties, Labour and Conservatives, would never stop the flow of immigrants and why the National Front was the only party committed to the repatriation of non-whites.

The NF, an alliance of ultra-conservatives, ‘empire loyalists’ and neo-Nazis that had formed in 1967, was the main beneficiary of the Powell affair. Aware that the larger part of their doctrine was shunned by the vast majority of the population, Britain’s small network of fascists was constantly on the lookout for points where their ideas overlapped with mainstream opinion. Powell seemed to have provided one. As one of the NF’s founders, John Bean, later recalled: ‘Here was a leading, respectable, orthodox politician saying what we had said for more than a decade.’3

When Powell was condemned by his own party’s leadership and dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet, recruits to the NF soared. As one former NF official claimed, ‘Before Powell spoke, we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speeches we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of Tory organisations.’4 The Heath Government responded by moving to the right on immigration policy, but this only provoked further demands for control. The NF experienced a further rise in support, particularly after the arrival in 1972 of Asian refugees from the former British colony of Uganda and at its peak claimed some 12,000 members – hardly a mass party, but unprecedented on the far right of British politics.

At the pub in Norwich, the fifteen-year-old Nick Griffin, then a pupil at the fee-paying Saint Felix school in Southwold, was impressed by what he heard. Ignoring his father’s advice to join the Conservatives and work from within, he joined the National Front the following year, soon becoming secretary of the Ipswich branch.

During that period, the National Front was becoming increasingly dominated by a group of hardliners. The future BNP leader John Tyndall, initially barred from the NF because of his neo-Nazi activities, manoeuvred to take leadership of the party in 1972. In 1974, the year Griffin first attended an NF meeting, Tyndall established an ‘Honour Guard’ of young men to accompany the NF at marches and rallies. His intent, as he stated openly, was to mimic the propaganda techniques of the Third Reich:

What is it that touches off a chord in the instincts of the people to whom we want to appeal? It can often be the most simple and primitive thing. Rather than a speech or printed article it may just be a flag; it may be a marching column; it may be the sound of a drum; it may be a banner or it may just be the impression of a crowd. None of these things contain in themselves one single argument, one single piece of logic . . . [instead] they are recognised as being among the things that appeal to the hidden forces of the human soul.5

In 1976, a more moderate faction, led by John Kingsley Read, split off to form the National Party, taking a chunk of the Tory-leaning membership with them. Griffin, however, stayed put.

Dominated by Tyndall and his sidekick Martin Webster, the National Front became more openly extreme. Tyndall would play the ‘respectable’ figurehead, addressing gatherings in a pompous oratorical style, while Webster would deliver rabble-rousing tirades aimed at the younger, more unruly supporters. As the 1970s drew on, the level of racist violence in areas where the NF was active soared.

At the end of 1977, Griffin – now studying history and law at Cambridge – attended a meeting at the National Front’s headquarters in Leicester. Here, along with a working-class sixteen-year-old activist from Dagenham in East London named Joe Pearce, he was appointed to the governing body of a new group, the Young National Front. One of the Young National Front’s first projects was to produce and distribute propaganda intended to undermine the growing anti-racist and anti-fascist movements. In 1976, the Rock Against Racism campaign had been established in response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment, encapsulated by comments made on stage by the rock musician Eric Clapton. The Anti-Nazi League was launched the following year, as alarm grew at the impact of the National Front. In January 1978, the Young National Front produced 250,000 leaflets aimed at schoolchildren titled ‘How to spot a Red teacher’. The accompanying pamphlet, ‘How to combat a Red teacher’, suggested that teachers who promoted racial equality in the classroom, or denigrated nationalism in any way, were part of a Communist plot to take over the UK. Griffin’s life at this point would revolve around his Cambridge studies during the week, and National Front activities at the weekends. Most often, he would travel to London, where he would spend his time at the party’s headquarters in East London, providing ‘security’ or selling newspapers at the party’s regular pitch just off Brick Lane in Whitechapel.

The NF, however, was already in decline. At its peak, in the 1977 elections for the Greater London Council, it received over 10 per cent of the vote in some boroughs,6 but the party’s morale was broken by a riot in Lewisham in August the same year, where its marchers were driven off the streets by a much larger Anti-Nazi League demonstration. Similar clashes over the following months drove away many more moderate supporters, some of whom were lured back to the Conservative Party in 1978 when its new leader, Margaret Thatcher, gave a television interview in which she described the fear of white Britons being ‘swamped’ by an alien culture. Not only did this stance draw some voters away from the NF; it indicated that the ‘new’ racism of Enoch Powell had now been repackaged and made part of the political mainstream. As Alfred Sherman, the former Communist who had become one of Thatcher’s closest advisors, wrote in the Telegraph that same year, ‘It is from a recognition of racial difference that a desire develops in most groups to be among their own kind; and this leads to distrust and hostility when newcomers come in.’7

The NF performed abysmally in the 1979 general election, despite standing a record number of candidates. As a result Tyndall was ousted from the leadership by his erstwhile ally Martin Webster. Supporting Webster in this was Griffin, now part of a group of young activists who thought the NF needed to tailor its appeal more to alienated, urban working-class youth. They were known as the ‘Strasserites’.

Attacking the free-market values of the Thatcher Government and calling for social security that guaranteed a basic standard of living – so long as you were white and British – the Strasserites took their name from two brothers who had been members of the German Nazi Party. Gregor and Otto Strasser were ‘left-wing’ Nazis who purported to side with workers against big business but rejected Communism as an anti-German plot. Griffin and other young NF members advocated Strasserite ideas through Nationalism Today, a magazine established as a counter to the official party journals in 1979.

One article, headlined ‘We Are Not Marxists – We Are Not Capitalists’, promised ‘radical ideological development’ of the NF’s programme:

We reject the Marxist belief that human consciousness and social structures have their ultimate origins in changing economic relations and that a future change in economic relations will lead to a new human type and to a new society free from antagonism of any kind. We reject the Capitalist prescription that political man must make way for economic man and that our decisions, personal as well as political, should be made on economic grounds; that we should live in order to work, rather than work in order to live.8

Did this make the NF Strasserites ‘left-wing’? The short answer is no, since racial purity and private property took precedence over any egalitarian commitment. They combined the Strassers’ ideas with the creed of Distributism, an economic theory that grew from a tradition of English radical right-wing thought in the early twentieth century. It held that the political elite acted only in the interests of an international ‘plutocracy’ and that the solution lay in an equal distribution of private property among the national community. These ideas were first explored by the journalist Hilaire Belloc in The Party System (1911), which argued that both Liberal and Tory parliamentary front benches had more in common with one another – serving the interests of big business – than with their own membership. The Servile State (1912) argued that state welfare provision would only end up enslaving the working class.

After the First World War, Belloc’s ideas were taken up and shaped into the creed of Distributism by his friend G.K. Chesterton. It looked back to a heavily idealized medieval Christian Europe of peasants, where craftsmen and merchants were organized into guilds that set prices and regulated competition. According to Chesterton, the advent of capitalism, which was unstable and put wealth in the hands of a few, only undermined this. He argued that every English family should own its own means of production, as a guarantee of economic independence and liberty.9

For the National Front Strasserites, Distributism conveniently provided a bridge between mainstream political thought and their own racism. Not only did it give a ‘patriotic’ gloss to their ideas, but Chesterton’s distrust of Bolshevism and ‘cosmopolitan finance’ had at times shaded into anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Such anti-Semitism had always been a feature of far-right doctrine in the UK, and the Strasserites were no exception. Capitalism and ‘national independence’ could not coexist, they argued; the sovereignty of the nation state must be protected from the ‘Money Power’. During one of our interviews, Griffin readily admitted to the anti-Semitic nature of the Strasserite programme: ‘Our position . . . was the leftist SA10 position where they happily allied themselves with the Communists and said well as regards the banks we’ll shoot the Jewish ones and you shoot the rest.’ He laughed. ‘Fairly pragmatic.’

Past issues of Nationalism Today are full of anti-Semitic caricatures: in one, a cigar-smoking, hook-nosed businessman is blamed for acid rain in an illustration accompanying an article titled ‘Capitalism Poisons Europe’.11 Numerous articles about ‘black crime’ (a favourite 1970s NF propaganda theme) appear along with adverts for The Turner Diaries, a novel by the American white supremacist William Luther Pierce in which he imagines a violent revolution and ensuing race war in the United States. The novel has inspired neo-Nazis around the world – most notably Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in April 1995.

The day-to-day reality of the National Front in the 1980s was more prosaic. It had been smashed as a serious political force, while Webster continued to recruit the most thuggish elements to its cause. Its propaganda was based on crude racism and little else. Under Webster’s direction, the Young National Front launched a youth magazine, Bulldog, aimed at the skinhead subculture and edited by Pearce, who spent two spells in prison for incitement to racial hatred as a result. It also established a music venture, White Noise, which promoted ‘white power’ punk rock and was centred on the racist skinhead band Skrewdriver. Griffin organized festivals for Skrewdriver and other bands on his parents’ land in Suffolk. Webster’s leadership lasted until 1983, before he too was forced out of the National Front – by the Strasserites. This heralded yet another ideological twist.

Run by a couple of well-spoken graduates named Nick and Michael, on the face of it Heritage Tours seemed much like any other company offering to take tourists on trips around London’s landmarks during the mid-1980s. But away from the day job, the ‘guides’ were committed racial nationalists, working to formulate a political creed that combined ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, fascist mysticism and ideas about building a social movement derived in part from Marxist philosophy.

Heritage Tours was run from the central London flat of Michael Walker – one of several money-making schemes Griffin took part in to fund his political activities. Walker, a former regional organizer of the NF and a talented linguist, was convinced that the British far right lacked theory. He developed an interest in ideas circulating among a group of intellectuals within the French far-right Front National, associated with the Groupement de recherches et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (the Research and Study Group for European Civilization) or GRECE. Led by the philosopher Alain de Benoist, GRECE attacked what it saw as the soulless nature of consumer capitalism. Liberal, multiracial America was seen as the worst embodiment of this phenomenon, against which de Benoist advocated a revival of European national cultures. Rather than arguing for the superiority of one race over another, he maintained the issue was one of difference: keeping races and cultures separate would lead to a national spiritual rebirth and end the alienation of contemporary life.12

De Benoist also took ideas about strategy from the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. Drawing on Gramsci’s ‘war of position’ theory, he argued that the far right needed to achieve cultural hegemony before it could gain political power, pushing key ideas and values among groups of influential people. As the GRECE journal Eléments explained, ‘We want to attract those few thousand people who make a country tick. A few thousand is not many in absolute terms, but a few thousand of such importance, sharing the same thoughts and methods, represent the potential for revolution.’13

Meanwhile, Heritage Tours became the subject of a press exposé thanks to the involvement of Roberto Fiore, a friend of Griffin’s.14 Only a few months older than Griffin, he had fled to London from Italy with the help of the League of St George, a clandestine far-right network that provided ‘safe houses’ for neo-Nazis on the run. Fiore, despite maintaining his innocence, was wanted by Italian police because of his association with a terrorist group, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei), which had bombed a Bologna train station in 1980, killing eighty-five people.

Fiore was part of a new generation of Italian fascists who rejected parliamentary politics, looking instead to the ideas of the Sicilian mystic philosopher Julius Evola (1898–1974). Like de Benoist, Evola had criticized the decadence of capitalist society, but for him, spiritual rebirth would be achieved by an elite warrior caste. Fiore had used Evola’s ideas to formulate a creed he called Terza Posizione, which like the Strasserites claimed to take up a ‘third’ position that was neither Capitalist nor Communist, and sought to achieve its goals by building grassroots social movements.

When Fiore arrived in Britain, he was looking for activists among whom he could spread Third Positionist ideas and struck up a friendship with Griffin, who was impressed by the Italian’s knowledge and organizational experience. Together with two other young National Front members, Derek Holland and Patrick Harrington, the group became known as the ‘Political Soldiers’, after a manifesto written by Holland and published in 1984. Claiming that the white race was under threat and the ‘death of Europe’ was at hand, the manifesto called for activists ‘to be moulded into National Revolutionary Warriors’, and to become a new type of man ‘who will live the Nationalist way of life every day’. The manifesto concluded with the exhortation ‘Long Live Death!’, a slogan derived from Evola.15

Such rhetoric proved unpalatable to many NF members and the party split in 1986, with the Political Soldiers naming their faction the Official National Front. They further elaborated their theory of race, arguing that ‘the racialist position now adopted by the National Front is based on the Nationalist principle that self-rule and the preservation of racial and cultural identity is the inalienable right of all the people of the world.’16 Following this logic, they began to adopt the language of black separatist and Third World liberation movements, professing support for the Iranian Revolution and Palestinian freedom. The Political Soldiers heaped praise on the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya theory of direct democracy, claiming ‘the very ideology which we hold dear is articulated in a superbly concise and direct manner in the pages of [Gaddafi’s] Green Book.’17 They also applauded the ‘true democracy’ of the Libyan People’s Committee and Gaddafi’s ‘belief in the inalienable right to self-determination of all the races of mankind’. The Green Book, then, was ‘essential reading for all who share our vision’. Griffin and Holland travelled to the Libyan capital Tripoli in search of financial support from Gaddafi, who at the time was funding a range of groups who opposed Western governments. They returned empty-handed, save for a couple of crates of the revered volume.

Beyond their own dwindling circle, the Political Soldiers had little impact. Unsuccessful attempts were made to set up a housing co-op in Northern Ireland in 1986 and, later, to infiltrate the anarchist squatters’ movement in Hackney, East London.18 The Official National Front increasingly came to resemble a cult: selected groups of recruits were reportedly taken for ideological cadre ‘training’ on Griffin’s parents’ land, while slogans such as ‘Fight Racism’ rapidly alienated members who had not kept up with the pace of change. When the March 1988 edition of the party newspaper featured pictures of Gaddafi, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and the US black separatist Louis Farrakhan on the front cover, it provoked a wave of resignations from the party.

The Official National Front disbanded in 1989 and Griffin’s clique renamed itself the International Third Position. They began buying dilapidated properties in rural France and renovating them: Griffin describes this as purely a business venture but others have claimed it was an attempt to set up a commune.19 At the same time he was becoming politically estranged from Holland and Fiore, both of whom were Catholics, and were introducing an increasing amount of religious rhetoric into the ITP’s doctrine.

In March 1990, Griffin says he was stacking a bonfire at one of the properties in France when he accidentally threw some shotgun cartridges onto the fire. One apparently exploded, seriously injuring Griffin and blinding him in one eye. He was forced to return to convalesce at home with his parents, who were almost bankrupted after they had bailed him out of a property deal gone wrong. For the time being, Griffin disappeared from active politics. He had achieved nothing, but the ideas he had toyed with would later resurface as he manoeuvred to take over the BNP.