HOW TO BEAT THE NAZIS

Nick Griffin makes a highly publicised visit to Sighthill in Glasgow. Shortly afterwards a young Kurdish asylum seeker is stabbed to death. British National Party members boast about their activities in whipping up feelings against refugees.

It seems that we have been here before. In 1976 Kingsley Read, leader of the fascist National Party, announced after the racist killing of Gurdip Singh Chaggar, 'One down, 1 million to go.' Across east London racist attacks rose in the wake of this inflammatory statement.

The fear felt by many that the BNP's June election results were the herald of a rise in racism and Nazi attacks have proved justified. We have seen a summer of race riots in a number of northern English towns such as Burnley and Bradford. Whites from poor estates are courted by the BNP and told that their problems stem from the 'preferential treatment' given to Asians. The BNP tries to pretend that it is purely defending 'white culture'--but its real aim is to foment race hatred. The Glasgow death shows where that leads. Yet the recent rise of the BNP has been aided by some of those who profess to be very far from Nazi policies. The media has bent over backwards to give them a hearing, despite the fact that media respectability is what the Nazis crave if they are to move into mainstream politics. The police have told Asians to stay out of their own town centres in places like Oldham in order to avoid 'trouble'--racist attacks from the Nazis and their supporters. The government has banned events like the Anti Nazi League carnival in Burnley, claiming they are as bad as the Nazis. Press and government have encouraged attacks on asylum seekers by their demonisation of them as scroungers, and by their discriminatory voucher and dispersal policies.

We have been here before as well. Whenever the Nazis grow, it throws mainstream politicians into crisis. They dislike the racist policies but have no real answers to them, because this would mean confronting the inadequacies of the system in a much more thoroughgoing way than they are prepared to do. They are also often threatened electorally by the Nazis. So while they denounce racism and fascism, they make concessions to the Nazis' arguments. Labour MP Ann Cryer recently located the problem of racism in Yorkshire as stemming from Asians who didn't speak English.

There has always been a different tradition of fighting fascism, which involves understanding the nature of the threat and that it can only be fought from below, by blacks and whites uniting to smash the Nazis before they gain the respectable foothold which Hitler achieved in Bavaria in the late 1920s, and which became a springboard for his eventual success in 1933. The examples of Le Pen in France, Haider in Austria and Fini in Italy all demonstrate the danger of allowing the Nazis to win electoral credibility. To launch a successful campaign we need to understand the nature of the beast. The Nazis don't just have a race hate ideology--their aim is to destroy every democratic institution in society which might challenge their ideology or inhibit their growth. This includes parliament, trade unions, cultural associations and non-Nazi press. They are prepared to use violence to achieve their ends.

Back to reality

The reality of what the BNP stands for is demonstrated by the career of one its members, David Copeland. He was a BNP member who took part in street attacks and attended party meetings. In April 1999 Copeland planted bombs in Brick Lane, Brixton, and a gay bar in Soho. Three people died in that attack. Altogether over 100 people were injured in the three bombings. Copeland told police he carried out the bombings to help ignite a race war which would lead to a BNP government: 'My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war in this country. There'd be a backlash from ethnic communities, then all of the white people would go out and vote BNP'--adding that 'I did it because I am a Nazi and I like killing people.' In his confession he boasted, 'I bombed the blacks, Pakis, degenerates. I would have bombed the Jews as well if I got a chance.' A BNP member told the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight,'I am almost certain that if Copeland hadn't joined the BNP and the NSM [National Socialist Movement] he would be an ordinary bloke working on the Jubilee Line. I think to start with there must have been something about him that made him do what he did, but I think that without that political education he would not have done it.'

All of this makes the sudden popularity Nick Griffin of the BNP seems to have found on the BBC alarming. Rod Liddle, the editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, explained the number of appearances Griffin has made on the programme to the New Statesman by saying he believed that 'people with strong opinions should be given the chance of asserting themselves', and that making mischief was his delight. Today knows that Griffin has a conviction for inciting race hatred and Holocaust denial but chooses not to mention it. There are reports that Today presenters have been instructed not to describe the BNP as 'neo-Nazis'.

A large part of this seems to be about class. In the world of Rod Liddle it seems to come as a surprise that the BNP's leader is public school and Cambridge educated rather than a crop-headed moron who starts on lager at breakfast. But the Nazis' leaders have never been anything other than well educated and articulate. Oswald Mosley was an upper class playboy. John Tyndall, who led the National Front in the 1970s, was middle class. Leading NF supporter Andrew Fountaine was a Norfolk landowner.

Lewisham in the 1970s (above)--the police protect the Nazis...as they do today in Bradford (below)

It has long been the liberal argument that if you give the Nazis media room they will expose themselves. Griffin's appearances on Today and Newsnight gave the lie to that. Seasoned presenters seem unable to deal with the fact that 56 years after the Holocaust Griffin is not going to appear in jackboots and black shirt, or try to start justifying Auschwitz. That, after all, is a historical albatross round the fascists' necks they are desperate to dump. So when Griffin says the BNP is no longer in favour of compulsory repatriation of non-whites it leaves his interviewer flummoxed. Despite having the research to hand, the BBC seems unable to point out that the BNP calls for complete racial segregation, voluntary repatriation and then compulsory repatriation for those who won't 'integrate'. How you are expected to do this in a racially segregated society is an interesting question. Nor do the interviewers ask how people will be categorised on racial lines. Is Ryan Giggs (whose father was black) white or non-white? What about Jews? Will people have to wear a badge identifying themselves as black, Jewish or Islamic, and how will racial segregation be enforced?

In an article on what he termed the 'Holohoax', for which Griffin was found guilty of race hatred, he argued, 'I am well aware that orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into soap and lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat... I have reached the conclusion that the "extermination" tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda and latter witch-hysteria.' Writing after the BNP's council by-election victory in Millwall in 1993, Griffin argued, 'The electors of Millwall did not back a post-modernist 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. When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate.'

Since the Second World War Nazis across the globe have been desperate to gain respectability. That means ditching the imagery of the 1930s and trying to downplay their real beliefs. What is important is not what Griffin says on television and radio--it is how those words translate down onto the street. His Nazi supporters understand that repatriation, whether voluntary or involuntary, requires a race war to achieve it, and that is what the BNP wants to spark.

Fighting the Nazis

In the 1930s large sections of the British ruling class had an extended love affair with Hitler, his ambassador Ribbentrop and Mussolini after they turned on the charm and showed how cultured they were. We cannot rely on the ruling class, whatever liberal noises it makes, to stop the Nazis. This is especially true over the question of banning the Nazis. It seems an attractive option --after all, how better to get the Nazis off the streets--but the experience is that such bans have nearly always been used to stop the left mobilising. The 1936 Public Order Act was rushed through after 100,000 workers stopped the British Union of Fascists marching through the East End of London at Cable Street. The police had made a determined attempt to clear the way for the fascists but were defeated by mass mobilisation. A Tory government promised the new law would stop the fascists. In reality it has been used against trade unionists and the left.

Bans have been used to demobilise the anti-fascist movement. What is happening under New Labour is worse than that. The bans are primarily aimed at preventing anti-fascist and anti-racist activities. It reached a new low in Welshpool, where the BNP staged a 'Red, White and Blue Festival', when Anti Nazi League activists were individually banned from the town, an exclusion zone was created round the town, and police said nobody would be allowed through unless they

produced a BNP membership card! Anti-fascists are then presented as the problem. It is worth saying that no one has ever been killed at an Anti Nazi League carnival. Any attempt to equate anti-fascists with the Nazis simply falls by an inspection of the collected convictions Griffin and others in the Nazi leadership share for racial violence and race hatred. When the Nazis have been banned in recent weeks in Oldham and elsewhere, they have still gathered to leaflet and spread their message of race hate.

The only guarantee of stopping the Nazis is by mobilising wherever they try and organise. The BNP thrives on media publicity. What is different about the Griffin leadership is that it has ditched the traditional fascist hostility to the media, and is actively courting coverage. Such publicity will only encourage future Copelands and further racial killings. We need to fight for the policy of no platform for Nazis.

Mobilising against the Nazis will raise the question of how we confront their thugs. The liberals will denounce us for supporting violence, but who would denounce the violence used at Cable Street in 1936 to stop the Mosleyites? What was crucial about Cable Street was the size of the mobilisation--over 100,000--and the targeted use of violence. Shops had 'Workers' shops' chalked on them to stop looting. Everything was concentrated on blocking the fascists' route and in confronting the police when they tried to clear the way. The violence used by the anti-fascists was not indiscriminate and it was proportional to the situation. The way Cable Street united English, Irish and Jewish, and brought together dockers and sweatshop workers, showed not just the widespread opposition to fascism but a growing realisation that, after Germany, Spain and Italy, fascism was a dagger pointed at the heart of the working class.

In 1977 Socialist Workers Party members, together with local people, confronted a Nazi march in Lewisham, south London, splitting it in half and forcing the Nazis to retreat. The effect was electric. Until then the National Front had been holding marches through black areas in an effort to intimidate people and show their invincibility. With one blow their balloon was punctured. This was the turning point in defeating the Nazis and consigning them to the political wilderness for years. In 1993, in the fortnight after the BNP election victory in Millwall, anti-fascists united to remove the Nazi paper sale from the top of Brick Lane in east London. That gave confidence to people across east London that the Nazis could be stopped. In their frustration the BNP's deputy leader and two other party members carried out an attack on a mixed race couple on the second Sunday hours afterwards, putting a beer glass into the man's head.

But what was important about these confrontations with the Nazis was that they involved black and white, women and men, young and old. Our very diversity was a weapon against the Nazis. In the 1970s the mass fightback of Asian youth in Yorkshire, the Midlands and Southall helped give confidence to their communities.

Turning the tables

Currently the BNP is avoiding holding street marches and rallies. Rather it wants media access to oil its electoral ambitions. Griffin has set his sights on winning council seats next spring. If the BNP goes unchallenged that is a possibility.

Anti-Nazis need to be out campaigning to show the reality of the BNP. In 1993 it was important that while Derek Beackon posed as a cheeky cockney chappie the ANL could publicise his real views across east London. After all, Beackon could be quoted saying, 'The Holocaust? It didn't happen. Maybe a couple of hundred thousand Jews died, but so what?' or 'Asians are rubbish and that is what we are going to clear from the streets.'

It is crucial that we mobilise vast numbers as we did in 1993 when 60,000 marched on the BNP headquarters in Welling, and in 1994 for the Anti Nazi League carnival. We also have weapons in the arsenal that the Nazis do not possess. So in September 1993 council workers in Millwall walked out the morning after Beackon's election following threats to them.

But something else is required. As in Oldham and Burnley, many voters in Millwall had voted BNP because they were disillusioned with Labour. Some saw it as a protest vote. Others were open to scapegoating immigrants. Socialists and trade unionists need to get out into white working class areas ensuring that the blame for a lack of council houses isn't pinned on asylum seekers, but on successive governments which haven't built a council house in 20 years, and on New Labour which is selling off council homes wholesale in cities like Glasgow. Poverty has been a growth industry in Britain under New Labour as well as the Tories. Low wages, pensions and benefits can't be blamed on Kurdish refugees.