Fighting the Nazi Threat Today

Nazis in Britain

The 1930s, 40s and 50s

FASCISM has never been ‘alien’ to Britain, as some would claim. Inspired by the triumph of the fascists in Italy and Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, ‘the Blackshirts’, was formed in 1933. They were active in stirring up hatred and anti-Semitism (hatred of the Jews). Physical attacks on Jews increased, and the Blackshirts marched through Jewish areas in the East End of London chanting, ‘The Yids, the Yids, we’ve got to get rid of the Yids!’ In 1936 the Blackshirts attempted a march through the heart of the Jewish community, in Cable Street in the East End of London. 100,000 people turned out to stop them in what become known as the Battle of Cable Street.

British Nazis made some attempts to reorganise in the 1940s and 1950s, but economic conditions did not favour them, and they met determined opponents such as the ‘43 Group’, which was set up by Jewish ex-servicemen after the war.

The 1960s and 70s

The first serious revival in fascism came in the 1970s. Black and Asian people had been invited to this country in large numbers after the war because there was a serious labour shortage. They had met much racism and hostility and from the late 1960s onwards which had been stirred up by politicians like Enoch Powell, and by increasing hysteria in the press. The most notorious intervention was a speech by Enoch Powell who predicted ‘rivers of blood’ if immigration continued.

Enoch Powell was a member of the Conservative shadow cabinet, and the speech, with its often lurid language, created a storm of racial hostility. Powell talked of the ‘menace ... of charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies’. Despite Powell’s sacking from the shadow cabinet, he received much public backing. London dockers and porters from London’s Smithfield meat market marched to parliament to support him. The release of papers from the Labour government of the 1960s has revealed that these marches were organised by members of the far right. The dock strike was organised by Harry Pearman, a supporter of the anti-Communist fundamentalist group Moral Rearmament. The meat porters were led by a fascist, Denholm Harmston, who stood for Oswald Mosley’s party in the 1966 general election. There was a huge rise in the hostility expressed towards Asians and black people, and racist attacks increased.

Powell continued to make such speeches throughout the 1970s, and the theme was taken up by other politicians and by hysterical reports in the press. In May 1976 there were reports of large numbers of Malawi Asians ‘flooding’ into the country, and racial hostility was whipped up by the fact that a few of them were temporarily accommodated in a luxury hotel. Following this, in July 1976, a ten year old Sikh, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, was murdered by a gang of white youths in Southall. John Kingsley Read, then a leader of the British National Party, commented, ‘One down--a million to go.’

The National Front

At the same time, economic conditions were worsening. Unemployment went over one million for the first time since the war, and reached one and a half million. Prices were rising, cutting the real value of wages, and deep cuts were being made in education, the health service and other welfare services.

In these circumstances Britain’s Nazis could grow, and the National Front gained support by blaming ‘immigrants’ (by which they meant anyone who wasn’t white) for taking jobs and for problems in housing, schools and other services.

Racial attacks increased. Nazis were selling newspapers and intimidating people on the streets and the National Front was beginning to attract votes in elections. In the Greater London Council elections of 1977 they won 119,000 votes, and in a by-election in West Bromwich, national organiser Martin Webster won 16.2 percent of the vote.

The National Front seemed about to overtake the Liberal Party to become the third force in British politics, which would give Nazi and racist ideas far more respectability and influence. The acceptability of racist ideas within mainstream politics was shown, for example, when Mrs Thatcher talked on BBC’s Panorama in 1978 about how ‘people’ felt ‘swamped by people with a different culture’ and how ‘people are going to react and feel rather hostile to those coming in’. This was in a context where ‘non-whites’ were actually less than 4 percent of the population.

 

 

In the 1936 Battle of Cable Street the police allowed the fascists to march whilst arresting and attacking the anti-fascists. This pattern has continued to the present day

 

 

 

‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’
ENOCH POWELL made this speech in Wolverhampton in 1968