Who else might vote BNP, given the chance? Full council elections in Tower Hamlets were scheduled for May 1994, just eight months after the Millwall by-election. In the past, fascists had been driven off the streets of East London by diverse, grassroots campaigns. In 1936 the Battle of Cable Street had blocked Oswald Mosley from leading his British Union of Fascists through Stepney – an area that then had a substantial Jewish population – thanks to a popular movement which embraced Jew and gentile, socialist and Communist. Four decades later, in the 1970s, white and black anti-racists fought street battles with the National Front. But this time, there was a difference: Derek Beackon had been elected. How on earth could the BNP’s opponents influence what went on in the privacy of the polling booth?
At the end of September 1993, the East London Advertiser published an alarming statistic: ‘More than 81 per cent support the BNP’, claimed its front-page headline, trailing the result of a telephone poll in which readers had been asked, ‘Do you think it is right or wrong that a BNP councillor has been elected to Tower Hamlets council?’ The question was somewhat leading – in one sense, of course it was ‘right’; Beackon had won a democratic election, and if you ignored the violence and intimidating behaviour of his party’s supporters, then he had every right to take up his seat.
The Advertiser, a popular read among older white East Londoners, appeared to agree. On 5 October, after attending his first council meeting, Beackon told the paper it was ‘full of figures and petty bickering. I’m an ordinary working-class bloke and most of the councillors are middle-class blokes, and for me it will take a little bit of understanding.’ On 7 October, under a headline that read ‘BNP’s Beackon steps into family eviction storm’, the Advertiser carried a report that claimed Beackon had helped ‘fight off’ bailiffs who wanted to evict ‘asthmatic Geraldine Johnson’ from her Isle of Dogs home. According to Nicholas Holtam, the paper’s editor Richard Tidiman (who died in 2006), initially gave Beackon qualified support. ‘Talking to the editor, he was worried about losing his readership. And of course the Bengalis don’t read the East London Advertiser. His readership was declining and so the stories played to that perception of, “We white East Enders have got to stand up for what’s right.”’
While Beackon attempted to position himself as a people’s champion, the borough’s two main parties had fallen into bitter recriminations. In December, an inquiry ordered by the Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown recommended the expulsion of Jeremy Shaw – the former mayor who had told Bangladesh that his borough was ‘full’. Its study of leaflets dating back to 1990 found that the party had ‘pandered to racism’, a conclusion that was disputed by local activists. Several prominent members tore up their party cards, while others branded Simon Hughes, the Bermondsey MP who had led the inquiry, as a ‘back-stabber’ and declared him ‘persona non grata in the borough’.28 A month later, a similar row erupted among Labour members, as the party debated whether to adopt a Lib Dem-style ‘Sons and Daughters’ housing policy in Millwall. After moves were made to expel its former candidate James Hunt for leaking the canvass return, a number of members resigned, Hunt included. He then announced he would stand as an independent.
In the absence of major parties, it was left to grassroots activists to build support for an anti-BNP campaign. Over the winter months, the Anti-Nazi League encouraged local firefighters, civil servants and health workers to leaflet against the BNP.29 Church volunteers, overseen by Holtam, worked with the Association of Island Communities to make sure that accurate information about housing and where council funds were being spent was distributed among Isle of Dogs residents.30
But they had competition: every Saturday morning, BNP canvassers would work the Island’s estates, knocking on doors and telling white residents that Derek Beackon was available to fight their corner. Anti-fascist protesters had continued to picket council meetings that Beackon attended, and BNP canvassers would tell residents that he had been ‘banned’ from official buildings, but that he could make personal calls if they so desired.31 Among voters who had already hit out once at the political establishment by electing Beackon, this merely reinforced the perception that they were being ignored. As Chuck, an Isle of Dogs resident, told me, it felt ‘exactly the same as the Palestinian situation. You know, they all want democracy, they allow a democratic vote, then the wrong party gets in and nobody wants to work with them.’32
It wasn’t until the spring of 1994 that the mainstream political parties began to campaign in earnest. The Lib Dems once more promoted a populist platform. The Tower Hamlets mayor, John Snooks, drew criticism from trade union leaders for ostentatiously displaying the Union Jack on his town hall desk. ‘When it becomes a crime to love your country, I’ll be the first to give myself up,’ he said in reply. ‘The only problem this borough faces is the cancer of the loony right and the loony left.’33 In April, the Lib Dem-controlled council announced a ‘carnival’ parade through Tower Hamlets, intended to restore a sense of pride among inhabitants of the East End. Held on a hail-strewn, bitterly cold day, the parade was a nostalgic vision of pearly kings and queens, wooden-wheeled market stalls and horse-drawn traps – evoking a time, it might be noted, when London sat at the heart of a vast empire whose colonial subjects remained for the most part overseas. Trailing behind the rest of the thirty-five carnival floats, at the very back of the parade, came the Bangladesh Welfare Association.34
The same month, Labour unveiled a ‘manifesto’ for the Isle of Dogs. In the autumn of 1993, Frank Dobson, then shadow local government secretary, had been drafted in by the Labour leader John Smith to oversee the party’s campaign. Dobson was convinced that the BNP could be beaten by a rejuvenated Labour campaign. ‘The thing to remember about the BNP,’ he told me, ‘is that they’re not eagles, they’re vultures. If there’s dead meat – useless councillors, people not pulling their weight, then that’s where they succeed.’ Dobson and another Labour MP, Nick Raynsford, held meetings throughout the autumn of 1993 with Island residents to find out what their concerns were; the manifesto promised more investment in housing if Labour were to win back control of the council. An ambitious young shadow minister named Tony Blair told an anti-racist rally in East London just a few weeks before the launch of the manifesto, ‘We understand the problems are housing and jobs.’35
As polling day drew closer, a wide range of community groups emerged to boost turnout and to make sure people felt they were not alone in opposing the BNP. Holtam’s church group distributed rainbow-coloured ribbons for people to wear. It was a small gesture, but as Holtam described it, the ribbons were ‘symbolic, a positive statement that said we want to be part of a multiracial community. It gave the sense that they [the BNP] were not necessarily going to win it.’ Syeda Choudhury’s mother joined a group named Women Against Racism and set about convincing her Bengali friends on the Isle of Dogs to register to vote. Formed in 1993 as a response to the BNP, Women Against Racism brought female campaigners together from many ethnicities – white, Somali, Chinese and Asian. But as Julie Begum, one of the group’s founders, explained, it drew on a strong tradition of anti-racist activism among East London’s Bengalis: ‘When our fathers and uncles and mothers arrived in the 60s, after the floods and the liberation war in Bangladesh, a lot of them were grateful for the refuge. Then in the 70s, there was an anger from young men who had grown up here, thinking, you know, we don’t have to be killed, just because we’re black. Since the 70s there’s been much more of a resistance to racism and in the 90s I think that was revisited. A lot of people felt that they needed to come together again to respond to that racism.’
Finally, under pressure from campaigners, the East London Advertiser revised its position on the BNP. In a front-page story the week of the local elections, Richard Tidiman urged his readers to ‘think about the consequences’ of voting for the party. If they were unsure, then he suggested ‘take a few hours off, go and see Schindler’s List’ before deciding.36
On 5 May, Derek Beackon’s short reign was brought abruptly to an end. Labour swept the borough, wresting control of the council from the Lib Dems and winning all three seats in Millwall. But as Begum recalled it, this was less a party political victory than