Yet an uncomfortable truth remained. The BNP’s vote had actually increased; spreading out across Tower Hamlets and into the neighbouring borough of Newham.37 What sort of legacy would this dark period leave – for the Island; for Britain?
Summer 2011; I am sitting in on a pensioners’ lunch club at a community hall on the Barkantine estate. Outside is bright sunshine, but as the diners finish their meal of savoury mince with dumplings, I am struck by the fact that the room’s lights are on full. The housing association that now manages the estate has been selling off land to property speculators, who have erected a block of flats on what used to be the hall’s back garden, blocking out any natural light. Now, they want to knock down the adjoining church. ‘They said we could use a room on the second floor as a chapel,’ Rita Bensley, lunch club organizer and a veteran Isle of Dogs community activist, tells me. ‘I said, have you even checked to see if a coffin will fit in the lift? They hadn’t.’ Space, as ever, is at a premium on the Island.
After the plates are cleared, two of the group, Mary and Donna, settle down in a corner of the room with mugs of tea. I ask Mary how long she’s lived here. ‘I was born on the Island,’ she says, ‘and it got such a pounding in the war that my mum moved out to Stepney. But I moved back when I got married. In them days the Island was an “in” place to live – they were building all these new flats. I live on the twentieth floor and I’ve got a beautiful view. But now people can’t get homes for their kids. It’s not fair. I don’t want to be called racist.’
‘I think they should abolish that word, racist,’ Donna interjects, fiercely. ‘It’s spot the white when you go down there –,’ she gestures towards the other end of Barkantine. ‘My grandson, his mum sent him to a lovely private school, but then they ran out of money and they sent him to the state primary here. Very mixed. His whole nature has changed. The way he talks, his attitude. He’d never have dreamed of that before.’
Mary nods. ‘It might be a good school but it’s not for our children.’ She gives me a conspiratorial grin. ‘It’s like we’ve been invaded, only not with guns.’
After all this time, I ask, haven’t people learned to mix?
‘Well,’ she replies. ‘They never talk to us.’
2
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