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