Coping with the Polities of Extremism

...On the other hand, if the Front had no natural claim on any significant element in the electorate-As seemed to be the case by the time the general election campaign got under way-then it would presumably dry up into insignificance on its own...

...it would be left with some protest votes, and the handful of Right-wing extremists at the core of the party...

...It devoted its energy instead to glorifying its first martyr, a victim of police brutality and government refusal to ban the Front...

...The same week Time Out, a Left-oriented, mass circulation entertainment weekly that had given the ANL an enormous amount of very sympathetic coverage before and during the campaign, published a report on the Asians of Southall and the East End: "Unfortunately . . . cynicism divides Asian youths from militant white antiracists of the Anti-Nazi League and the Trotskyist Left...

...Prominent figures in the arts, sports, the academic world, politics, and trade unionism were invited to join as sponsors...

...And so the story here continues-As does the inquest into Peach's death reconvened on November 15, with a dispute over the participation of an ANL attorney still unresolved...

...In short, during the past campaign, the Front represented a strong argument for allowing unpleasant protest parties to die natural deaths...

...No surveys have yet been taken to determine the impact of the Southall incident on the electorate...

...Eric M. Breindel, who recently returned from Britain where he studied at the London School of Economics, is writing a book on the assassinations of Lord Moyne and Count Bernadotte...

...Labor Party would do well to closely scrutinize the political orientation of the people behind it...

...On the contrary, the uncontrollable political violence of the early 1930s ate away at the foundations of the Republic and helped Hitler come to power...

...The Public Meeting Act of 1908 makes it a criminal offense to be disorderly at a lawful public meeting for the purpose of disrupting it...

...Scotland Yard dispatched approximately 4,000 policemen to Southall, among them 40 officers of the Special Patrol Group (SPG...

...It was hard not to notice that anti-police slogans were very much a part of the lore of these demonstrations...

...From a tactical standpoint, denying an organization like the National Front the right to function openly seems a sure way of increasing the long-term danger...

...But if the SWP and others in the League were really interested in taking lessons from the rise of Nazism in Germany, they would think twice before calling on the Left to take to the streets against the National Front...

...The lead song on the record bears the same title and has been described (again in Time Out) as a moving but not sentimental account of Blair Peach's death...

...The ANL had never made a secret of its intention to disrupt Front meetings, and this was the ostensible purpose of the Southall demonstration...

...Here the British CP, unable to ignore the League's massive growth, has had to make common cause with the SWP in a battle the latter initiated, and in an organization where the Trotsky-ites are the single most powerful element...

...it does not permit the police to ban all the processions of an organization...

...Unless the very existence of the party were deemed a provocation, its South-all meeting had to be considered a legitimate exercise of freedom of speech...

...Some ANL members who claimed they were witnesses to the incident said that Peach was running from the heart of the demonstration when he was accosted by several policemen who proceeded to belt him with their truncheons, hitting him repeatedly about the head...

...By the fall of 1978, it was known that the National Front intended to field candidates in more than 300 constituencies the following spring, easily enough to entitle the party to free air time on television...

...The central motif in ANL literature was a comparison between the National Front in present-day Britain and the Nazis in late Weimar Germany...

...The appearance of the National Front in Southall during the election campaign, for example, was in no way comparable to a threatened Nazi demonstration in Skokie, Illinois...

...Followers of Trotsky have long been denigrated by orthodox Communists as traitors to the working class...

...The historical record is ignored because the ANL affords the SWP a unique opportunity to lead a Left-wing political struggle...

...The ANL virtually assured that the police would be out in force on April 23 to prevent demonstrators from disrupting the meeting and attacking Front members...

...The National Front is a legal political party and Southall, like other mixed areas, was a logical place for it to field a candidate...

...He also remains an important figure in the SWP, where he was a member of the executive and was responsible for the anti-Front campaign...

...And the lesson of Hitler's rise to power was recited: Nazis must be crushed before they grow too powerful to control...

...Is the Anti-Nazi League to be credited with crushing the Front...

...The League's intention now to stage a massive show of strength was well publicized in posters, leaflets and in the press...

...In the case of Southall, the scheduled meeting could scarcely have been considered a procession, and there was no evidence that the mere presence of the National Front inside the Town Hall would lead to serious disturbances...

...The National Front, established in 1967 by an assortment of Right-wingers, is indeed a neo-Nazi outfit...

...The results were released at a press conference in early June attended by Mrs...

...He was not struck more than once, since there was no external injury to the skin...

...But the key figure in the troika is Holborow...

...Nazism flourished in very specific conditions...

...Professor Mant concluded that Peach was killed by a single blow to the head...

...driven underground, it would take on a clandestine aura...

...Although the National Front did not attract significant support at the outset, the economic recession of the early 1970s gave new strength to the immigration question...

...Holborow maintained that he was confident the police were responsible for Peach's death...

...Since the general election much less has been heard about the National Front...

...That a fair number of citizens do not regard it as risky to express their discontent, or their anti-immigrant sentiments, by voting for a party they know to be antidemocratic and Nazi-led, is cause for concern...

...This was the political and legal context for the Southall protest...

...No doubt this in part reflects the Front's performance at the polls...

...let us mourn, but let us mobilize and organize...

...The Sko-kie march was a blatant provocation, its sole purpose having been to antagonize a community with many Nazi death camp survivors and thereby attract media attention...

...Peach lost consciousness immediately and died within half an hour...

...They don't understand us, and they don't really care about us...

...The ANL has had more to say about the police than the Nazis...

...Facile comparisons to German Nazism are, of course, of dubious value at best...

...They were on to bigger and better things...

...Requiring a membership fee of only 1.00, the ANL soon began to grow rapidly...

...Evidence indicates that protesters and police sustained about the same number of serious injuries...

...By November the Anti-Nazi League was formed...

...Similarly, the Public Order Act of 1936 permits the police to use its discretion in prohibiting a particular procession that might cause serious public disorder...

...True, the Front's leadership is in the hands of veterans of those groups-including Martin Webster, who once wrote a pamphlet entitled "Why I am a Nazi," and John Tyn-dall, a self-professed expert on the Ju-deo-Bolshevik conspiracy and author of The Jew in Art...

...The point was made again and again that "like Hitler with the Jews, the British Nazis seek to make scapegoats of black people...

...Yet this does not make the National Front comparable to the German Nazis...

...The Anti-Nazi League had hardly gotten itself organized and its nominal raison d'etre seemed to be vanishing...

...In the end, the rank and file of the ANL found themselves attacking not only the Front, but also the British government for supposedly conspiring to protect the Front in the guise of protecting civil liberties...

...that the manipulative strategy of Popular Frontism is still very much alive, albeit in new guises...

...More than a dozen unions affiliated with Britain's Trades Union Congress signed on as sponsors, each making a financial contribution, and a number of private donations were received...

...Thatcher a racist, but it would not be possible to draw thousands of people into the streets to protest the Conservative party's existence...

...Naturally, public interest in the Front waned...

...One member of the SPG was stabbed in the stomach...

...More than 5,000 mourners marched behind the cortege as it traveled slowly through the East End...

...Holborow provided the cadres: The local organizers, the pamphleteers and most of the other nuts-and-bolts workers of the Anti-Nazi League are SWP members...

...The final words were delivered by Tony Cliff, an SWP official, who told his audience: "It's no use building monuments of brass and stone...

...Of the quarter of a million voters the party is capable of attracting if it contests every constituency in the nation, only about 5,000 are Front members who share the pro-Nazi views of the leadership...

...The elections offered a mixed reading of its strength...

...Nonetheless, nearly two months after he died, when the autopsies were completed, Blair Peach was accorded a true martyr's funeral...

...For without the continued existence of the Front, ANL organizers could not bring masses of people out to the streets and create potentially volatile situations that inevitably end up as battles with the police...

...He reportedly staggered into a nearby house, blood streaming from his head, and collapsed...

...Paul Holborow spoke at the cemetery, as did Peach's friends and colleagues and leaders of the teachers' union...

...In particular, many young Jews, potentially natural recruits to the anti-Front struggle, were less than anxious to ally themselves with a Party maintaining that Zionism, too, is a form of racism...

...As most analysts had predicted, it was reduced to an extremely marginal force, akin to a joke party...

...Scotland Yard denied the charge...

...The Blair Peach Memorial Fund simultaneously began to garner revenue from another source, a pop record entitled, "The Murder of Blair Peach...

...In 1977 the party expected to win its first local contest and failed to do so...

...exploiting the real problems of unemployment, bad housing, cuts in education and in social and welfare services...

...Peach's widow commissioned an examination of her husband's body by an independent pathologist, Professor Keith Mant, head of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital...

...When Scotland Yard opened an investigation into the death, the ANL promptly denounced it as a cover-up...

...In fact, it was largely because of the problems the SWP encountered in the course of its campaign that the decision was made to set up the League...

...The list of those who responded affirmatively, ranging from Ralf Dahren-dorf, the director of the London School of Economics, to Glenda Jackson, the actress, and from Irish Murdoch, the writer, to Dave Watson, the soccer star, was indeed impressive...

...They have discarded the swastikas and, under the cloak of British nationalism, built something of a serious party by exploiting an already existing concern: immigration...

...it might be smaller than at present, but would no longer be constrained by the need to remain inside the law...

...Blair Peach died from a crushing blow to the head-possibly delivered by a policeman-At a huge demonstration opposing a meeting of the neo-Nazi National Front Party in Southall, a section of West London with one of the highest concentrations of Asian immigrants in Britain...

...By early July, Time Out was no longer discussing the views of the Asians in Southall...

...They were orchestrated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)-which leans heavily toward Trotsky and the Fourth International, but does not identify itself explictly as "Trotskyist"-And frequently coincided with Front election meetings...

...There is also a general feeling that the white Left, for all its antiracist rhetoric, makes little effort to understand the culture or the day-to-day problems of the Asians whom it seeks to organize and lead . . . "For most Asian youth, the role of the white Left is summed up by the statement: 'They only want to use us...

...The Front was created as a kind of umbrella party waving the Union Jack banner that would enable individuals of various political persuasions to join in a common effort to halt nonwhite immigration...

...Britain does not have specially trained riot police...

...Similarly, for all the indications that the Liberals were in crisis, a major party falling behind the National Front anywhere was bound to be disquieting...

...The only paid officer of the ANL, he holds the title of secretary and is the national organizer as well as official spokesman...

...There were other anti-Front demonstrations after Southall...

...One problem was the reluctance of unaffiliated opponents of the National Front to join forces with a militant, revolutionary group stridently opposed to British democracy...

...Even on that question the difference in the response was not very pronounced: 36 per cent for National Front supporters, 21 per cent for Tory supporters, 20 per cent for Labor, and 15 per cent for Liberal supporters...

...The League says it is committed to exposing the Front's "Nazi and racist" ideology, disrupting its meetings, and forcing the government to declare it illegal...

...Under the headline, "stars against the spg," the magazine heralded an upcoming event, an evening of musical entertainment devoted to the theme: "Who Killed Blair Peach...

...From 1974-76 the Front made steady, yet highly limited, progress...

...On April 23, 1979, in the fourth week of the national political campaign, it brought some 5,000 demonstrators to Southall to protest a Front meeting...

...He interpreted the pathologist's report as indicating that SPG members carry unauthorized weapons and reiterated the ANL charge that a cover-up was taking place...

...In this atmosphere several large demonstrations against the Front were organized, often in areas with growing immigrant populations and pockets of Front support in their shrinking white communities...

...Nevertheless, in a recent poll 73 per cent of those willing to call themselves "NF sympathizers" agreed that the Front "has a Nazi side to it," and 69 per cent of the "sympathizers" agreed that the Front "wants dictatorship, not a democracy...

...At the same time, in a number of London constituencies, plus others in Leicester and Wolverhampton, the Front surpassed the Liberals to become the third-place party, and over the course of the year this feat was repeated in two parliamentary by-elections...

...the weapon used was either a lead-weighted rubber instrument or a hosepipe, but not a police truncheon...

...Since the implications of each case vary widely, an overall rule cannot be set...

...It is surely alarming that LaRouche, an openly anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist possessing mysterious and apparently unlimited financial resources, has been able to wage sophisticated campaigns in several of the early primary states, complete with television advertising, and to secure 1-2 per cent of the vote...

...The German Communist Party's strategy of confrontation with the Nazis did not produce wondrous results...

...The official police post-mortem had already come to essentially the same conclusions, which conflicted with the testimony provided by the League members who originally described the incident to the police and the press...

...As for prosecutions under the Race Relations Act, firm proof of incitement to racial hatred is rather difficult to produce, assuming the law is not interpreted so loosely as to completely deprive it of meaning...

...In 1973, Webster won 16.7 per cent of the vote in a West Bromwich parliamentary by-election, marking the first time a party candidate had saved his deposit (i.e., secured enough votes to get back the deposit each constituency requires to keep joke candidates from running...

...And actual attacks on the police, provoking in turn counterattackers, seemed less an accident than a predetermined goal...

...At the head of the march, a huge circular wreath bore the emblem of the Anti-Nazi League...

...A second smaller wreath displayed the should be initials of Peach's partySWP...

...Thatcher adopting a tough position on immigration, it became apparent that the Front would lose much of its anti-immigrant vote...

...This is clear from their tactics in the last general election...

...Britain is not in the throes of an economic disaster akin to the one that beset Germany in the late 1920s, nor can its 300-year democratic tradition be likened to the 14 crisis-ridden years of the Weimar system...

...The ANL seemed to do the same...

...He gained public attention as the organizer of various campaigns against South Africa and apartheid, and as a strong supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization has written for Free Palestine, a PLO English-language organ, Roberts is a former official of the Engineering Workers union who stood unsuccessfully as a Labor candidate for Parliament last May...

...Dramatic readings were also on the bill at the Royal Court Theater, including a monologue about should be Ulrike Meinhoff's last days in her prison cell...

...The Race Relations Act of 1976 provides for the prosecution of individuals who incite racial hatred...

...it does not cover the banning of entire organizations...

...This relative success received national attention and seemed to some to signal the reappearance of a strong current of racism in British society...

...Martin Webster was the scheduled speaker, and the ANL had given his appearance in the racially mixed area wide advance publicity...

...Three men signed the original letter appealing for sponsors and funds: Peter Hain, Ernie Roberts and Paul Holborow...

...Police continued to deploy huge detachments, but evidently tried to keep a lower profile at the protests...

...This, in turn, raised a question that has been the subject of an ongoing debate throughout the democratic world: Should potentially dangerous, avowedly antidemocratic organizations be accorded the protections of a free society...

...Its ostensible purpose is to combat the "Nazi threat" posed by the National Front, described in the ANL's founding statement as a "growing force in British politics...

...But Britain's encounter with the politics of extremism-the dilemma posed by the presence of a potentially threatening force on the Right, and a group on the Left ostensibly dedicated to opposing it that is directed by a politically unsavory element-takes on new relevance in the light of Lyndon LaRouche's Presidential candidacy...

...less violent demonstrations had taken place in London...

...The violence at Southall, simmering for hours that day, began in earnest after demonstrators hurled smoke bombs, flaming objects, bottles, bricks, rocks, and finally a Molotov cocktail at the police...

...Considerably more candidates were fielded than in the previous year, but the Front's overall percentage fell by a third...

...Hain and Roberts were essential to lending an aura of Social Democratic respectability to a "popular front," anti-racist undertaking (though many Left-Laborites, it should be noted, are increasingly less recognizable as Social Democrats...

...Others suggested that Britain needed special riot police, or that the police should be granted powers to control the size of public demonstrations...

...They were informed that the ANL sought to "unite the broadest possible forces in opposition to the propaganda and activities of the National Front...

...In no constituency did its strength increase relative to the 1974 general election...

...Second, a poll found that Front supporters did not differ noticeably from the rest of the British electorate on any major issues, except sending "colored immigrants back to their home country, whether or not they want to go back...

...Banning the Front was raised as an issue by some politicians during the final days of the campaign...

...The Representation of the People Act of 1949 specifically allows prosecution for such behavior at election meetings...

...Yet if a movement aimed at combatting LaRouche were to emerge-As may well happen-liberals, social democrats, centrists and others genuinely frightened by the U.S...

...It emerged as a minor attraction to the poorer, less educated white voters of certain specially selected urban Labor strongholds in Inner London and parts of Leicestershire...

...The most important of them is that destroying the Front is not actually the goal of theoreticians, whatever the intentions of the rank and file...

...There are also less metaphysical reasons for the ANL's head-on challenge to the National Front...

...The Inner London total dropped from 9.4 to 5.4 per cent...

...Peach was pronounced dead at Ealing Hospital a few hours later...

...Labor Party's Lyndon H. LaRouche, and about the recent "war" between the Ku Klux Klan and the Revolutionary Communist Party of North Carolina, one thinks of a violent confrontation during the British campaign that could have its counterpart this election year in the United States...

...Certainly Anti-Nazi League strategists called for banning the Front in the knowledge that what they claimed they wanted was impossible under British law...

...On the face of it, the Anti-Nazi League was more likely to violate the law by its behavior at Southall...

...Fewer than 50 people attended, including five representatives of the Asian community and several journalists...

...A case-study in sophisticated political manipulation, the incident also raised important civil liberties issues...

...Three days earlier, 25 policemen had been injured in clashes with ANL protestors at a Front rally in the Midlands...

...First, the Front had suffered several electoral setbacks during the year...

...The chorus of the song identifies the new orientation of the ANL and its supporters: "Who needs the Nazis when we've got the SPG?/Who needs the fascists in this democracy...

...The thrust of the show, according to its organizer, was to "focus attention on the sinister development of the SPG...

...Peach was a member of the organization that staged the Southall demonstration, the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), formed in late 1977 and now boasting upwards of 40,000 members...

...the lack of emphasis on public ceremony...

...In any event, there is no legal statute in Britain under which the Front as a whole could be proscribed...

...Even the New Statesman, which gave ANL activities considerable publicity, does not think so...

...Besides the otherwise unattainable mass publicity-from which fringe groups as a whole tend to benefit-webster and Tyndall were afforded an opportunity to pose as defenders of free speech...

...Essentially, it involved Left extremists masquerading as concerned liberals, who guiled well-meaning citizens into seeing danger on the far Right where none existed and thus managed to set off a battle with a false foe...

...But even more, reading about the extreme Right-wing candidacy of the so-called U.S...

...Despite its quasi-Nazi ideology, the Front is in no way comparable to its absurd predecessors: the swastika-waving British National Socialists, fond of singing the Horst Wessel Lied at "Hitler was Right" rallies, and the Greater Britain Movement, headed by disciples of the disgraced Blackshirt leader, Sir Oswald Mosley...

...A small mobile reserve unit, it is currently used to supplement regular police manpower and to trouble-shoot in crisis situations...

...They're working for themselves, and we have to do the same.'" But the problem of community alienation did not profoundly trouble those who were the object of this devastating criticism...

...The National Front was clearly not menacing the demonstrators...

...The National Front, meanwhile, had held its rally...

...The lesson of the events in Britain is that vigilance is compromised, rather than enhanced, by incautious alliances...

...It can further be argued that if it had a natural claim to some support-As was true at the outset, due to its anti-immigration position-then it must be assumed none of the other political parties satisfied the needs of those voters and they would gravitate toward the Front anyway...

...The background of the incident, though, is more complicated than was suggested by brief reports in the U.S., under headlines such as "demonstrators killed at anti-racism protest...

...the elevated, highly ideological nature of the debate between the Labor and Conservative parties...

...With Mrs...

...With several Labor MPs who were solicited by the troika at the 1977 Labor Party Conference on board, the newly-formed outfit was able to move into high gear...

...The next day, Paul Holborow told a public meeting that the "murder" of Blair Peach was the joint responsibility of the "Nazis and the police...

...It might be possible to call Mrs...

...Proceeds from the evening were to be split between the Southall Defense Fund and the Blair Peach Memorial Fund...

...Paul Holborow and his colleagues were not pleased to see the Tories stealing the Front's thunder...

...A secret underground movement with a neo-Nazi hard-core that could attract average citizens would be all the more insidious...

...The worst casualty was a 33-year-old teacher, a New Zealander who worked with "delicate" children at a school in East London...

...None of the policemen carried firearms, nor was any special equipment issued other than riot shields...

...There was a certain inevitability to the death at a rally like the one in Southall, strange as this may seem because England has a relatively limited history of violence in the context of mass political demonstrations...

...The influx of people from Africa and Asia claiming British citizenship or Commonwealth privileges had become a genuine issue here, with popular racist sentiment fanned by Conservative MP Enoch Powell and other demagogues...

...But two factors had combined to convince most analysts that the party would be an insignificant factor in the national balloting...

...Moreover, it remains doubtful that men like Tyndall and Webster will ever be able to sell their imported, fundamentally alien ideology, even if adapted for domestic use...

...Local youth leaders complain of lack of coordination with the ANL in the planning of joint demonstrations and of attempts by 'outsiders' to assume leadership of such joint activities...

...A massive and apparently brutal police baton charge dispersed the demonstrators...

...Yet an American living in Britain and following the seemingly interminable race for the Presidency back home cannot help recalling the brevity of the campaign that ended in Margaret Thatcher's victory...

...Celia Peach, her solicitor and Paul Holborow...

...More than 300 arrests were made...

...But only a small hard core within the party, recent studies indicate, is obsessed by the various "hidden hands" conspiracy theories that animate the leadership, and are readily found in nearly all Right-wing fringe groups (as well as in some on the far Left...

...In the 303 races it fought, it averaged a less than spectacular 1.3 per cent of the vote...

...But the only fatality was Blair Peach...

...If its objective had actually been to attack the Front meeting, as small a police presence as possible would have been desirable and it would not have gone to great lengths to play up its plans...

...One such confrontation in the Lewisham area of South London turned into a riot, as protesters battled police to break through a cordon separating them from greatly outnumbered National Fronters...

...The SPG was set up in 1965, in response to an increase in housebreaking and hooliganism in metropolitan London...

...The ANL was therefore determined to bring the Front back into the limelight...

...But given the fact that the Front ended up appearing in the media very frequently as a congenial, liberal-minded third party, observing a dispute between the Left and the police, it is probable that the episode contributed to preventing a sharper decline in its vote...

...By demanding that the authorities enact a new law to achieve this-An entirely unlikely development-the ANL was able to depict the state as an ally of the Nazis...

...Banning it would be the height of folly, since that would simply restore its credibility among former supporters and arouse the interest of the general public...

...Surveys by the New Statesman and other independent sources indicate that the National Front was and is the recipient of a considerable number of consciously-cast protest ballots...

...Failing to see fringe Right-wing phenomena in perspective may lead to crying wolf every time some new crackpot appears on the scene-both obscuring and minimizing the original evil, and reducing the possibility of recognizing a genuine new threat...

...and that the threat posed by politically disreputable would-be allies on the extreme Left is not any less real than the danger represented by overt imitators of European fascism...

...Hain, a well-known activist and former leader of the Young Liberals, is currently identified with the Left wing of the Labor Party...

...in Greater London, it managed 2 per cent in the 88 constituencies it contested...

...The Front, already suffering from the public's sharply diminished interest in its efforts, no doubt was delighted by the ANL decision to press ahead with the confrontation policy...

...As Peach's body was lowered into the grave, some in the crowd held high their red carnations in clenched fists and began to sing the Internationale...

...Often it was nowhere to be seen and the violence was directed entirely at the police-the defenders of the oppressive capitalist state...

...Another problem was the violence associated with the SWP protests...

...While it was not clear that support for the Front was on the increase-And some signs distinctly pointed the other way-the very fact that an openly racist program could attract more than 100,000 votes in London alone appeared to be cause for alarm...