'Teeny Trots' and fascist right
Peter Shipley
The guerrilla warfare between the forces of the far right and the left rumbles on through its 'phoney' stages: small numbers are engaged in a seemingly contrived conflict, the future course of which is indeterminate.
For the record, on two Saturdays in the past month a total of some 10,000 people have taken to the streets, in Leicester and then in London, to assert or redefine the meaning of democracy. The worst fears of the authorities that widespread violence would occur were in both instances unrealised. By a combination of skilful police manoeuvres and a discretion that is rarely the better part of extremist valour, the private armies of revolution and reaction avoided a repetition of the Red Lion Square confrontation. Only 400 assorted revolutionaries ventured to harass and impede the National Front's devious journey to Lincoln's Inn Fields while ten times that number of their comrades speechified the afternoon away, at the original destination of Speakers' Corner. Those recent demonstrations and rallies have passed into oblivion as supreme non-events of the silly season. Perhaps A. J. P. Taylor was right to suggest, as he did in the columns of the Beaverbrook press, that if we ignore such extreme but ludicrous manifestations they will go away. Boredom and contempt for the antics of the fringe may be a fairly general reaction, and an understandable one, but the phenomenon of open rivalry on the streets between opposed extremists will not die for a while yet. More NF marches are promised for the autumn and the left's rent-a-mob bandwagon will undoubtedly roll into action on these occasions to pursue its quarry across the land. There will be more afternoons of tension as the police strive to keep the rival groups apart. With this in mind we may ask, what significance has this factious contest? Does it matter to the rest of us who are in no way involved?
The comparatively recent growth of organisations like the National Front and its more vociferous opponents is symptomatic of the current national confusion. Such elements, albeit in very different ways, reflect some of the social and political undercurrents that are part of the present state of unease and uncertainty about our future. They provide simple answers to complex problems and guarantee salvation, which those practised in the compromises of democracy cannot so assuredly promise.
Formed in 1966, the National Front brought together a British Nationalist Party, a Greater Britain Movement, and the League of Empire Loyalists. Its leaders and its activists have many past associations with fascism and Nazism in its less inhibited forms. Today, however, the Front is a mixture of these • influences, which haunt its every moment, and a more naive populism which consists of a grass-roots membership drawn from the lower middle classes and the economically insecure and which includes many former Labour Party Supporters as well as diehard Tories. In the forthcoming election the NF will contest some eighty seats, the fourth highest number of any party, and will concentrate on the emotive issues of immigration, the EEC and law and order, cutting across conventional party lines.
Actively ranged against the NF in the non-electoral battle are the forces of socialism rampant: the Labour left, politically-conscious trade unionists, the Communist Party and the radical sects, way out to the crash-helmeted 'teeny Trots' of the International Marxist Group. Some of the most determined and most effective of all these groups have been the International Socialists. Creators of rank and file organisations in twenty trade unions during the last three years, the IS have 4,000 members and 150 branches, including teachers and local government officers as well as car workers and engineers. They are all in militant mood, eager for action and impatient with those who stand in their way.
The NF and the IS are of course scornful of the present order of society and their aims are incompatible with it; the former derides its liberalism and decay, the latter its injustice and corruption. They each depend for their appeal on the existence of the other — the Front to conjure up red and black bogies and the revolutionaries to concoct the threat of fascist oppression. Aware of each other's growth they have been spoiling for a quarrel for some time.
In 1972 over the Ugandan Asian issue the NF and IS came to blows on several occasions. The ineVelutionaries followed this up by pursuing the National Union of Students' ban on speakers and at the end of last year — more than six months before the Red Lion Scmare incident — the IS unequivocally stated: "We support physical action against all fascist and racialist marches, demonstrations, campaigns and organisations." The Front responded with warnings of a growing 'Red menace in the unions and elsewhere that must be expunged.
At the present time the Front actually wishes to be assailed, verbally and physically, but does not intend to retaliate beyond its lurid propaganda outpourings and its highly disciplined marches. Instead it wishes to represent itself in public as a model of restraint in the face of provocation, in the hope that this will attract the voters it so obviously lacks. Moreover the two recent marches have demonstrated that the left can dominate the NF,on the streets, that it outnumbers the Front's mobilising power by at least seven to one. The left's aggressive stance in this situation is hardly surprising.
The police hold the ring and appear to be in control. Both sides are, however, keen to widen the scope of the campaigns and one of the more disturbing features is the left's clear intention to confront and discredit the police. The IS attitude towards authority has hardened considerably in the last eighteen months since the homes of four of its leading members were raided by the police following the IRA bomb attack on an officers' mess at Aldershot. The Socialist Worker frequently reports 'that its sellers have been arrested or cautioned and the antipathy deepened when the IS held the Special Patrol Group responsible for the death of Kevin Gately in Red Lion Square. And now a meeting has been organised to discuss alleged violence by the police on the last march. The police are portrayed as protectors and collaborators with the fascists, and the NF is quite happy to further its own implied identification with the legitimate forces of law and order.
One leading IS speaker told the 'victory' rally in Leicester that not only would the fascists have to be driven off the streets but their infiltration of industry would have to be stopped also. The NF has formed some factory branches; their Midlands demonstration was the outcome of a racial strike at a typewriter factory in which they supported white workers while the revolutionaries backed Asians protesting about their relatively low pay. In the educational field as well, the two organisations have come into conflict, over a demand for the resignation of a London school teacher photographed on an NF demonstration, a picture first published in a magazine of the IS Rank and File Teachers Group.
Given that these disputes will continue can they be confined to propaganda exchanged and marches which avoid serious violence? The answer to that depends on co-operation between marchers and police, about which there must be serious reservations, and on the police's ability to outwit attempts at disruption.
The mental condition of some of the protagonists indicates that they are positively seeking violence. The revolutionaries who chant "Sieg Heil" at the NF and the police in turn, do so with glazed eyes and tense faces which suggest the taunt offers them an emotional release and reflects their own political conceptions as much as those of their opponents. These militants see themselves enacting an historical fantasy which evokes the memory of Weimar Germany and of Cable Street. Violence is the drama's cathartic denouement. This may have little to do with politics as we understand them, not simply because the organisations concerned enjoy no large scale support, but because such apparently deviant and atavistic behaviour is better explained by psychological than political terminology. In a modern context one might expect such conduct and attitudes in a banana republic racked by instability or the collapse of its currency, when arguments do not wait on rational discussion. The methods and the style of the present dispute between left and right are in other words the politics of hyperinflation; as such they offer to the rest of us a miniature preview of the unthinkable.
Peter Shipley is working on a book about revolutionary politics in contemporary Britain
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