Drums In The Distance

Journeys Into the Global Far Right

Joe Mulhall

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781785787522

'Mulhall watches the extreme right revival from the inside - as an anti-fascist infiltrator criss-crossing the global networks of modern fascism - but he brings a deep analytical focus. By the end of it we understand one thing: the threat of a second fascist era is real.' Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism'An urgent missive from the global frontlines of the fight against fascism.' Nima Elbagir, CNN Senior International Correspondent A terrifying and timely look at the spread of far-right movements across the globe.Joe Mulhall knows what it's like to stare fascism in the face. For a decade, often undercover at significant personal risk, he has investigated hate groups.He infiltrated a US white supremacist militia, set up a fake Ku Klux Klan branch, has been on countless street marches with violent far-right groups across Europe, and got inside some of the most important 'alt-right' meetings ever held. Brazil, India and the US are still in thrall to authoritarian populism, and far-right views have become steadily normalised in mainstream politics. Mulhall's dramatic experiences on the front line of anti-fascist activism, coupled with his academic research, clearly explain the roots of both elected and non-elected far-right movements across the globe. Above all, he concludes, the far right should not be dehumanised - they are normal people, but with dangerous beliefs that can be defeated.'Joe has had a unique view of the far right over the past decade as it transformed from a marginal subculture into one of the defining political currents of our time. He understands how these groups think and operate, and is perfectly placed to guide readers through this disturbing but vital story.' Daniel Trilling, journalist and author of Lights In The Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe'Few, if any, are better placed to write a book of this breadth and scale than Joe Mulhall.' Mark Townsend, Home Affairs editor of the Observer

21

1

FROM THE BRITISH NATIONAL PARTY TO BREXIT

I was standing on the opposite side of the road to a police station with an extendable paint roller in each hand. It was dark and the roads were now quiet, but our plan was already starting to feel a little underdone. At any moment a police officer could walk out of the station and ask us what we were up to – and I certainly didn’t have a believable answer. A touch of night-time decorating, perhaps? Not sure that would wash. I was in front of a huge British National Party (BNP) billboard attached at ground level to the outside wall of a terraced house. ‘People Like You Voting BNP’ it read, with a picture of an idyllic white family. My friend, Cookie, was behind me holding a 10-litre tub of brilliant white matt emulsion paint. The plan was simple: he would throw paint on the billboard and I would use the rollers to distribute it, after which we would jump in a third friend’s waiting car and make our getaway.

Conscious of the proximity of the police station, we knew we had to be quiet and fast. What could go wrong? I faced the billboard, rollers at the ready. ‘On three’, I whispered. ‘One, two, thr—’ Before I could finish, 10 litres of paint had hit me on the back of the head. I turned in disbelief to my buffoon of an accomplice. ‘Sorry, it slipped’, he said sheepishly. I turned 22to look back at the billboard. We had managed the seemingly impossible – it was completely untouched, not a drop on it. I on the other hand was covered from head to toe. Starting to panic, I turned myself into a human roller and slid my body left and right across the billboard, smearing as much paint on it as possible. My mate took the roller, ran it up and down my back and then onto the billboard. I had essentially become a paint tray. We did what we could and then ran to the waiting car.

‘There is no fucking way you are getting in my car.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not getting in my car covered in paint, no way.’

‘Are you joking? There’s literally a police station right there.’

‘You’ll ruin my seats.’

‘It’s already a shit car, I’m getting in.’

‘Do not, get in.’

‘I’m getting in.’

‘Do not, get in.’

I jumped into the seat with a squelch. ‘DRIVE THE FUCKING CAR!’

Our little operation hadn’t got off to an ideal start, so we moved on to the next billboard while arguing about who would pay for the destroyed upholstery.

The next advertising board was an altogether harder proposition. Instead of being at ground level it was up high. To reach it we had decided on the ingenious plan of filling cheap plastic pint glasses with paint, covering the tops in masking tape and throwing them as paint bombs. We pulled up next to a vast billboard that ran alongside the A13 motorway. One side was for the BNP, the other was a UKIP sign reading ‘5,000 New People Settle Here Every Week: Say No 23To Mass Immigration’. Cookie picked up one of the pint glasses and took aim before hurling it up at the sign. However, instead of smashing, it bounced, and I looked up to see a pint glass filled with paint heading straight for my head. Surely not. Not again. I dived out of the way just in time, the pint glass whistling past my face and smashing on the floor next to me, once again covering me in paint. I looked up at a pristine billboard and then down at my paint-spattered legs. ‘I think we should call it a night.’

Throughout the post-war period, the British far right’s ability to exert influence beyond the confines of the political fringe has depended on its cohesiveness and size. While it is unwise to measure the threat of the far right purely in terms of electoral strength or number of feet on the street – it only takes one right-wing extremist to bomb a pub or murder an MP – its ability to influence mainstream political debate, especially on issues like immigration and integration, has generally been tied to the relative importance and scale of political parties and street movements. Since 1945, there have been cycles of unity and division that correspond to periods of relative influence, decline and obscurity.

In 1948, 51 far-right and fascist organisations merged at a meeting in Farringdon Hall, London, forming the Union Movement (UM) under the leadership of the notorious pre-war British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.1 Though officially lasting into the 1990s the UM, which encountered fierce opposition, remained noteworthy for just a few years before fading back into obscurity. 1967 saw a second period of coalescence, with the formation of the National Front (NF) following the merger of the League of Empire Loyalists 24with the then British National Party and elements of both the Greater Britain Movement and the Racial Preservation Society. Though never achieving mainstream support, the NF became a household name during the 1970s and was a fixture on the political landscape, peaking in 1979 when it stood 303 candidates at the general election, only to have the rug pulled from under it by Margaret Thatcher’s infamous 1978 television interview in which she said British people feared being ‘swamped’ by immigrants, and by the intensity of campaigning by the Anti-Nazi League. A period of splintering and decline in the 1980s followed as a result.

On 7 April 1982 a rival far-right party emerged, muscling in on the political space previously occupied by the NF. With time it grew into the most electorally successful fascist party in British history. The British National Party (BNP) was formed by John Tyndall who brought with him former activists from the NF and his splinter group, the New National Front. As well as personnel, there was a continuity of politics, with explicit racial nationalism remaining the central pillar of the party’s platform.2 So much so that in 1986 Tyndall and the editor of the BNP’s newspaper were both sentenced to a year in prison for conspiracy to incite racial hatred.3 While the BNP stood in elections throughout the 1980s it remained a party of the streets, best known for provocative and confrontational marches. At the end of the decade they launched a ‘Rights for Whites’ campaign that sought to exploit growing racial tensions in multicultural communities exacerbated by the economic and social turmoil unleashed on industrial towns by a decade of Margaret Thatcher’s rule. Their first electoral breakthrough came in September 1993 with the shock victory of Derek Beackon as a councillor in the Isle of Dogs, a large peninsula in East London, bordered on three 25sides by the winding River Thames. The victory became a blueprint for the BNP, which benefited from local anger over decades of neglect following the decline of the once mighty docks, combined with a local housing crisis blamed by many on the growth of the local Bengali community.4 Demographic change and economic decline were a potent mix and the BNP were always ready to provide easy answers to complex questions, a tactic that saw them emerge as a terrifying electoral threat from the turn of the century onwards.

In 1999 the party leadership changed hands with Nick Griffin, a long-time fascist from Barnet in north London who had joined the National Front aged just fourteen, graduated from Cambridge and had a history of extreme racism and Holocaust denial. He had joined the BNP in 1995, becoming the editor of two extreme publications, the Rune and subsequently Spearhead, where he built a reputation as a hardliner who argued that ‘We need to take political people and convert them into thugs.’5 In 1998 his extremism landed him in trouble with the law when he was convicted of inciting racial hatred and received a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for two years.6 It is perhaps surprising then that Griffin went on to become the great moderniser of the BNP, the man who led the British far right out of the wilderness and into the European Parliament.

With one eye on the success of the modernising project undertaken in France by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, Griffin sought to make the BNP a more viable electoral option by altering how it presented itself, if not its core beliefs. While this was correctly criticised by many anti-fascists as a superficial transformation, it began to pay dividends at the ballot box. Though remaining a racist, antisemitic and homophobic political project, the party began to professionalise 26both its image and its structures, a move encapsulated in its decision to finally drop its policy of compulsory repatriation for non-white people. Griffin understood that being labelled as antisemitic and racist was the primary hurdle to gaining mainstream success. So much so that in July 2001 the BNP even launched their ‘Ethnic Liaison Committee’ designed to ‘organise publicity activity with non-whites who have expressed favourable sentiment towards the BNP’ – all designed to break down the media image of the BNP as ‘racists’.7 Hence, in the early 2000s the BNP publicly jettisoned the more explicit elements of its traditional anti-black racism and shifted towards what they felt was a target more likely to garner public support: Islam and Muslims.

The BNP’s decision to change the focus of their racism towards a different community is nothing new for the British far right. Throughout the whole post-war period the far right have sought out an Other, a target of their ire, on the back of which they hope to secure wider public support and gain entry into the mainstream of domestic politics. In the years immediately following the Second World War the British far right was still obsessed with its traditional enemy, namely Jews, a target that, in the post-Holocaust age, only served to isolate them further from the mainstream. However, as public hostility towards the arrival of non-white immigrant communities grew, large sections of the UK far right shifted their attacks onto the new arrivals.8 By...