Bloody Nasty People

The Rise of Britain's Far Right

Daniel Trilling

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781781684467
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The past decade saw the rise of the British National Party, the country's most successful ever far-right political movement, and the emergence of the anti-Islamic English Defence League. Taking aim at asylum seekers, Muslims, "enforced multiculturalism" and benefit "scroungers", these groups have been working overtime to shift the blame for the nation's ills onto the shoulders of the vulnerable. What does this extremist resurgence say about the state of modern Britain?
Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews with key figures, such as BNP leader Nick Griffin, Daniel Trilling shows how previously marginal characters from a tiny neo-Nazi subculture successfully exploited tensions exacerbated by the fear of immigration, the War on Terror and steepening economic inequality.
Mainstream politicians have consistently underestimated the far right in Britain while pursuing policies that give it the space to grow. Bloody Nasty People calls time on this complacency in an account that provides us with fresh insights into the dynamics of political extremism.

PART I

1

A Nasty Little Local Difficulty

The Island is a funny place. People fall out with people, some groups fall out with one another. But if someone’s back is against the wall, they’ll all stand together. Because otherwise, they’ll pick you off one by one.

Rita Bensley, Association of Island Communities

The night of 16 September 1993 provided an unpleasant moment of farce to punctuate a slow, grinding tragedy. As protestors from the Anti-Nazi League gathered outside the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood centre, officials from Tower Hamlets Council were sifting through ballots cast in a local by-election. At 10.30 p.m., a murmur of surprise ran through the room as the Labour candidate, James Hunt, asked for a recount. He should have walked this election. Now, visibly shaken, Hunt wasn’t so sure of himself. Just before eleven, an eighty-strong mob of skinheads emerged from nearby pubs and headed for the crowd outside the centre, chorusing ‘Rule Britannia’. One threw a milk bottle, which smashed among his opponents. As police broke up the ensuing scuffles, inside the building the election result was quietly confirmed. Derek Beackon, an unemployed van driver and candidate for the British National Party, had won the Millwall by-election by just seven votes.

It may have only been one local council seat out of thousands – and two fewer than were held at the time by the Monster Raving Loony Party – but the election of a BNP candidate sent ripples far beyond the Isle of Dogs. Over the days that followed, news crews and reporters descended on this little spit of land that sticks out into the Thames from London’s East End. They wanted to know why 1,480 of its residents had voted for a man with a twenty-year history of involvement in racist street politics, whose campaign leaflets complained that ‘our children are being forced to learn the languages and religions and cultures of Asia, forced to eat their food’, demanded ‘Rights for Whites’ and promised to ‘put the British people first’.

Was this an aberration, ‘a nasty little local difficulty’, as the Daily Mail put it? Academics were wheeled out to explain the East End’s association with far-right movements, stretching back almost a century, via the National Front and Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, to the British Brothers’ League of 1902. This part of London had for centuries been a stopping-off point for immigrants, something that had long made it a target for demagogues seeking to whip up hatred. Now, just as newspapers were reporting preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s defeat, voters in one of the areas hit hardest by the Blitz had delivered a stinging rebuke to the establishment by electing a fascist.

And perhaps there was more to come. ‘The people of East London have always been known for their tolerance and easygoing temperament. Recently some of them, and there are many more, have got fed up with being undermined,’ warned one letter-writer to the local paper. ‘They voted for the one who had the guts to speak on their behalf.’1

What, though, was being undermined?

‘I was the last registered stevedore in Millwall Dock,’ George Pye told me, as we sat in his office at St John’s Community Centre, a small room dominated by a painting in which a square-jawed docker thrust a piece of paper under the nose of his cowering boss. ‘When they closed the dock – or murdered it, I should say – I was on holiday. All the other dockers went to Tilbury but when I came back, I refused.’

Pye, a fifth generation ‘Islander’, as many locals here refer to themselves, was describing the devastation visited upon his neighbourhood when the docks that had sustained it closed in 1980. ‘When we opened this place [in the early 1980s], it was packed. You used to get lots of families down here because you could bring your kids. Now the only ones left are pockets of older people.’ It was a Friday night, but the streets outside were almost deserted, and the centre’s function room was nearly empty, with only a handful of elderly white men and women drinking and playing darts. Were it not for the towers of Canary Wharf that loomed nearby, you might never have guessed that this place had been at the crossroads of an empire for more than two centuries – or that Pye’s story was proof of the destruction it could leave in its wake.

Lying just a couple of miles from the City, the Isle of Dogs, a marshy peninsula surrounded by water on three sides, was transformed into a hub of international trade with the opening of the West India Dock in 1802. As Britain’s empire grew, so did the docks, and migrants from Britain, Ireland and Europe were drawn to work there, their fortunes tied to the booms and slumps of the global economy. Slum conditions and precarious employment led to the formation of the modern trade union movement at the end of the nineteenth century – and a tradition of protest that is still celebrated in East End legend. The ‘Island’ was severely damaged by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War, but those inhabitants who stayed were rewarded with a huge programme of council house building.

When the London docks began a slow but steady decline after the Second World War, hit by a fall in manufacturing exports and the rise of containerization, the East End was bereft. In 1955, they had given work to 31,000 people – by 1975, this had fallen to 9,800. And the industries that supported shipping were cut adrift, too: 75,000 jobs were lost in East London between 1971 and 1981.2 Islanders, cut off from the rest of the East End (literally so, when the swing bridges at the north end of the peninsula were raised to let ships pass) were particularly hard hit, voicing their discontent in 1970 when a group of local campaigners issued a ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’.

The final blow was delivered by the Thatcher Government in 1980 – a move that Pye, like many of his colleagues, saw as political. ‘It was like with the miners, Maggie took the unions on in stages.’ Pye was hardly a militant – he told me, proudly, that his union branch had only ever gone on strike twice in three decades – but even today, he is adamant that the docks could have been saved. ‘What makes me so bitter is that all this time, they were saying, “We need to move into the twenty-first century.” Well we had containerization here, we had a bigger berth for the bigger ships, we had cruise ships docking here. The apple and pear trade from New Zealand and Australia was guaranteed for another three years. Everything they was talking about we were doing.’

Instead, the government’s solution was a combination of top-down diktat and economic laissez-faire – the essence, perhaps, of what became Thatcherism. In 1981, the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) was established as a private company; the following year, a huge swathe of London’s riverside, stretching east along the Thames Estuary was designated an Enterprise Zone, offering low tax rates and lax planning regulations to property developers. The idea was to transform Docklands, as it was rebranded, into a world financial centre, focused on Canary Wharf. Former dock land was sold off for development, prompting land values to soar; a new gold rush from which the Islanders were excluded. Despite £6 billion of public money being spent on ‘regeneration’, unemployment remained 20 per cent on the Isle of Dogs. ‘There was a missed opportunity here,’ said Pye, who today works as a pierman, unloading boatloads of tourists and City workers at Canary Wharf. ‘The finance stuff is fine, but they put all their eggs in one basket. It’s crazy not to use water when you’ve got the Thames on your doorstep.’

Islanders were furious: they were watching steel and glass palaces rise in front of them, yet their children couldn’t find jobs or, increasingly, a place to live. The Right to Buy scheme – a Thatcher Government policy introduced in 1980 that gave council tenants the right to buy their homes at subsidised rates – was eating away at the number of council homes available, and the LDDC was actively hostile to building more social housing, preferring to encourage developments aimed at affluent professionals. In July 1986, protesters from the Association of Island Communities released thousands of bees and a flock of sheep into a tent where the cream of the world’s finance industry had gathered to watch the governor of the Bank of England turn the first sod of earth to mark the beginning of construction work at Canary Wharf.3 Beyond a few colourful headlines, their protest was ignored.

One year later, a new dimension would be added to this already fractious situation. My conversation with Pye took a pause, as he attended to two Asian women in headscarves who had come to book the function room for a wedding. ‘I’ll give you a discount, as you won’t be needing the bar, I take it?’

In 1987, sixteen-year-old Syeda Choudhury, along with her parents, brother and sister, became one of the first Bengali families to move on to the Isle of Dogs. ‘It was scary,’ Choudhury told me, her accent a mix of Cockney and Bengali, when we met in 2011. ‘We lived up by Commercial Road [in Whitechapel, north-west of the Isle of Dogs], where lots of other Bengalis lived. A lot of people had told us that the Isle of Dogs was not a nice area, but at that time the council made only one offer for housing, so you had to take what you could get.’ The Choudhurys took up residence on the Barkantine estate, whose pointy-roofed tower blocks still stand today, a stubborn objection to the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. The ‘Islanders’ were never a homogenous community; estates like Barkantine had long been used to house tenants from elsewhere in London. But in the past they had been white. ‘We were the only Bengali people in our block – and in the two or three other blocks, there was like one or two families.’ The Choudhurys soon found they were not welcome.

East London’s Bengalis, their lives marked by the same empire that had sustained the docks, were no strangers to hostility: the thousands of families like the Choudhurys who had arrived from Bangladesh during the 1960s and 1970s had faced abuse and systematic discrimination since their arrival. Asian families were far more likely to experience homelessness or overcrowded living conditions,4 and had been a target for violence encouraged by the BNP’s forerunner, the National Front, during the 1970s and 80s. Choudhury remembers her shock the first time she saw a gang of Union Jack-toting racists: ‘I was nine when we came over from Bangladesh and we used to love this Union Jack, everyone loves the British Queen. But when I saw it here, in their hands, and the way they were abusing it, you don’t like it any more.’

By the mid-80s, Bengalis had resisted the worst racism, but in 1987, the Choudhurys were dropped into the middle of an acute housing crisis. As the Island’s waterfront properties had been sold off for private development, the Right to Buy scheme was severely diminishing the available housing stock: in 1985 there were 5,537 council homes on the Isle of Dogs; by 1993 this had fallen to 4,000.5 Community life on the Isle of Dogs had already been torn asunder when many dockers moved downriver to work at the Tilbury container port; now the remaining working-class residents found it increasingly difficult to ensure that their friends and relatives were housed nearby.

This problem was by no means confined to the Island – across Tower Hamlets, one of the country’s poorest boroughs, housing was in short supply. A shortage of homes, combined with rising unemployment, had bred discontent at the borough’s long-reigning Labour administration, and in 1986 Tower Hamlets elected a Liberal-run council. The Liberals (who became the Liberal Democrats in 1988) had won power with a populist campaign that sought to play up fears of crime and social breakdown and promised a ‘Sons and Daughters’ housing scheme, which would ensure ‘local’ people were at the front of the queue for homes.

This was an empty promise, since councils were obliged by law to house homeless families first. What’s more, as the Liberals were well aware, to many East Londoners ‘local’ meant ‘white’. Once in power, councillors sought to shore up their position by playing on white resentment. In 1987, Liberal councillors claimed that Bengali families living in bed and breakfast accommodation had made themselves intentionally homeless by coming to Britain; a year later, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, Jeremy Shaw, staged a publicity stunt, willingly relayed by the East London Advertiser, when he travelled to Bangladesh to tell the government there that Tower Hamlets had no more room for migrants.6

And while the Liberals raised the hopes of white Tower Hamlets residents, their commitment to localism had created a further problem: power in the borough was devolved into ‘neighbourhoods’, each with their own budget and spending powers. The Isle of Dogs neighbourhood was represented by three Labour councillors and when Asian families began arriving in 1987, many white residents blamed Labour for giving away homes they believed should have been theirs. As Pye, who stood as a Lib Dem council candidate in 1990, put it to me: ‘Everybody felt that Labour was fine on the Bengalis or West Indians or whatever, but if you were white you got nothing. The feeling was, we’ve got to get houses, same as anybody else.’

Pye is no bigot, and he has worked hard to make people of the different colours and creeds who inhabit the Isle of Dogs today feel welcome: St John’s provides space for Muslim prayer sessions, plus West Indian, African and Anglican church congregations. But during the late 80s, other Islanders let their resentment spill over into something much nastier. Choudhury recalled being chased off a bus by white youths shortly after moving to the Isle of Dogs (‘I ran home and just shut the curtains’), and described a steadily worsening atmosphere as more Asian families moved onto the Island. ‘You couldn’t go to the park, never. If I went to the park, to play, on the swings and stuff, there would be white boys and girls chasing me. They used to bring dogs to chase you. We had to come home before dark, much earlier than other people. In winter you had t...