Anti-fascism

This year the left will be commemorating the events of May 1968, when students and workers rose up in Paris.

But those events were preceded in Britain by a dismal affair. The gutter press and right wing politicians launched a huge campaign against Asian families fleeing persecution in East Africa. The Labour government and nearly all the Labour MPs joined in. They pushed a bill through parliament in just one day, removing the right of Asians to enter this country even through they held British passports.

Woody Guthrie in the 1940s, for example, performed with a guitar emblazoned with the words, "This Machine Kills Fascists". In the late 1960s Marvin Gaye and a host of others picked up the anti-racist baton.

I never had much time for Margaret Hodge when she was the leader of Islington council back in the 1980s, and I never knew what wrong the people of Barking, one of London's poorest areas, had done to deserve this millionaire as their MP.

But her behaviour in recent weeks has really put her beyond the pale. I simply don't believe her claim that eight out of ten white families she canvassed in her constituency were "tempted to vote BNP". Even the BNP don't believe that, or they would have put up a full slate of candidates across all the wards in the constituency.

If true, this is a very divided society on the verge of turmoil. But many of the interviews have a dated feel. One example, which immediately stands out, is an interview with a white respondent who complains of allegedly preferential service offered to Asians, "last Saturday at the children's hospital in Hackney Road". This hospital, a few hundred metres from where I live, closed in 1998.

Rock Against Racism - 1970s
by Roger Huddle

It is very important that we consider the establishment of Rock Against Racism in the wider political and historical context. 1976 was a year of major social upheavals, with the introduction by a Labour government of the Social Contract. It was also the year that saw a real rise of the Nazi National Front.

The National Front's leader was chased away from Manchester, scared off from visiting Birmingham, and ended up in BNP Führer Nick Griffin's ample backyard. The reason was determined and organised resistance from Unite Against Fascism.

Some 2,000 people attented the launch at the Astoria in London and this was followed up by a sellout event in which exciting new bands like The Libertines joined veteran anti-racists The Buzzcocks and The Clash's Mick Jones.

It brings together the Anti Nazi League, the National Assembly Against Racism, Labour MPs, the TUC, and the general secretaries of Unison, the TGWU, the GMB, the PCS and the CWU. Billy Hayes is the treasurer of the organisation and Ken Livingstone the chair. Every day more names come flooding in. There is tremendous relief throughout the labour movement that the organisation has been set up, because there is serious concern about the threat posed by the Nazi BNP in the forthcoming June elections.

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' Assessing the level and threat of racism in Britain today uncannily summons up those famous opening words of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

'I had dropped into the only community of any size in western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.' So wrote George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia on the six months he was to spend in revolutionary Spain.

Witness to revolution