Ryan Shaffer. Patterns of Prejudice. Volume 47, Issue 4-5, 2013.
We are a nationalist music organization promoting European nationalist groups who are mostly ignored by the leftwing and capitalist music media.… Through us you will be able to hear about concerts of bands who the music media hates and refuses to advertize their gigs [sic].
~ White Noise Club
In 1987, hundreds of neo-fascist skinheads from around Europe gathered at a barn in rural Suffolk, England to watch Skrewdriver perform their trademark song ‘White Power’. The performance was part of a music festival hosted by National Front (NF)’s White Noise Club at the home of Nick Griffin, chair of the party. During the song, hundreds of skinheads bounced up and down as they sang along and mimicked the singer as he gave the Nazi salute during the chorus that demanded ‘white power for Britain’. For those who did not attend, images and descriptions of the performance were featured in White Noise, the White Noise Club’s official magazine that was distributed to thousands of teenagers throughout Western Europe. The concert and magazine were not just entertainment but part of a conscious effort by the NF elite to recruit, fund-raise, spread ideas and develop international ties. The party used music to push its narrowly British ‘nationalist’ message beyond Britain, and frame contemporary events through a British fascist lens for youth in other countries. To further these goals, the National Front’s leaders had no problem attaching their brand of politics to hordes of youth who chanted ‘Sieg heil’ with the Nazi salute after every song.
Throughout the 1980s, the National Front’s close association with young neo-Nazis and its move away from traditional political campaigning restricted its appeal to mostly young people. By the late 1990s, neo-fascist politicians realized that the neo-Nazi subculture hurt their electoral prospects. After Griffin became chair of the British National Party (BNP) in 1999, he began cleaning up the party’s language and public image, but remained opposed to equality, and sought the repatriation of ‘non-natives’. With a seemingly new political brand, the party gained more than fifty local council seats, becoming the most successful British fascist party, exceeding the British Union of Fascists’ two councillors in the 1930s. The BNP built from this local community support, and Griffin, along with Andrew Brons, both former National Front chairmen in the 1980s, were elected as Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in 2009. In the background of this success, journalists and scholars have analysed the superficial ‘modernization’ of fascism—with the BNP moving away from skinhead culture and offensive rhetoric—and pointed out that such changes were merely cosmetic. Yet scholars and the media have not examined the intimate role BNP leaders played in developing neo-Nazi skinhead culture, how important music was for spreading extremist messages, and the British neo-fascists’ transnational connections in the 1980s.
This article explores the development of youth culture in British neo-fascism by focusing on the National Front’s youth outreach. It argues that youth culture was a recruitment tool for extremists, and music was a transnational commodity that helped establish contact and connections with like-minded people throughout the world. Using rare underground publications and interviews with key former National Front members, this article examines the contradictions youth gave rise to in the NF, which increased its youth recruitment, restricting the party’s ability to gain broader support while spreading a narrowly ‘nationalist’ version of politics to an international audience. In the first section, it explores the origins of the National Front, starting in 1967, and looks at early outreach campaigns. It then focuses on the symbiotic nature of youth culture by arguing that post-war British fascism directly mimicked its diametrically opposed rivals when the neo-fascists co-opted the leftists’ music outreach. Finally, it explores the emergence of international ties between marginal groups as the National Front greatly expanded its focus on youth culture and music in the 1980s. However, these marginal gains were not without negative consequences. While skinhead culture drew thousands of young people to neo-fascist politics and established international links between groups, the move away from traditional politics damaged the National Front’s public image as it became closely associated with young neo-Nazis. When the NF leadership matured, they consciously distanced themselves from the very subculture they helped to develop and promote.
Origins and growth
Even though the British fascists were largely unsuccessful in the 1930s compared to their continental counterparts, the fascists gained firm support from a marginal population, and their inter-war leaders became significant fascist figures after the Second World War. In 1932 Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF), whose members wore ‘black shirt’ uniforms that attracted First World War veterans like A. K. Chesterton, who became editor of its Blackshirt newspaper. The BUF quickly grew, and held large marches that resulted in street clashes, including the October 1936 Battle of Cable Street in which anti-fascists prevented the fascists from marching. In response to the marches and violence, Parliament passed the Public Order Act in December 1936, which targeted the Blackshirts by banning ‘political uniforms’, prohibited ‘quasi-military organisations’ and allowed the police to prevent BUF marches on London streets. As Europe moved closer to war, Mosley ran a ‘peace campaign’ to dissuade Britain from going to war with Germany. Eventually, key BUF figures, like Chesterton, left the party and fought in the British army during the Second World War. In 1940 Mosley was jailed as a threat to public order under Defence Regulation 18B, and the BUF came to an end, its political pinnacle having been one elected local councillor in 1934 and another in 1938. He was released in 1943, and launched the Union Movement in 1948; but he never again drew the large pre-war numbers and eventually moved to France.
Chesterton also remained active in post-war politics, and focused on preserving the British Empire and the British ‘race’. In February 1945 he helped found the National Front, which united minor groups with policies that included building a strong ‘national and Empire economy’, preserving Christian traditions and finding ‘an honourable, just and lasting solution’ to the ‘real Jewish problem’. The party unified ‘underground fascist movements’ and was a ‘private’ organization until it was publicly launched at the end of the war, to avoid attracting opponents. Following the collapse of the party due to infighting, Chesterton started the League of Empire Loyalists in 1954 as a political pressure group to strengthen the bonds between the white Commonwealth nations, and to reverse ‘non-white immigration’. After failing to make gains in the 1966 general election, Chesterton called for a ‘front’, composed of the disparate but like-minded groups, that could unify extremist parties.
A new party also called the National Front (NF) was formed in February 1967 at Caxton Hall, London where Chesterton was elected chair. The party brought together members of minor extremist groups, including the British National Party and the Racial Preservation Society, with the League of Empire Loyalists. Robert Edwards, who attended the first meeting as an agent of Mosley’s Union Movement, remembered key figures of various groups giving speeches about Empire, including Chesterton, Andrew Fountaine and John Bean. With a business suit and imperialist policies, many saw Chesterton as representing an ‘upper-middle class form of fascism’. Radicals and openly neo-Nazi figures were kept out of the party to avoid tarnishing its image, and these included former National Socialist Movement and League of Empire Loyalists members John Tyndall and Martin Webster. The activities of these two had been discussed in national and international media reports with regard to the National Socialist Movement’s paramilitary organization Spearhead, which was broken up in 1962 under the Public Order Act by targeting the group’s uniforms and ‘military’ training. Just a few months later in 1967, however, both Tyndall and Webster began to enjoy an upturn in fortunes that would see them become important figures in the NF.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the National Front’s electoral success grew as the British economy was suffering from inflation and unemployment. With an influx of immigrants, the Front’s message was ‘Your enemies are not the coloured immigrants, but the British government which let them come in hundreds of thousands’. Max Hanna argued that many of the recruits in the early 1970s were people ‘who have not belonged to another political organisation’, and the Front expanded to 32 branches and 80 groups by July 1973. Furthermore, he claimed that the bulk of the membership was from the skilled working class and lower middle class. The NF continued to expand when John Tyndall became chair in 1972. With Chesterton’s advanced age and his part-time residency in his native South Africa, many members wanted a younger and more politically involved leader. Tyndall was able to become chair with the support of the party’s directorate, due to his commitment and previous leadership roles as the deputy chair of the National Socialist Movement and leader of the Greater Britain Movement. Tyndall, a National Socialist, had previously written: ‘our modern democracy has got out of hand. It neither governs responsibly nor is in fact democracy.’ This was similar to the NF’s official line, which asserted that the party wanted ‘to safeguard and improve the status and responsibilities of British Citizenship, providing opportunities for additional methods of public representation’.
Despite challenges to Tyndall’s leadership, the party grew, and by the 1974 general elections it could no longer be ignored. After just seven years in existence, the Front announced it would have fifty-four candidates in the February 1974 election compared to a mere ten in 1970. In the second general election that year, in October, the Front stood ninety candidates. The Front received 77,000 votes and released its first political broadcast. In the 1977 Greater London Council elections, the NF pushed the Liberals into fourth place in Inner London with 119,000 votes. Sociologist Christopher Husbands wrote that the NF became the fourth largest political party by exploiting the economic conditions. Yet the most important new members were youth that wanted to join a radical political movement.
In the autumn of 1977, the NF called a meeting and discussed the creation of a youth organization as a response to teenagers’ increased interest in the Front. The Young National Front (YNF) was officially launched in early 1978 and drew in rebellious youth who identified with the NF’s racial policies. Originally the YNF sought to recruit youth from schools to shore up the future ranks of the NF with educated members, and the NF’s constitution limited youth membership to ‘National Front [members] between the ages of 14 and 25’. Among the youth who joined were Nick Griffin and Joe Pearce, who became important NF members in the following years. Pearce, under his own initiative, began printing a youth tabloid called Bulldog, which became the YNF official newspaper. Bulldog focused on sports, race and youth activity. A column entitled ‘Youth in Action’ informed readers of local activities, highlighting YNF Secretariat ‘Nick Griffin [who] is currently studying history at Cambridge University and … is optimistic about the future for NF students’. In addition to Bulldog, the YNF issued leaflets and held ‘training seminars’ for schoolchildren. The surge in youth activity was not welcomed by Tyndall, who wanted young members to be seen but not heard, and made sure that they did not have any power in the leadership. Youth finances were tightly controlled as well as YNF publications, which required approval either by the chair or by two of the three secretariats appointed by the chair.
Due to its popularity, Bulldog, which was designed to grab the attention of readers concerned about race and immigration, was adopted as the official Young National Front publication. Yet it also reflected interests of many teenagers. The February 1978 issue claimed the National Front was ‘blamed as school race riot flares’ in the headline of the four-page paper. That same issue announced the launch of the ‘first ever Young National Front football championship’, with five London teams and other teams set up in Norwich, Ipswich, Birmingham, Manchester and Leicester. A few months later Pearce wrote that the ‘YNF soccer competition is [a] great success’, noting that ‘the first ever John Tyndall Shield soccer competition’ drew more than 200 people, including guests John Tyndall and his wife Valerie. Indeed, this reflected a long-held interest among the youth and, in the autumn, the league began a new season. The paper proved popular among football fans. Chris ‘Chubby’ Henderson, leader of the Chelsea Headhunters and later a singer for the skinhead band Combat 84, wrote that football fans bought Bulldog ‘not because they were interested in politics, but the league table of louts on the back page’. He noted that fans got it just ‘to tell their mates they’d read it first’.
NF members targeted concerts and football matches as venues for selling papers and recruiting people because it was ‘where the white working class gathered together, [and] very few non-whites attended football’ matches. Journalist Philip Venning, citing numbers from Pearce, wrote that ‘West Ham and Chelsea supporters are notorious for their rightwing support’, noting that the NF sold ‘about 1000 copies of Bulldog at a Chelsea home game … [while] 700 copies of Bulldog were sold at a recent Madness concert’. Pearce said that, though Chelsea was a bad team at the time and had small crowds of about 9,000, the YNF would regularly sell 700 copies at the games. Recruiting at football matches became such a problem within a few years that the Football Association and Commission for Racial Equality began investigating extremism at matches in 1981.
In a direct challenge to the Front and other extremist organizations, the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) was launched on 3 November 1977, backed by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), International Socialists, trade unions and members of the Labour Party. Specifically, the ANL was founded by SWP member Paul Holborow, anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain and Labour Party member Ernie Roberts. It went on to distribute 500,000 copies of A Well Oiled Nazi Machine, characterizing the Front as a neo-Nazi organization. Meanwhile, David Bowie and Eric Clapton were accused of making fascist and racist statements. Bowie told a reporter during an interview: ‘I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism.’ Similarly, Clapton was accused of making statements ‘that seemed to support Enoch Powell’s view on repatriation’.
Rock Against Racism (RAR) was created in response to Bowie’s and Clapton’s statements in order to denounce racism through music, and target the NF’s growing support. Music journalist Garry Bushell has claimed that the RAR was formed by Roger Huddle and Red Saunders as ‘an umbrella organization’ to bring people into the Socialist Workers Party. Dave Renton has pointed out that the Socialist Workers Party, formed from the International Socialists in January 1977, has been described by historians as ‘taking a parasitic attitude towards social movements’, but he argued that Rock Against Racism was ‘decentralized from the start’ and had no consistent ‘line’. Indeed, the Socialist Workers Party drew on the socialists’ history of engaging in social action not only to attack fascists but also to recruit union members. The RAR had a monthly magazine called Temporary Hoarding, held local concerts on a regular basis and had its own record label called RARecords. The organization’s activities culminated in a collaboration with the Anti-Nazi League for two Rock Against Racism carnivals. In the spring of 1978, the ANL used its recruiting efforts to lead a march to Victoria Park for the first Rock Against Racism carnival. The RAR concert featured several well-known bands, including The Clash and Steel Pulse, with between 50,000 and 80,000 attendees. Journalist Martin Huckerby described it as ‘probably the biggest anti-fascist demonstration since the 1930s’, and notable for ‘the participation of many thousands of teenagers in punk rock styles’. The demonstrators were composed of a diverse assortment of supporters, including members of trade unions, student unions, left-wing political parties as well as ‘teenagers with multi-coloured hairstyles and weird clothing’. The event was so successful that a second Rock Against Racism carnival was held on 24 September 1978 featuring Aswad and Elvis Costello. Trevor Fishlock described the concert as attracting 30,000 anti-racism supporters, who were mostly white and under the age of twenty-five.
The musical front
The Young National Front took note of the massive number of people mobilized under the banner of Rock Against Racism. Just one year later, the National Front adopted the Socialist Workers Party’s method of recruiting members through music. In 1979 YNF leader Joe Pearce helped launch Rock Against Communism (RAC) as a national movement in direct response to the NF’s opponents, and established a voice for NF youth who wanted to listen to music that they found sympathetic. RAC developed out of the activities of several different young NF members who wanted music that represented their views or at least did not support RAR. In 1978 Eddy Morrison and other NF supporters in Leeds sought to promote music with an NF message that drew attention to race and opposition to communism. Morrison spearheaded the effort with the creation of a publication entitled The Punk Front, which promoted neo-Nazi bands and prominently featured the NF logo. Morrison explained later that ‘straightforward participation in parliamentary democratic politics is not enough’, and setting up ‘social clubs’ for youth recruitment was important for shaping society. The publication and recruitment at the F Club drew locally known Leeds bands into RAC, most notably the skinhead bands The Dentists and The Ventz who associated with openly ‘Nazi’ ideas and groups. In August 1978 Morrison’s British News printed an interview with Alan Peace, singer with The Ventz, who described how Rock Against Communism was not originally serious, but grew into a conscious effort to show ‘opposition’ to ‘all that commie stuff in the music scene’. Besides discussing performances, British News urged readers to send letters to mainstream music magazines to ‘challenge’ communist ideas ‘pushed by the music papers’. Despite this effort, there was no major push to establish RAC at the forefront of the radical youth subculture. As Alan Peace said, the group itself ‘are not really involved in the organising side of things’; they hoped for a ‘music monthly and a concert’.
By the following year, the National Front sought to advance RAC into a prominent position, and the official YNF began promoting it with fervour. The March 1979 issue of Bulldog announced: ‘For years White, British youths have had to put up with left-wing filth in rock music. … But now there is an anti-commie backlash.’ Despite racists adopting it for their cause, skinhead music originated in Jamaican working-class culture and was brought to Britain by the West Indian population. Yet, by the 1970s, skinheads ‘were gradually edged out’ of Rastafarianism as black culture and its identity was ‘segregated’, and a segment of white working-class youth developed an identity that conflated ‘white’ with ‘British’. The NF youth tapped into the subculture of skinheads, even appropriating the style that included Doc Marten boots, cropped hair and bleached Levi’s as its unofficial uniform. RAC and the skinhead style would have a profound and lasting impact around the world for neo-fascist youth, one that continues to shadow the NF and BNP today.
In August 1979, the first RAC concert was held at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square with Homicide and White Boss performing. The event drew a few hundred fans who were secretly rerouted to the venue in an attempt to avoid attracting protestors. YNF member Patrick Harrington described his experience: ‘I went to a Rock Against Communism gig held at Conway Hall in London and they had two of the most awful bands I’d ever heard. I only remember one of them. One was a punk band from Leeds called The Dentists.’ He noted that most of audience was drunk and male, and the bands had little musical talent. Journalist Mark Ellen wrote that the event consisted not only of YNF supporters, but 200 RAR activists who demonstrated as police arrived in two coaches to prevent violence. Additionally, other youth from the British Movement travelled to the Russell Square tube station to be redirected to the venue. The British Movement was started by Colin Jordan as a 1968 outgrowth of the National Socialist Movement, and proved successful at attracting radical youth and neo-Nazi skinheads who openly embraced Adolf Hitler’s ideas. The British Movement was smaller than the National Front; its leader Mike McLaughlin said that it had 4,500 members ‘about a third of whom are under 21’. Nonetheless, it contained notable members, including John ‘Grinny’ Grinton, a one-time drummer for future RAC band Skrewdriver and former NF member, who wrote to Sounds that he was ‘proud to belong to the British Movement’: ‘We are the real working class.’
While the NF youth saw a generation gap, older NF leaders also noticed differences. The Front leadership was not enthusiastic about welcoming skinheads who could harm the Front’s image on the streets with their youth culture and violence, but the increase in membership was heavily desired. Pearce described Tyndall as ‘disdain[ing] all manifestations of youth culture’; ‘he did not like’ the skinhead interest in the Front, but needed members to help with recruitment. In fact, Tyndall claimed that ‘“Pop” music is of course one of the major weapons in the assault on white civilization in which the barons of the media are engaged’. Likewise, YNF member Patrick Harrington said Tyndall ‘didn’t like any of’ the social aspects of youth. Tyndall ‘was old fashioned’ while younger members had different cultural influences based in working-class ‘traditions’ and youth rebellion. On the one hand, the skinheads and violence hurt the image of the Front and damaged its recruitment from a wider adult base. On the other hand, skinheads gave new life to the group and a new medium for disseminating a fascist message. After all, youth, as opposed to adults, often had more free time and energy to canvass areas for supporters.
As the YNF competed in the music realm with the ANL, the country faced the 1979 general election. The 3 May election was a political failure for the Front, but an ideological success for the right. It was the culmination of much campaigning in which the Front worked to have enough candidates ‘to demand equal television time with the big parties’. Yet, despite all the planning and campaigning with 303 candidates, the Front only received 191,706 votes, which made up 0.6 per cent of the total ballots cast. Scholar Christopher Husbands has argued that the NF ‘lost absolute percentage support in all seats contested in October 1974 and May 1979’. Furthermore, ‘the party’s decline is not to be explained in terms of a growing awareness among voters’, but rather that a vote for the NF was seen as a risky or wasted vote. While the election was ‘humiliating’ for the NF, ‘the success of Mrs Thatcher and the Tory party’ was due to ‘capturing the race and immigration issue from the NF’. NF Directorate member and later BNP National Organizer Richard Edmonds agreed, describing Thatcher’s win as a successful use of ‘playing the race card’ to take votes away from the NF, specifically when she mentioned the Front’s immigration appeal and said on television that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’.
Despite the popular appeal of the NF’s anti-immigration policies, the election caused the collapse of the party’s leadership, and from those ashes came a new level of youth activity. Tyndall perceived that the party’s poor performance had to do with a leadership that was ‘weak’ due by too much input from people who were not the chair. After failing to persuade the Directorate to give him more power, Tyndall resigned and formed the New National Front. In April 1982, at a hotel in London, Tyndall’s supporters, including Edmonds, voted to rename it the British National Party.
Following the leadership crisis in late 1979, several important NF leaders left the party, and Andrew Brons, formerly a member of the National Socialist Movement and Tyndall’s deputy chair, became NF chair in early 1980. After Tyndall’s exit, the YNF acquired new importance in the party. And the members of the Young National Front, including Griffin, Pearce, Harrington, Derek Holland and Ian Anderson, gained new responsibilities. The NF went through a difficult period as it lost members after the split, and its headquarters were closed causing new membership applications to be returned. One attempt to help fill the ranks was the relaunching of Rock Against Communism, and the key to this was having the reunited and recognizable skinhead group Skrewdriver serve as its flagship band.
With Tyndall and many older fascists out of the NF, younger members had the freedom to develop their interest in skinhead music in order to spread their message. In 1982 Pearce met with his musician friend Ian Stuart Donaldson, more famously known as Ian Stuart, who had been the lead singer for Skrewdriver, a skinhead band. Skrewdriver had achieved some minor success, but had trouble booking concerts—as the band was ‘unable to shake off the nauseous NF connotations’—and disbanded in 1978.
Ian Stuart officially joined the Young National Front as a recruiter in 1979, and years later said he was ‘proud’ to be a ‘Nazi’ and that ‘I admire Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, Robert E. Lee, [and] Rudolf Hess’. There are four hagiographical works on Stuart that provide details of the band and parts of his life. Skrewdriver: The First Ten Years, published while Stuart was alive by Skrewdriver Services, was written by Joe Pearce and describes Stuart’s life up to 1987. Born in Poulton-Le-Fylde, near Blackpool, in August 1958, Stuart formed Tumbling Dice, mostly playing Rolling Stone songs until being inspired by the Sex Pistols in 1977. Skrewdriver was launched later that year; it had an anti-drugs message and avoided political themes. Having grown disillusioned with the punk scene, according to Pearce, the band became friendly with skinheads—in fact ‘had been skinheads during the early seventies’—and eventually developed to the point at which, at the end of 1977, ‘Skrewdriver became a skinhead band’. The band broke up in mid-1978 citing negative press, club owners’ refusals to book them and an inability to get a new label interested in releasing their music.
One reason why club promoters were uninterested in hosting Skrewdriver was the violence they attracted, but this was not confined to Skrewdriver since other genres of bands saw disputes play out physically at their concerts. Indeed, concerts could have violent and disastrous effects even if the band was not explicitly fascist or racist. The most notable such event occurred in July 1981 at a club in Southall where the 4-Skins performed; it was described as an ‘interracial riot’ that resulted in the venue getting burned down. The New Musical Express featured the destroyed club on its cover with the headline ‘the gig that sparked a race riot’. Hundreds of skinheads had travelled to the area; some began attacking Asians stores and, later, 400 Asians started assaulting the venue with ‘paraffin bombs’. The skinheads fled the burning club with police help and ultimately the building was completely destroyed. Journalist Mick Duffy wrote, with regard to the concert and subsequent riot, that ‘the British Movement and the National Front certainly find it relatively easy to win support from pin-brain skinhead factions’.
By 1982 the National Front decided to relaunch Rock Against Communism as a decidedly more professional effort. Without Tyndall and opposition to youth outreach, Pearce urged Stuart to reform Skrewdriver for a new version of Rock Against Communism. The result was the recording of the song ‘White Power’, which became the most recognizable neo-fascist skinhead song. As Harrington explained, ‘once Skrewdriver got involved it was seen more seriously’. In 1983 the NF set up White Noise Records, the first record label operated by an extremist political party. Record labels were reluctant to promote overtly racist music, and White Noise Records met a demand by producing and distributing records that would otherwise not be sold. As Pearce explained: ‘the music wasn’t a vocation. The politics was the vocation. The music was a means to the end.’ The musical aspect of the Front proved very important to its survival. NF member Phil Andrews, who shipped record orders from NF headquarters, claimed the music’s success financed the Front ‘and kept it going for many years’.
White Noise Records’ first release was Skrewdriver’s White Power EP, which included the eponymous title song that evoked American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell’s book of the same name. Bulldog promoted the band’s White Power EP by printing mail order forms for purchasing it through the NF, and noted that copies had been sold in ‘Germany, Holland, Sweden, and America’. Soon youth around the world were singing along to Skrewdriver’s ‘White Power’, with the record selling at least 1,000 copies at the time of its limited release. The title track included the following lyrics:
Are we gonna sit and let them come?
Have they got the white man on the run?
Multi-racial society is a mess.
We ain’t gonna take much more of this.
The success of White Noise Records gave the NF a new means of delivering its ideas, and plans were quickly made to expand its music production. Chairman Andrew Brons, in a confidential bulletin to NF members wrote: ‘The threatened prosecution of Skrewdriver (under the Race Act) has not deterred White Noise Records from producing discs. The next disc—featuring four bands—is due be released in mid-June.’ White Noise Records continued producing Skrewdriver records and, after hearing from teenagers of varied musical tastes, released a compilation album of four bands called This Is White Noise in June 1984. That same year the label made plans to sell Skrewdriver’s Hail the New Dawn LP, which was eventually released by the West German record company Rock-O-Rama in 1984. The album reflected a more international view of British neo-fascism with the song ‘Europe Awake’, the lyrics of which included:
We’ve got to get together now, and wage our nation’s fights.
If we don’t act quickly, we’re going to face the endless night.
We’ve got to take our nations back, from all the traitorous scum.
You’d better believe it, our day will soon have to come.
Bookkeeping and contracts for White Noise were lax or non-existent leading to later problems. In fact, Skrewdriver and White Noise did not have a contract. While Pearce did not know how much Stuart earned, he noted: ‘I’m sure he was getting paid more … than the normal 10 per cent of sales and was getting probably 30 to 40 per cent.’ There was no doubt that music, in particular the band Skrewdriver, gave the National Front a focus that attracted an international base as well as revenue. In all, the Front sold a minimum of 10,000 records but the force of the ideas and the establishment of an international network would impact like-minded groups three decades later.
But, despite the sales, the NF had trouble getting venues to allow RAC concerts so the organization used unique locations as well as deceit to host the events. While members refined the practice of using fake names and carefully instructing attendees to meet at a rendezvous point, they were without a major venue at which they could bring large numbers of people together. The property owned by Nick Griffin’s parents turned into an important international venue for young neo-fascists. In 1984 the first large NF music festival took place at his parents’ home in Suffolk, England with Skrewdriver performing. NF banners were hung on the side of the stage, and most of Skrewdriver’s songs were greeted by an enthusiastic crowd, chanting ‘Sieg heil’ as they raised their arms in the Nazi salute. At one point, in response to the crowds’ chants, Ian Stuart said: ‘Fucking right Sieg heil, fucking nigger bashing.’ In addition to Skrewdriver performing ‘White Power’, they played ‘Back with a Bang’, which was originally released in 1982 and celebrated the rebirth of skinhead music:
Do you remember in summer back in 1978?
When they reckoned that the skinheads’ days were numbered.
And the papers dripped with liquid hate.
As Skrewdriver’s lyrics were echoing in young minds, the youth gained more leadership responsibility in the Front. In 1983 long-time NF Activities Organizer Martin Webster was expelled with support from the younger members; while he won a court battle over the expulsion, he was thereafter without a party position. The Times described ‘the new face’ of the National Front: Ian Anderson, a man in his late twenties, filled Webster’s position organizing activities and Nick Griffin served as deputy chair. Within a few years, however, an ideological division over political direction, and personal conflict between Griffin’s supporters and the faction backing Ian Anderson and Andrew Brons led to the party’s fragmentation under Griffin’s leadership in 1986 and 1987.
The Young International Front
With Nick Griffin in charge of the National Front, the party achieved increasing international influence by creating the White Noise Club. White Noise, the organization’s magazine, described itself as ‘a nationalist music organization promoting European nationalist groups who are mostly ignored by the leftwing and capitalist music media’. Ian Stuart began working closely with Patrick Harrington at the central London branch of the NF and developed new ideas for music outreach. The White Noise Club, formed by Harrington and Derek Holland, built social networks, organized concerts and distributed merchandise. Harrington said that the club began as nationalists creating their own publications and distribution channels because they ‘couldn’t expect the press from the establishment’ or mainstream distributors to promote Rock Against Communism. The White Noise Club produced merchandise and the magazine White Noise contained band interviews, record reviews, mail order service and policies of the movement. Early issues of White Noise had a circulation of about 1,000 copies and peaked with 5,000 worldwide, not including photocopied issues that were given out to non-members. The magazine kept in contact with about thirty different publications throughout the world that helped the White Noise Club to recruit new bands and spread political news. Meanwhile, the NF continued holding events at which large numbers of teenagers bought beer and merchandise, which encouraged the Front to organize more festivals.
By 1987 the White Noise Club was hosting international events at the NF summer festivals. In April of that year, the music festival at the Griffin property in Suffolk was organized by NF member Phil Andrews, who described hundreds of skinheads travelling from around Europe to attend the concert. Skrewdriver performed, promoting political themes, including apartheid, and dedicated songs to local and foreign figures. Notably, Ian Stuart spoke about Tom Metzger, head of White Aryan Resistance (WAR) based in San Diego County, California. Ian Stuart praised ‘the WAR Party and Tom Metzger. He’s doing a lot for the white racialist cause in America. He’s going to put this video concert on television.’ Metzger received a video of the concert and made copies available for purchase to youth in the United States. After this, he explained: ‘The skinheads began to look to myself as a type of leader or someone who they look[ed up] to.’
Metzger was previously well known for his radical views, having been a member, in 1975, of the California branch of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), under the national leadership of David Duke. As a member of the KKKK, he became a public figure and developed ties to neo-Nazis as he ran for public office, including the United States House of Representatives. During this failed campaign he launched the White American Political Association, which encouraged him to adopt a political approach and led to the creation of the militant White Aryan Resistance. With a monthly newspaper and a telephone hotline that allowed supporters to hear a recorded message about extremist news, WAR was one of the most notable neo-Nazi organizations in the United States. Metzger became known to readers of the National Front’s publication Nationalism Today when Griffin interviewed him in 1985.
With Metzger’s help, the sounds that the NF helped to create were echoing throughout the United States. In 1989 WAR and the American Front, modelled on the National Front by Robert Heick, held the first ‘white power’ festival in North America, billed as an ‘Aryan Woodstock’, with bands from Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Philadelphia. Metzger went on to organize his own concert in the United States in 1989 called the Aryan Festival. The concert proved successful, and another was held the following year near Tulsa, Oklahoma, featuring No Remorse, a British band closely aligned with Skrewdriver. During this period an underground movement of neo-fascist bands began forming in the United States, which developed publications and record labels that financed a new generation of neo-Nazi activists throughout the country. By the late 1980s, Rolling Stone highlighted Metzger’s growing influence in the United States, his ties to Skrewdriver and the National Front’s impact on ‘Nazi-skinhead ideology’.
Despite the international interest, the NF lacked mainstream channels, which meant that one either had to seek out Rock Against Communism music or purchase it without necessarily knowing the political connotations. For example, in the United States, the earliest distributor of neo-Nazi and Skrewdriver music was Chicago Area Skinheads (CASH), led by Clark Martell, who initially sold albums on consignment to local music shops. In 1987 Martell and others were arrested for attacking his former girlfriend, which left Christian Picciolini the leader of CASH. Picciolini recalled that his main duty was purchasing records from Europe and dubbing them on cassettes, which in turn were sold to Americans through advertisements in crude racist publications. He noted that there were two record stores that specialized in imports and sold Skrewdriver music, but the owners of the store likely did not know the political nature of Skrewdriver. The music brought in income and made CASH a recognizable name for youth interested in neo-Nazism because it was one of a few sources at the time for music with racist and fascist lyrics.
In England, Ian Stuart and Skrewdriver broke away from the National Front and created a global neo-fascist skinhead movement without any political party affiliation. According to Patrick Harrington, once Skrewdriver became involved with the West German record label Rock-O-Rama, Stuart did not need the National Front as a ‘middle man’. Harrington and Holland would travel to West Germany to purchase ‘van loads’ of the music to sell back in Britain, and for the next decade Rock-O-Rama would continue to sell Skrewdriver music throughout Europe as well as to music stores in the United States that purchased imports. Indeed, this proved to be a turning-point as the band grew in notoriety and needed the NF less. Rock-O-Rama financed the recordings and had control of distribution to music stores from its history of selling reissues and German punk albums. Garry Bushell wrote that precise sales numbers were not reported, ‘but it is known that Skrewdriver sales alone made a millionaire of Herbert Egoldt, the boss of their German record label Rock-O-Rama’.
In 1987 Ian Stuart set up Blood & Honour after feeling like he was not being paid sufficiently by the White Noise Club and no longer needed the National Front to promote or finance recordings. The first issue of its eponymous magazine declared it was ‘a new independent Rock Against Communism paper … run by people who really care about the Nationalist music scene’. The two sides began attacking each other personally with Stuart calling his former Front peers ‘weirdos’ and the ‘Nutty Fairy Party’. Whereas the NF claimed that ‘Stuart’s real complaint against’ Harrington and Holland was that ‘they told him exactly what they thought of his reactionary Nazi views, and his instant cry of “I want more”’. Blood & Honour spread throughout the world during the 1990s with a US division being established in 1993 and a German one in 1994. Eventually, by the late 1990s, it had expanded into Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. The Guardian reported that Stuart had ‘thousands of devotees from skinheads in Tokyo to Ku Klux Klan members in Tennessee’. Though Ian Stuart died in a 1993 car crash, the organization continues and has active members around the world.
The National Front voted in favour of disbanding in late 1989, but out of its remains new forms of extremism reached new heights. The fragmentation of the National Front and its decision not to contest the 1987 national election caused serious problems for the maintenance and recruitment of members. Following Harrington’s apology to the Jewish community for previous NF attitudes towards Jews, Griffin and Holland left the NF and moved away from party politics by joining the International Third Position to create a revolutionary cultural movement. Suffering from a loss of prominent figures and members, Harrington voted with the majority to disband the National Front and it was officially dissolved in January 1990. Former NF members then migrated to the British National Party making it the largest neo-fascist political organization in Britain. In 1995 Griffin joined the BNP to help Tyndall, and became editor of Tyndall’s Spearhead magazine in May 1996. Griffin later challenged Tyndall for the leadership of the BNP, arguing that the party needed to modernize in ‘two general categories: image and organisation’. During his campaign for BNP chair, Griffin said he was willing to use music because it is ‘a very powerful medium and the multi-racial devil mustn’t be left with all the tunes, good or otherwise’.
After Griffin became BNP chairman in October 1999, he publicly distanced the BNP from skinheads—the party expelled members and demoted others who tarnished the BNP image—but the party maintained some of its connections to radical music. This included allowing members to join who were in ‘white power’ bands and accepting donations from neo-fascist skinhead concerts. Griffin also created the BNP’s record label Great White Records, which was both a business and a platform for promoting the party’s ideas. The BNP’s Great White Records differed from the NF’s White Noise Records in that it produced only ‘nationalist’ folk music. Under Griffin’s leadership, the BNP enjoyed electoral success and, by 2009, had gained fifty-five local councillors, one London Assembly member and two Members of the European Parliament. Meanwhile, Patrick Harrington formed the Third Way with former NF member David Kerr in March 1990, and advocated ‘far more liberal’ politics, including environmental issues and support of gay rights. In 2005 Solidarity, a ‘union for British workers’, was launched and in 2006 received government recognition under the leadership of John Walker, Lee Barnes and Kevin Scott, who were BNP members; in 2006 Harrington became its general secretary. The union’s president was Adam Walker and the treasurer was John Walker, both prominent BNP members, but it included members with a variety of political affiliations in addition to BNP supporters. In 2010 Harrington, who never joined the BNP, became Griffin’s political advisor in the European Parliament, and Adam Walker served as Griffin’s office manager. Since this success, however, the BNP has lost many members and councillors because of alleged financial misconduct and expulsions and, in 2011, Andrew Brons unsuccessfully challenged Griffin for the BNP leadership, only to resign from the party in 2012.
The Young National Front’s impact on neo-fascism
Post-war British fascism was transformed by youth who focused both on cultural outreach and politics. The leadership vacuum in 1979 and influx of youth into the National Front transformed far-right politics in Britain by creating a cultural project in which neo-fascists introduced their ideology through music instead of political campaigning. In the process, the NF developed an international community that approved of the message and the music. Youth interests came to the forefront of NF policies with the party establishing a record company and a concert production organization. The party turned away from traditional political campaigning towards international cultural programmes that included music. The result of these developments was the tarnishing of the party’s image due to its members’ use of Nazi imagery and incendiary language. Griffin had welcomed hundreds of skinheads on to his family’s property in the 1980s but, by the 1990s, he publicly distanced himself from skinhead subculture as he tried to clean up the BNP’s language and image.
The lasting impact of the Young National Front was far-reaching and it still influences radical teenagers around the world. NF leaders never learned how to turn skinhead recruitment into a political force, although they were able to spread their ideas to a new generation of angry and discontented young people. Neo-fascist skinhead music continues to finance like-minded organizations in Europe and North America, like Resistance Records, operated by the neo-Nazi National Alliance, which mirrors the NF’s White Noise Records business of the 1980s. As if fulfilling the hopes of the White Noise Club, young extremists see themselves as part of an international community with a shared common culture of music. Though these developments did not turn the National Front or the British National Party into mainstream political parties, a few innovative young NF members transformed extremist politics and reshaped a part of youth culture.