LDDC executives worried about property deals, the people of Tower Hamlets were facing a more pressing problem as the borough experienced a resurgence of racist violence. On 8 September, an Asian teenager named Quddus Ali had been beaten into a coma in Whitechapel. On the afternoon of 19 September, a group of BNP activists, newly emboldened by their election victory, were drinking outside the Ship pub in Bethnal Green, when a black man, Stephen Browne, and his white girlfriend, Jenny Bone, tried to pass through the crowd on their way to the supermarket. The couple were spat at and showered with beer by BNP members, who shouted ‘nigger lover’ and ‘monkey’ at them. When the couple replied by telling the group to shut up and calling them cowards, the BNP’s national organizer Richard Edmonds threw a glass. Others then ‘glassed’ Browne in the face and punched and kicked him as he lay on the ground. Browne was left scarred for life; Edmonds was later sentenced to three months in prison for his part in the assault.25
On the Isle of Dogs, police statistics showed a spike in ‘recorded racial incidents’, breaking the 100 barrier for the first time in 1993 and peaking at 180 in 1994.26 Many Bengali families remained in their houses, scared to go out – and one man left altogether after a scaffolding pole was thrown through the glass of his front door.27 ‘After he [Beackon] was elected, we got really scared,’ recalled Syeda Choudhury. ‘I used to know white neighbours who would say hello to me in the street,’ Choudhury said. ‘They stopped. That’s how bad it got.’
By 1993, Choudhury was married and had a one-year-old son, although the young family continued to live in her parents’ council flat. Her husband was a student and used to work evening shifts at a restaurant, often returning home after midnight. So scared were the Choudhurys for his safety at night that they would escort him, en masse, from his car to the entrance of their tower block: ‘He would phone us when he was leaving the restaurant, so me, my brother, my mum and my dad, all four of us, would have to go downstairs to where he’d park his car. We used to carry big sticks and a baseball bat. You could not have peace of mind all through the day and night. You were anxious, worried what’s going to happen next.’
While the presence of the BNP sowed fear among the Island’s Bengalis, it had also bred mutual suspicion among white residents. A white member of Holtam’s congregation made a point of telling him that she hadn’t voted for the party: ‘I feel I’ve got to say that because I keep looking at people and wondering if they voted BNP.’
Who else might vote BNP, given the chance? Full council elections in Tower Hamlets were scheduled for May 1994, just eight months after the Millwall by-election. In the past, fascists had been driven off the streets of East London by diverse, grassroots campaigns. In 1936 the Battle of Cable Street had blocked Oswald Mosley from leading his British Union of Fascists through Stepney – an area that then had a substantial Jewish population – thanks to a popular movement which embraced Jew and gentile, socialist and Communist. Four decades later, in the 1970s, white and black anti-racists fought street battles with the National Front. But this time, there was a difference: Derek Beackon had been elected. How on earth could the BNP’s opponents influence what went on in the privacy of the polling booth?
At the end of September 1993, the East London Advertiser published an alarming statistic: ‘More than 81 per cent support the BNP’, claimed its front-page headline, trailing the result of a telephone poll in which readers had been asked, ‘Do you think it is right or wrong that a BNP councillor has been elected to Tower Hamlets council?’ The question was somewhat leading – in one sense, of course it was ‘right’; Beackon had won a democratic election, and if you ignored the violence and intimidating behaviour of his party’s supporters, then he had every right to take up his seat.
The Advertiser, a popular read among older white East Londoners, appeared to agree. On 5 October, after attending his first council meeting, Beackon told the paper it was ‘full of figures and petty bickering. I’m an ordinary working-class bloke and most of the councillors are middle-class blokes, and for me it will take a little bit of understanding.’ On 7 October, under a headline that read ‘BNP’s Beackon steps into family eviction storm’, the Advertiser carried a report that claimed Beackon had helped ‘fight off’ bailiffs who wanted to evict ‘asthmatic Geraldine Johnson’ from her Isle of Dogs home. According to Nicholas Holtam, the paper’s editor Richard Tidiman (who died in 2006), initially gave Beackon qualified support. ‘Talking to the editor, he was worried about losing his readership. And of course the Bengalis don’t read the East London Advertiser. His readership was declining and so the stories played to that perception of, “We white East Enders have got to stand up for what’s right.”’
While Beackon attempted to position himself as a people’s champion, the borough’s two main parties had fallen into bitter recriminations. In December, an inquiry ordered by the Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown recommended the expulsion of Jeremy Shaw – the former mayor who had told Bangladesh that his borough was ‘full’. Its study of leaflets dating back to 1990 found that the party had ‘pandered to racism’, a conclusion that was disputed by local activists. Several prominent members tore up their party cards, while others branded Simon Hughes, the Bermondsey MP who had led the inquiry, as a ‘back-stabber’ and declared him ‘persona non grata in the borough’.28 A month later, a similar row erupted among Labour members, as the party debated whether to adopt a Lib Dem-style ‘Sons and Daughters’ housing policy in Millwall. After moves were made to expel its former candidate James Hunt for leaking the canvass return, a number of members resigned, Hunt included. He then announced he would stand as an independent.
In the absence of major parties, it was left to grassroots activists to build support for an anti-BNP campaign. Over the winter months, the Anti-Nazi League encouraged local firefighters, civil servants and health workers to leaflet against the BNP.29 Church volunteers, overseen by Holtam, worked with the Association of Island Communities to make sure that accurate information about housing and where council funds were being spent was distributed among Isle of Dogs residents.30
But they had competition: every Saturday morning, BNP canvassers would work the Island’s estates, knocking on doors and telling white residents that Derek Beackon was available to fight their corner. Anti-fascist protesters had continued to picket council meetings that Beackon attended, and BNP canvassers would tell residents that he had been ‘banned’ from official buildings, but that he could make personal calls if they so desired.31 Among voters who had already hit out once at the political establishment by electing Beackon, this merely reinforced the perception that they were being ignored. As Chuck, an Isle of Dogs resident, told me, it felt ‘exactly the same as the Palestinian situation. You know, they all want democracy, they allow a democratic vote, then the wrong party gets in and nobody wants to work with them.’32
It wasn’t until the spring of 1994 that the mainstream political parties began to campaign in earnest. The Lib Dems once more promoted a populist platform. The Tower Hamlets mayor, John Snooks, drew criticism from trade union leaders for ostentatiously displaying the Union Jack on his town hall desk. ‘When it becomes a crime to love your country, I’ll be the first to give myself up,’ he said in reply. ‘The only problem this borough faces is the cancer of the loony right and the loony left.’33 In April, the Lib Dem-controlled council announced a ‘carnival’ parade through Tower Hamlets, intended to restore a sense of pride among inhabitants of the East End. Held on a hail-strewn, bitterly cold day, the parade was a nostalgic vision of pearly kings and queens, wooden-wheeled market stalls and horse-drawn traps – evoking a time, it might be noted, when London sat at the heart of a vast empire whose colonial subjects remained for the most part overseas. Trailing behind the rest of the thirty-five carnival floats, at the very back of the parade, came the Bangladesh Welfare Association.34
The same month, Labour unveiled a ‘manifesto’ for the Isle of Dogs. In the autumn of 1993, Frank Dobson, then shadow local government secretary, had been drafted in by the Labour leader John Smith to oversee the party’s campaign. Dobson was convinced that the BNP could be beaten by a rejuvenated Labour campaign. ‘The thing to remember about the BNP,’ he told me, ‘is that they’re
