held meetings throughout the autumn of 1993 with Island residents to find out what their concerns were; the manifesto promised more investment in housing if Labour were to win back control of the council. An ambitious young shadow minister named Tony Blair told an anti-racist rally in East London just a few weeks before the launch of the manifesto, ‘We understand the problems are housing and jobs.’35
As polling day drew closer, a wide range of community groups emerged to boost turnout and to make sure people felt they were not alone in opposing the BNP. Holtam’s church group distributed rainbow-coloured ribbons for people to wear. It was a small gesture, but as Holtam described it, the ribbons were ‘symbolic, a positive statement that said we want to be part of a multiracial community. It gave the sense that they [the BNP] were not necessarily going to win it.’ Syeda Choudhury’s mother joined a group named Women Against Racism and set about convincing her Bengali friends on the Isle of Dogs to register to vote. Formed in 1993 as a response to the BNP, Women Against Racism brought female campaigners together from many ethnicities – white, Somali, Chinese and Asian. But as Julie Begum, one of the group’s founders, explained, it drew on a strong tradition of anti-racist activism among East London’s Bengalis: ‘When our fathers and uncles and mothers arrived in the 60s, after the floods and the liberation war in Bangladesh, a lot of them were grateful for the refuge. Then in the 70s, there was an anger from young men who had grown up here, thinking, you know, we don’t have to be killed, just because we’re black. Since the 70s there’s been much more of a resistance to racism and in the 90s I think that was revisited. A lot of people felt that they needed to come together again to respond to that racism.’
Finally, under pressure from campaigners, the East London Advertiser revised its position on the BNP. In a front-page story the week of the local elections, Richard Tidiman urged his readers to ‘think about the consequences’ of voting for the party. If they were unsure, then he suggested ‘take a few hours off, go and see Schindler’s List’ before deciding.36
On 5 May, Derek Beackon’s short reign was brought abruptly to an end. Labour swept the borough, wresting control of the council from the Lib Dems and winning all three seats in Millwall. But as Begum recalled it, this was less a party political victory than proof of what people could do by themselves: ‘What I remember the most is our solidarity, the meetings – the sisterhood, if you like – of all these different women. We used to meet in our front rooms, making banners, producing posters and leaflets. There was lots of activity, we lived that time with each other constantly, in each others’ houses, on the phone at demonstrations. It was exhausting, actually. And when we got the result, it was euphoric.’
Yet an uncomfortable truth remained. The BNP’s vote had actually increased; spreading out across Tower Hamlets and into the neighbouring borough of Newham.37 What sort of legacy would this dark period leave – for the Island; for Britain?
Summer 2011; I am sitting in on a pensioners’ lunch club at a community hall on the Barkantine estate. Outside is bright sunshine, but as the diners finish their meal of savoury mince with dumplings, I am struck by the fact that the room’s lights are on full. The housing association that now manages the estate has been selling off land to property speculators, who have erected a block of flats on what used to be the hall’s back garden, blocking out any natural light. Now, they want to knock down the adjoining church. ‘They said we could use a room on the second floor as a chapel,’ Rita Bensley, lunch club organizer and a veteran Isle of Dogs community activist, tells me. ‘I said, have you even checked to see if a coffin will fit in the lift? They hadn’t.’ Space, as ever, is at a premium on the Island.
After the plates are cleared, two of the group, Mary and Donna, settle down in a corner of the room with mugs of tea. I ask Mary how long she’s lived here. ‘I was born on the Island,’ she says, ‘and it got such a pounding in the war that my mum moved out to Stepney. But I moved back when I got married. In them days the Island was an “in” place to live – they were building all these new flats. I live on the twentieth floor and I’ve got a beautiful view. But now people can’t get homes for their kids. It’s not fair. I don’t want to be called racist.’
‘I think they should abolish that word, racist,’ Donna interjects, fiercely. ‘It’s spot the white when you go down there –,’ she gestures towards the other end of Barkantine. ‘My grandson, his mum sent him to a lovely private school, but then they ran out of money and they sent him to the state primary here. Very mixed. His whole nature has changed. The way he talks, his attitude. He’d never have dreamed of that before.’
Mary nods. ‘It might be a good school but it’s not for our children.’ She gives me a conspiratorial grin. ‘It’s like we’ve been invaded, only not with guns.’
After all this time, I ask, haven’t people learned to mix?
‘Well,’ she replies. ‘They never talk to us.’
2
Any Colour as Long as It’s Black
After Millwall, debate gripped the BNP. Activists who had tramped the streets of London’s East End and seen first hand what a few thousand low budget leaflets, false rumours and some doorstep cajoling could do, wanted the party to throw its efforts into more of the same. If only temporarily, Beackon’s victory had shaken the idea that a vote for the BNP was a ‘wasted’ vote.
John Tyndall, the BNP’s leader, wasn’t so sure. He had tried the electoral route once before in the 1970s as chairman of the National Front and it had proved useless. This softly-softly approach wasn’t really what being in a fascist party was about. For all the talk of fair treatment and housing allocations and equal rights to Tyndall, fascism was street politics, and a far-right party like the BNP could only bully its way into power. Looking for allies, Tyndall’s attention lighted upon Nick Griffin, an activist who had recently been drawn into the BNP’s orbit. ‘The electors of Millwall’, Griffin wrote in a party magazine, ‘did not back a postmodernist rightist party, but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan “Defend Rights for Whites” with well-directed boots and fists.’1
This was exactly what Tyndall wanted to hear – which should have made him wary. Griffin, then in his mid-thirties, had an arcane personal ideology formed from a soup of foreign and British intellectual traditions, along with a proven ability to switch allegiances at opportune moments. In nearly two decades of political activity, this chameleon had shown he could come in any colour, as long as it was black.
Born in 1959, in Barnet on the northern outskirts of London, Griffin was the son of right-wing Conservative Party activists (his father, Edgar, a small business owner, had met Nick’s mother when they both turned up to heckle a Communist Party meeting in the early 1950s). Griffin received his early political education in the family home. It wasn’t, perhaps, an entirely typical childhood: Griffin says that by the age of fourteen, he had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, although he has often claimed that only the chapter on propaganda made any lasting impression on him. Nevertheless, Griffin described his parents to me as mainstream Conservatives who were pushed rightwards by the Heath Government that came to power in 1970, and were ‘increasingly dismayed by a Tory Government not doing anything to move the country back after Labour had ratcheted it leftwards.’
Above all, the issue that exercised the Griffins most, like many others on the Tory right, was immigration. For them, as for many others, the politics of the period were defined by the Tory MP Enoch Powell, in whose career were reflected the contortions of the British elite as it tried to reconcile itself to the loss of empire. Powell had set out as a vocal opponent of decolonization, but when that came to nothing, he reinvented himself as a champion of the free market and the free movement of labour: during his stint as health minister in the late 1950s, he was one of the first to encourage nurses from former colonies to
