making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin.’ But when these new workers were not matched with expanded public services, Powell was one of the first to shape the resulting white resentment into a new political language.2
From 1965 onwards, Powell made a startling about-turn. After councillors in his Wolverhampton constituency expressed fears about the birth rate among non-whites in 1965, Powell demanded that Commonwealth immigrants be prevented from bringing their spouses and children into the country. When race riots in Detroit and other American cities erupted in the summer of 1967, he published a piece in the Sunday Express asking: ‘Can We Afford to Let Our Race Problem Explode?’ Then, in 1968, came a series of speeches that laid out the blueprint for anti-immigrant politics in the decades to come.
The first, delivered in Walsall on 9 February, conjured the image of a lone white child marooned in a classroom of immigrants. His misinterpretation of immigration statistics to back up his assertion foreshadowed the ‘numbers game’ now played by politicians across the spectrum. The second, in Birmingham on 20 April, was supported by an anecdote about an anonymous constituent, an elderly lady whose street had been overrun by blacks and who was now terrorised by ‘grinning picanninies’ pushing excrement through her letter box. Another anonymous constituent, Powell claimed, had expressed the fear that ‘in this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’ The third, made in Eastbourne on 18 November, explicitly linked race and nation. ‘The West Indian or Indian does not, by being born in England become an Englishman,’ stated Powell. ‘In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still.’ He invoked a ‘mass of immigrants, living in their own communities, speaking their own languages and maintaining their native customs.’
This was a new kind of racism; a departure from the old, imperial kind that insisted on the biological superiority of whites. Powell recast whites as victims, under threat from alien cultures. His speeches, relayed to millions of people across the country who had never experienced immigration first-hand, appeared to confirm their worst fears about the presence of non-whites in British cities. They also contained many of the features of subsequent far-right propaganda: a vulnerable woman, dirt, the prospect of invasion. When Edward Heath dismissed Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, it sent many of his supporters on the Tory right hurtling towards a new political grouping, the National Front.
In October 1974, Edgar Griffin, now living in Suffolk, took his wife and two teenage children to a National Front meeting at a pub near the football ground in Norwich. In the pub’s function room, in front of a genteel audience of about fifty people, a well-spoken young man gave a speech on immigration: why both main parties, Labour and Conservatives, would never stop the flow of immigrants and why the National Front was the only party committed to the repatriation of non-whites.
The NF, an alliance of ultra-conservatives, ‘empire loyalists’ and neo-Nazis that had formed in 1967, was the main beneficiary of the Powell affair. Aware that the larger part of their doctrine was shunned by the vast majority of the population, Britain’s small network of fascists was constantly on the lookout for points where their ideas overlapped with mainstream opinion. Powell seemed to have provided one. As one of the NF’s founders, John Bean, later recalled: ‘Here was a leading, respectable, orthodox politician saying what we had said for more than a decade.’3
When Powell was condemned by his own party’s leadership and dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet, recruits to the NF soared. As one former NF official claimed, ‘Before Powell spoke, we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speeches we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of Tory organisations.’4 The Heath Government responded by moving to the right on immigration policy, but this only provoked further demands for control. The NF experienced a further rise in support, particularly after the arrival in 1972 of Asian refugees from the former British colony of Uganda and at its peak claimed some 12,000 members – hardly a mass party, but unprecedented on the far right of British politics.
At the pub in Norwich, the fifteen-year-old Nick Griffin, then a pupil at the fee-paying Saint Felix school in Southwold, was impressed by what he heard. Ignoring his father’s advice to join the Conservatives and work from within, he joined the National Front the following year, soon becoming secretary of the Ipswich branch.
During that period, the National Front was becoming increasingly dominated by a group of hardliners. The future BNP leader John Tyndall, initially barred from the NF because of his neo-Nazi activities, manoeuvred to take leadership of the party in 1972. In 1974, the year Griffin first attended an NF meeting, Tyndall established an ‘Honour Guard’ of young men to accompany the NF at marches and rallies. His intent, as he stated openly, was to mimic the propaganda techniques of the Third Reich:
What is it that touches off a chord in the instincts of the people to whom we want to appeal? It can often be the most simple and primitive thing. Rather than a speech or printed article it may just be a flag; it may be a marching column; it may be the sound of a drum; it may be a banner or it may just be the impression of a crowd. None of these things contain in themselves one single argument, one single piece of logic . . . [instead] they are recognised as being among the things that appeal to the hidden forces of the human soul.5
In 1976, a more moderate faction, led by John Kingsley Read, split off to form the National Party, taking a chunk of the Tory-leaning membership with them. Griffin, however, stayed put.
Dominated by Tyndall and his sidekick Martin Webster, the National Front became more openly extreme. Tyndall would play the ‘respectable’ figurehead, addressing gatherings in a pompous oratorical style, while Webster would deliver rabble-rousing tirades aimed at the younger, more unruly supporters. As the 1970s drew on, the level of racist violence in areas where the NF was active soared.
At the end of 1977, Griffin – now studying history and law at Cambridge – attended a meeting at the National Front’s headquarters in Leicester. Here, along with a working-class sixteen-year-old activist from Dagenham in East London named Joe Pearce, he was appointed to the governing body of a new group, the Young National Front. One of the Young National Front’s first projects was to produce and distribute propaganda intended to undermine the growing anti-racist and anti-fascist movements. In 1976, the Rock Against Racism campaign had been established in response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment, encapsulated by comments made on stage by the rock musician Eric Clapton. The Anti-Nazi League was launched the following year, as alarm grew at the impact of the National Front. In January 1978, the Young National Front produced 250,000 leaflets aimed at schoolchildren titled ‘How to spot a Red teacher’. The accompanying pamphlet, ‘How to combat a Red teacher’, suggested that teachers who promoted racial equality in the classroom, or denigrated nationalism in any way, were part of a Communist plot to take over the UK. Griffin’s life at this point would revolve around his Cambridge studies during the week, and National Front activities at the weekends. Most often, he would travel to London, where he would spend his time at the party’s headquarters in East London, providing ‘security’ or selling newspapers at the party’s regular pitch just off Brick Lane in Whitechapel.
The NF, however, was already in decline. At its peak, in the 1977 elections for the Greater London Council, it received over 10 per cent of the vote in some boroughs,6 but the party’s morale was broken by a riot in Lewisham in August the same year, where its marchers were driven off the streets by a much larger Anti-Nazi League demonstration. Similar clashes over the following months drove away many more moderate supporters, some of whom were lured back to the Conservative Party in 1978 when its new leader, Margaret Thatcher, gave a television interview in which she described the fear of white Britons being ‘swamped’ by an alien culture. Not only did this stance draw some voters away from the NF; it indicated that the ‘new’ racism of Enoch Powell had now been repackaged and made part of the political mainstream. As Alfred Sherman, the former Communist who had become one of Thatcher’s closest advisors, wrote in the Telegraph that same year, ‘It
