AS FAR-RIGHT hate and violence sweep across Britain, exploiting the Southport murders as a pretext but especially targeting Muslim communities, anti-fascists of a certain vintage are taking to social media and posting defiant images of an Anti-Nazi League (ANL) badge. It’s a way of saying: “We have seen this before, and we will stand up to it again.”

The ANL, launched in autumn 1977, credits itself, with much justification, for defeating the National Front (NF) in that period.  With 20,000 members nationally organised into local branches, and with a large hinterland of sympathisers, the NF terrorised inner-city migrant communities with incendiary racist propaganda and provocative marches. The ANL mobilised impressively to physically confront the fascists in large numbers, drown out their messages and discredit their lies about immigrants through mass literature. 

The NF, though, was more than an organised group of racist thugs propagating hate and violence. It had a political programme. Beyond the obvious racism targeted against Asian and Caribbean minorities of “Stop Immigration — Start Repatriation” and a demand that Britain must remain a “white country,” the NF called for: the return of national service; restoring capital punishment; an education system that recognised “innate differences in intelligence between children”; withdrawal from the common market and replacing it with an ultra-protectionist “economic  nationalism” and self-sufficiency; and adequate warmth in winter funded for pensioners.

When the NF was formed in 1967, its chair was AK Chesterton (GK’s cousin), a veteran of Oswald Mosley’s deeply anti-semitic pre-war British Union of Fascists. Through the 1970s the NF’s more internal literature was replete with “world Jewish conspiracy” theories, but the anti-semitism was more coded in its literature for mass consumption. It condemned the “malign influence” of “cosmopolitan finance.” It asserted that “international monopoly capitalism” and “international communism” represent different means to “a world tyranny,” run by the you-know-whos. 

Among the NF’s inner-core, the “mongrelisation” of Britain through black and Asian immigration was cast as a Jewish plot. International fascists today promote the “Great Replacement Theory” which claims that Muslim immigrants/refugees are replacing white Christians in the West. They finger Jews such as George Soros as the instigators. Fascists don’t move on from one enemy to the next, they merely accumulate them.

Some older anti-fascists have also posted images of their Rock Against Racism (RAR) badges, recalling an incredibly exciting and overlapping cultural movement that preceded the ANL by more than a year but combined with it to hold two mass carnivals in London in April and September 1978 with a Northern Carnival in Manchester sandwiched between them in July. Total attendances at these carnivals were well into six figures.

Leading black bands and white bands pushed defiant anti-racist, anti-fascist messages on stage, and celebrated multiculturalism. In the first Carnival in Victoria Park, east London, the Birmingham-based reggae band Steel Pulse donned white hoods for their song Ku Klux Klan, The Clash played an immensely powerful set, and Tom (not Tommy!) Robinson had the whole 80,000 crowd singing the refrain of “Glad to be Gay” — a song that BBC radio had banned. 

ANL propaganda sheets ridiculed the fascists’ “NF” acronym as an anti-democratic movement that promised No Fun and No Future. They made badges appealing to specific identities: “Social Workers Against the Nazis,” “Skateboarders Against the Nazis,” “Vegetarians against the Nazis.”

In 1977, in my late teens I was immersed in these movements that formed much of my lasting political and cultural outlook. I still treasure my original memorabilia — circular placards that on one side say, in black on yellowing white, “Smash Race Hate in 78,” and on the other: “Reggae Soul Rock ’n’ Roll, Jazz Funk and Punk, our Music! Rock Against Racism.” 

RAR’s regular gigs in smaller venues around Britain mainly combined punk (almost entirely white) and reggae (almost entirely black). They brought the growing audiences of both genres together at the same gigs. 

While I enjoy seeing ANL and RAR badges on social media, I hesitated about putting mine up there in response to the riots, because I worry that too simplistic a parallel is being made with the late 1970s. There are important differences, and we can’t simply transplant the main tactics we used in the 1970s. In that time we drew inspiration from the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s, and the slogan “They Shall Not Pass,” but these were not an exact blueprint.

ANL and RAR had enormous strengths which we can build on today. They sought to drive a wedge between the Hitler-worshipping leaders of the fascist movements and the more diffuse angry, frustrated, often unemployed young people who were prey to arguments that scapegoated immigrants for their misery.

They grasped the need for a mass movement far beyond the ranks of those already politically aware. They captured the imagination especially of many young people who could be pulled in a very different political direction under the pressure of economic crisis, and educated them about fascism and hate. Using the slogan “Black and White, Unite and Fight!” they offered those people the chance to be part of a meaningful, humane future based on solidarity and multicultural unity. 

But these extraordinary movements inevitably also had limitations and weaknesses. The ANL’s founding statement was signed by 300 figures from politics, trade unions, music, the arts, professions, football and other sports, TV, film — including many individuals young people admired and identified with. Nearly all of the signatories were white. The minorities most under direct physical attack — Asian and Caribbean — were relatively absent from this list and from the leadership of these movements.

While the propaganda they produced was sharp on pinpointing the explicitly pro-Nazi sentiments of NF leaders, their attention to state racism and the politics of immigration control which impacted on the daily lives of minorities was more sketchy. 

While the ANL can claim most credit for defeating the NF on the streets, three other factors played a significant part: the militant youth movements of minorities under attack which often operated autonomously, an intelligence-led operation by the anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight, to infiltrate and disrupt the NF, setting off conflicts within its ranks; and the co-option by the Tories, led by Thatcher, of much of the NF’s anti-immigration programme, combined with increasingly racist policing tactics against minority groups. Non-fascist racists could achieve their goals through conventional right-wing politics which took power in 1979 and kept clear blue water between hard-right Conservatives and the openly fascist far right. 

Fast forward to 2024. What is different about the threats to migrant, refugee and longer-standing minority communities now? Even before September 11 2001, the majority of the British far right began to embellish their generalised anti-immigrant position with a more specifically Islamophobic politics, while retaining their conspiracy theories. But since September 11, we’ve had more than two decades of a deepening state-sponsored Islamophobia connected with both domestic and foreign policy, that has had support across the political Establishment and its media. 

The interlude of Corbyn-led Labour temporarily pushed back against these agendas, but Keir Starmer’s Labour has renewed that Islamophobic Establishment consensus. This has been illustrated by Starmer’s description of the last two weeks’ events. He  condemned “thuggery” and “violence” against the police. Only under pressure, has he talked of keeping Muslims safe, and even then he can’t utter the word “Islamophobia” — something that many Muslims and anti-racists accuse him of justifiably. 

On the obsession with “borders” and “security” and the use of the inflammatory “Stop the Boats” slogan, it is hard to separate Labour and Tory policies. The far right will always want to go further and quicker, and they have seized their opportunity on the streets. An Establishment consensus, backed by right-wing media, has echoed far-right talking points on migrants and refugees and, for the last 10 months, demonised pro-Palestine protests. This further legitimised, strengthened and emboldened the far right. 

However, if, in the 1970s, the British far right was a very centralised top-down entity, today it is much more fragmented. Tommy Robinson — an irritant, chancer, opportunist and showman — can pull off occasional events that bring the fragments together in huge numbers in central London spaces, but he doesn’t have a coherent ideological programme or any branch structure.

We should be more worried by the 14 per cent of the electorate — more than four million votes — that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party received in the 600-plus seats in which it stood candidates, taking votes both from former Tory and Labour voters. 

Reform UK does have an embryonic right-wing populist ideological programme and it will be identifying their significant clusters of support. Farage and his closest associates within his party move within the ideological circles where those who hold hard-right and far-right political positions and conspiracy theories can happily converse and coalesce. Unlike the late 1970s when across Europe there were mainly social-democratic governments, today the further-right/National Conservative tendencies are getting stronger in many countries.

The anti-racist and anti-fascist movement will eventually succeed in discrediting Robinson — or he will do enough to discredit himself — but the more serious battles against the hard-right/far-right politics that Reform UK is building will pose a tougher challenge, and will be quite different to the battles with the NF of the 1970s.

An authoritarian right-wing Labour government that combines austerity economics with a failure to build a principled politics opposed to racism and nationalism will make those battles much harder. We have to build movements from below that can simultaneously oppose racism and nationalism and fight for social and economic justice.

David Rosenberg is an anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigner active in the Jewish Socialists’ Group.