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.