Dear editor,
I wouldn’t normally write to address mistakes even in an article the subject of which I know a bit about, but in the case of Dean Conway’s article about British fascism I feel I have to.
The problem begins in the opening paragraph. Not two, but three neo-Nazi groups have recently been registered as parties with the Electoral Commission (EC). The third is Patriotic Alternative (PA) from which your article notes that the other two split away in recent years and which you say has not been approved.
That is wrong. PA did register with the EC last March using another name, the Identity Party and were crowing about it in their Telegram feed last month.
Then there is the background history. It is generally accepted amongst scholars of the British far right that the post war neo-Nazi movements in this country did not stand in the tradition of Oswald Mosley and the BUF but in the even more hardline – though less visible – tradition of Arnold Leese. Leese, leader of the pre-war Imperial Fascist League, was the first person to suggest the use of gas chambers for the mass killing of Jews.
John Tyndall, who is correctly identified in your article as one of the main lines of continuity through the post-war history of the British fascist movement, was a founding member of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), along with Colin Jordan. Both were Hitlerites and devoted followers of Leese. Indeed, Leese has been described as the ‘mentor’ to both men.
The NSM HQ was in Arnold Leese House in Notting Hill, donated to the NSM by Leese’s widow. Tyndall’s politics – and indeed the dominant strain of right wing extremism in this country – stemmed from that explicitly neo-Nazi tradition, not from any involvement with the fascist Mosley movement which withered in the post war period.
Steve Woodbridge, at Kingston University, quotes Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain thus: “Moreover, as Thurlow has also persuasively suggested, in the long term, while the Mosleyite form of fascism failed to inspire a new generation of far-right activists in the post-1945 era, Leese’s interwar ideology may have been more of a key influence on the ‘racial nationalism’ of later British extreme right movements, such as the National Front, the British Movement, and the British National Party”.
If you believe that Mosley’s was the dominant strain you really should make a case for that, given that it is not generally accepted by those who study the subject.
John Tyndall did not, as you say, stand trial alongside Griffin and Collett in 2005. He died before the case came to court, and, in any event, their cases had been separated so he would never have stood trial with Griffin and Collett even had he lived.
Finally, to discuss the decline of the National Front in the late 1970s without reference to the Anti-Nazi League is to ignore one of the most important factors leading to its demise. Similarly, later in your narrative, to overlook the enormous impact of the Hope Not Hate and trade union mass campaigns against the BNP in areas like Barking and Dagenham is to write out of the history the proven efficacy of anti-fascist campaigning.
It feels rather odd that a piece warning against a resurgence of the far right should completely ignore two of the most successful post war campaigns against it.
Note: I was editor of Searchlight magazine from 1983-1989 and co-author of Ray Hill’s autobiography, The Other Face of Terror. I am still an occasional contributor to Searchlight.
Yours sincerely,
Andy Bell
