From the street to the state: making anti-fascism anti-racist in 1970s Britain

Abstract

The author examines the origins and rise of the extreme-right National Front in Britain in the mid-1970s and the nature of the community struggles it provoked. In looking at key confrontations in Lewisham (South London) 1977 and Southall (West London) 1979, he discusses the different analytical frameworks and tactics adopted by local anti-racist anti-fascist coalitions, on the one hand, and the more high-profile national Anti-Nazi League (with its principal message: the National Front is a Nazi front) on the other. Street confrontation with fascist thugs was not judged a sufficient response when the state itself was regarded as racist if not fascist and the police especially seen as a constant danger. Drawing on analyses from Black Power onwards, this article shows how black people’s experience of state racism managed to modulate a traditional (class-based) analysis of fascism. It was in this period that the (white) class fight against fascism began to heed the concerns of the (black) ‘immigrant’ fight against racism.