7 Days 15 March 1972

When the Powellite dockers marched in 1968, many students and anti-fascists got hurt. Above, their boots land on a young protester. Prime mover of these fascist mobilisations was Dan Harmstone — an active

T h e u ltr a r ig h tIN BRITAIN TODAY

EVER since the demise of Mosley’s Trade Union Move­ment, the extreme right in

Britain has never been much more than a kaleidoscope of fractious and fragmented cells, uncertain whether to wear a swastika or a union jack on their arm bands. At the last count, there were 98 of

• them taking in every shade of brown and black and a splattering of red-white-and-blue, too. But they have never had any popular ideologues, and have always been politically isolated, a fringe rabble ranging from Colin Jordan’s criminal heavy mob to loud­mouthed Tory backwoodsmen.

There are signs that this might be changing. Unemployment at home, fighting in Northern Ireland, the

Rhodesian debacle, and the puritanical, cultural backlash, provide a political climate which the right is trying to exploit. Its most odious prejudice, racism, can be manipulated when there are a million out of work, and economic conditions are hard.

Next Saturday TRU-AIM (Trades Unions Against Immigration) will march through Oldham in Manchester, an area hit by critical unemployment as one mill after another closeddown. The organisers, a coalition of right wing sectarians,intend to exploit the idea that black men are taking away all the jobs. Colin Jordan, a Nazi, and organiser of the British Movement, successor to the Nazi National Socialist Movement, which had a paramilitary wing, the National Socialist Group, believes that there will be at least 1,000 workers on the streets behind TRU-AIM’s banners.

The right is not yet a real danger. It even embarrasses the main-liners of the Tory party, but the moves towards coalition within it, and its attempt to organise the unemployed and get popular support on a racist ticket have to be resisted and snuffed out, before things are allowed to go as far as they did in the thirties.

Things are constantly changing within the odious family tree of British fascism. Three years ago, the big

grouping was the National Front, a fanatical, racist coalition, then headed by A.K. Chesterton, implacable right­winger, and literary dilettante. But after a recent internal putsch, John O’Brien, a former horticulturist, ended up Chair­man, and Chesterton, piqued, left for South Africa. O’Brien has not been an unqualified success for the Front. Its membership, which topped 9,000 in Chesteron’s heyday, is now sliding fast. It cannot mobilise anything like as many men as it could in 1968/69. Then, it was turning out several hundred thousand free leaflets a year. (Character­istically, the Right tends to have access to large funds. The Racial Preservation Society once put out 2 million leaflets in a single year). But now it has even had to close down “Britain First”, the shrill voice of little England teutonic chauvinism which ran stories like “Get tough with black thugs: Immigrant violence hits new peak”, “Fairer deal for landlords”, and “Jeremy Thorpe: Best man for the Immigrants”.

When we visited John O’Brien in the Front’s Fleet Street office, he denied the allegations of fascism. “I spent a lot of my life fighting the Germans. I really resent being labelled a Nazi now”, he told me. But somebody who knew him well said, “He’s so bad at his job, that I often wonder if he isn’t a special branch plant. If you look at his history, he has

worked in several right wing organ­isations, he has always got to the top, and they have always started to crumble. But perhaps it’s just because he’s thick”.

Anyway, whether or not O’Brien likes to be called a Nazi, some of his closest associates were once in Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement — active at the time when Jordan was convicted for running “Spearhead”, a para-military organisation of quasi stormtroopers, which landed him in the nick.

Take John Tyndall. He writes a lot of the National Front propaganda material — but he was in Jordan’s movement in the early sixties. Jordan was cavorting around with his wife, Francoise Dior, the House of Dior heiress, bombing synagogues. Tyndall, infuriated because he lost out to Jordan when Francoise broke off her engagement with him, finally quit after she had served an eighteen-month prison sentence for her part in the raids. He ended up in the National Front. Much to O’Brien’s chagrin, a German Nazi magazine in our possession, refers to Tyndall as “Dem Fuhrer der britischen National Front”. But Tyndall isn’t all a Führer should be. At one of his birthday parties his sister wanted to watch “Ready Steady Go”, which Tyndall called “a yid and nigger show” and stormed out of the room. His mum ran after him calling “Come back John. Mummie’s made a cakie for

your birthday”. The Fuhrer came back, and the TV stayed on.

Perhaps the most pathetic figure associated with the National Front is Bill Whitbread. He used to sit on the National Executive as Trade Union organiser, and was the Front’s main link man during the inauguration of TRU- AIM. Organisational meetings for the march were often held at Jordan’s Coventry headquarters. (He once operated in Princedale Road, London, but moved North soon after his last prison sentence, to found the British Movement.) Whitbread was not meeting Jordan for the first time. Like so many senior National Front men, he was a one-time member of the National Socialist Group, and of its military wing, NSG. He is now back with Jordan in the British Movement. This pathetic­ally confused individual has another skeleton in his cupboard. He is a renegade Left Wing activist

Another of Jordan’s henchmen in his “Spearhead” days was fat, thuggish Webster - who is now the Front’s National Activities Organiser, and deputy editor of one of their publica­tions which is called “Spearhead”.

The reason for the Front’s decline is partially the emergence of the Monday

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7 Days 15 March 1972 7 Days 15 March 1972

Jordan, in the White raincoat, takes a stroll with his heavies during the peak years of the National Socialist Movement. Danny Batram, (4th from right) was, with his deceased brother Eddie, one of Jordan’s most notorious hatchet men. Behind him is "Geordie" David Pascoe one of many Nazis who now belong to the National Front. Webster (extreme right) who was sent to

prison in 1964 for assaulting President Kenyatta, is now National Activities organiser for the NF - which tries to deny its Nazi connections.

The Monday Club held anti Common Market rallies in 1970. At the Trafalgar Square meeting, National Front banners outnumbered those of the Club by about 20 to 1. Despite the Club s internal “tribunal” to purge Nazis, it has become inextricably involved with the most militant and extreme right wing groups in Britain.

Danny Harmstone, (extreme left, of the picture) is largely responsible for the Powellite dockers marches in 1968/9. He is a former Mosleyite Parliamentary candidate, an ex-boxer and present Smithfield market meat porter. Once, he was close to Jordan and an NSM member. They have come together again to organise Saturday’s march in Manchester.

The Dirty Labyrinth of Britain’s Ultra RightHancock Bamford

Rev G.H. Nicholson marches to the Cenotaph, to take a service there, held by the Anglo-Rhodesian Society. Nicholsen, a National Front member, has been associated with Jordan’s NSM. His parish magazine contains the most outrageous anti-Semitio propaganda. “Many of them (the Jews) who returned to Palestine in recent years were on the Eastern European type, short of stature, dark haired, hook nosed and of sallow complexion”, he wrote. But not to worry! Nicholson and his racist friends believe that “God will cleanse their blood”.

avid Courteney, Fuhrer of the National Socialist Group, and former associate of Jordan, is obsessed with the Japanese “arts of war”. He once worked for a firm of City stockbrokers, but got geared out in Nazi uniform in the evenings. Bill Whitbread, now in the British Movement, and sometime National Front industrial organiser, tried to claim that the NSG had just been a “cultural group”. But, 18 months age, the police raided a West London flat, where they discovered an arsenal. The two Ollife brothers, who were convicted, were, like Whitbread and Courteney NSG members. Whitbread is a key figure in Saturday’s TRU-AIM march.

SUSSEXFORUM

BRIGHTON MONDAY CLUB

Ormow

SUSSEX POWELL FOR P.M

ESSEX POWELL FOR PM

ESSEX ANGLO RHODESIAN

SOCIETY

NATIONALANGLO

RHODESIANSOCIETY

NATIONALDEMOCRATIC

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RACIALPRESERVATION

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NATIONALFARMERS

UNION.

W O RTHINGD EB A TIN G -SOCIETY

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EAST ANGLIA FORUM

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Rev.Nicholson

IAN PAISLEY

ASSOCIATION OF BRITISH

PEOPLE

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CAMPAIGNAGAINST

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Bramwell

Geoffrey-Steward Smith, who gets £3,000 a year from Saigon, is a fanatical anti-communist crusader. He even “exposed” 7 DAYS in his wretched little East West Digest. Apart from contacts in America, and proven involvement with mercenary, para-military forces, Stewart Smith is an ardent Monday Club member.

When Colin Jordan left goal in 1963. Francoise Dior, house of Dior heiress and his sometime wife, was among those waiting for him. She served an 18 month sentence for her part in the bombing of more than 30 synagogues. She was once engaged to John Tyndall (centre) who was then a Jordan heavy, and a member of his NSG, the armed wing of the National Socialist Movement. Tyndall, who has served several sentences for arms and paramilitary offences, the last in 1967, is now a leading propagandist for “Law and Order” fanatics, the National Front. The man with his back to the camera is Webster, National Front Activities organiser, and former NSM member.

Bell

UNIONMOVEMENT

UNEMPLOYEDWORKERS

ASSOCIATION

NATIONAL SOCIALIST GROUP

Jordan

INTERNATIONAL NAZI GROUPS

SOUTH AFRICA FORUM

Greig

FOREIGNAFFAIRSCIRCLE

EAST WEST DIGEST

SOUTH AFRICA SOCIETY

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SOCIETY FOR IN D IV ID U A L

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CONTROLASSOCIATION

ANTICOMMON MARKET

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CAMPAIGN FOR REHOUSING AGED

AND NEEDY

Hesketh LONDON & COUNTIES TENANTS ASSOCIATION

Mary Howarth

Powell has links with only one extreme right organisation: the para-fan club, called the Powellite Association. But everyone on the right, from the Front to the Club is watching to see what he will do next.

P. Newman was photographed in full Nazi regalia only last year. Yet he is an ardent and fanatical member of Jordan’s British Movement. Jordan has tried to deny that the Movement has any Nazi connections — in the hope that the right coalition, TRU-AIM, will be able to mobilise hundreds of unemployed, unpoliticised men next Saturday.

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BRITISHMOVEMENT

Jordan

Merrick

O'Brien

TRU AIM

MONDAY CLUB

ENOCHPOWELL

POWELLITEASSOCIATION

INTEGRALISTS

MONARCHISTPRESS

ASSOCIATION

INTER CITY

Lady BirdwoodGeorge Young

CONSERVATIVECOUNCILLOR

NATIONAL PARTY OF

ST GEORGE

NATIONAL FRONT

BaronColeman

Grace Woods

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EX SS MEN IN EUROPE

NORTHERNLEAGUE

BRITISH ISRAELITES

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7 Days 15 March 1972

In 1968, a march organised by the Immigration Control Association clashed with the police. At that time “Bruiser” Bramwell, now a leading light in the Monday Club, was active in the IGA, and helped to organise the march. Bramwell has been talking about getting Orange men to support Saturday’s TRU-AIM March and the present ICA leadership have been active in its organisation.

continued from page 11 Club. Before the last election it was weak and disorganised — a bigots’ ghetto. Now it has 30 MP’s in the house who are open members and there are at least a dozen more who keep in clandestine association. Nationally, it has 6,000 members and the local groups, which are autonomous, have got up to 4,000 more on their books.

It is very strong in local branches of the Conservative Party, and on Tory controlled local councils. Essex, for some reason a fascists’ paradise, has a local Monday Club Chairman called Lambert, who claims that 23 out of 104 County Councillors are in the Club. Only Mrs. Greenfield, of Billericay, admits her affiliation, but as this is known MC territory Lambert’s claim is probably close to the truth. Heath is nervous of the Monday Club, precisely because of this kind of phenomenon. It is a growing, Tory grassroots organisa­tion which is wholly opposed to the present leadership, and has even accused it of having “Socialist” policies.

The Monday Club has become in­extricably mixed up with British Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups. At its Anti-Common Market rally, in 1970, National Front banners out­numbered the MC’s own placards by 20 to 1. The National Front turns out to all its rallies, and backs its parliamentary policies.

In fact, the Monday Club has within it a tribunal, whose job is to root out Nazis, fascists and others suspected of being “disloyal to the Queen” . It is not successful. There was for example the Great Hancock Scandal a year ago.

The Brighton Branch organiser of the Monday Club was Hancock Jnr. who was exposed as an organiser, with John Ormonde, of the Northern League, a virulent fascist group. Hancock’s father was revealed as the owner of the Heidelberg Hotel, and a founder of the Racial Preservation Society. His wife, a German, was an unrepentant Nazi. Hancock Jnr. was a regular supporter of the National Front. He was expelled from the MC but remains active in the Racial Preservation Society, which is now joining forces with Merriek’s British Committee against Immigration and the Immigration Control Associa­tion, all of which embrace a great chunk of Club and front members. The new body will represent a really nasty threat to racial minority groups.

Scandals like the Heidelberg affair, exposed by John Pilger in the Mirror, did the Monday Club no good at all. But there are worse revelations, involving the core of the organisation.

High up in the Monday Club’s National Body is Roy Bramwell, a property dealer in his mid forties, who sits on the Immigration and Economics Committees. He owns East End slum property and has many blacks as tenants.

Three years ago, he set up the Contarta Music Society, drawing on his right-wing friends. It was expensive to join. A massive row blew up about its funds. Bramwell is deep into Northern Ireland. He likes to say “We have a lot to learn from the Provos. We must encourage people to buy arms and take to the streets” . He even said that he wanted to “bring over a band from Northern Ireland” , to swell the Orange sympathisers whom Jordan has already rallied in the North of England. It is probable that Military Intelligence organisations and Southern Irish senators know what he is doing. He

talks, a lot, about arms.Like several other right-wingers,

Bramwell travesties Mao’s phrase “Political Power Comes Out of the Barrel of a Gun” , and is fond of quoting it when talking about barricades thrown-up from the right, and “counter­insurgency” activities. Bramwell has been in contact with John Taylor, the Irish Cabinet Minister whom the IRA recently tried to assassinate. John Jackson, Evening News Parliamentary and Education correspondent, and an extreme right-winger, wanted a safe, protestant, Northern Irish seat. Bramwell, Taylor and Jackson, were seen together at the Conservative Conference. The list of Bramwell’s activities is daunting; he is a member of the Codgers Debating Society, where he frequently meets NF National Activities Organiser, Webster. He is the new Chairman of the Immigration Control Association, and has known connections with the British Campaign - Against Immigration. Here he meets Jim Merrick, the organiser, who, himself, is in close touch with Jordan and the National Democratic Party. Bramwell is taking a coach load of people to Bradford, Merrick’s hometown, “to study the immigration problem” . His wife, Anna, is organiser of the Monday Club Young Members Group. To cap it all, he is a frequenter of 52 Victoria Road, home of White Russian emigre, Prince Michael Grousinski, who was convicted last year for firearms offences, a violent anti-Semite and ex-National Socialist associate. Once the Young Members’ Group of the Monday Club held a party there. The disco was on the ground floor. Heavies guarded the staircases, and when guests wanted to use the lavatory, they were escorted there and back. 52 Victoria Road, W.8., has barred windows. It is believed to be the venue for the right-wing gay milieu. Fairhead, another Monday Club fanatic, has complained to the MC executive about Bramwell.

Fairhead, who has gay friends is a frequenter of 52 Victoria Road. Fairhead has also a past which he does not like discussed. He was in the Revolutionary Communist Party just after the war.

Bramwell is not an isolated freak in the club. Another key figure is David Ashton, personally praised by Mosley in his introduction to “My Life” for his work in the Union Movement. Right at the centre is George Young, who raises and controls much of the Club’s money. Young is right into the Society for

Individual Freedom, the Immigration Control Association, and a plethora of other groups. He defended Hancock of the Heidelberg Hotel affair, when John Biggs-Davidson was having him purged from the Club and the Party. Even when shown photographs of Hancock march­ing behind NF banners, all Young could say was “You can’t pillory people just for that” . Young works for Kleinwort Benson, merchant bankers in the City, and controls considerable patronage in right wing groupings, particular the anti black outfits.

Monday Club members are every- where where the right is active. They were behind the Sussex and Essex, " Powell for P.M.” campaigns. Kevin Baron, now dead, and his brother Alex, who is a right-wing fixer, dreaming of a National Front and Right Tory alliance under Powell. Geoffrey Stewart Smith, exposed in 7 DAYS for his organisation of mercenaries, and incessant right-wing propaganda through East'West Digest, is a member. Smith is believed to get £3,000 a year from Saigon, and more money from an anti-communist outfit in Taiwan. He is very close to the Griegs, with whom he collaborates on Foreign Affairs Publishing, which puts out extreme right propaganda.

Horace Cutler, the Greater London Council leader is an influential member, so is Jonathan Guiness, who writes frequently for the Club’s publications, and is active in its Northern Branch. The McWhirter twins, who compile the Guinness Book of Records, establish another link between the Club and the interests of the black beer family. Jonathan Guinness is one of those trying to fabricate an ideology for the club. He has every analysed Mailer for “Monday World” , and found him a friend of the night. A younger grouping centres round David Levy and Tim Beardson. Both have tried to extract a right-wing ideology from the neo-Nazi racist and totalitarian, Charles Maurras.

Levy, in a recent “Monday World” , said that the main problem facing t he British right was discovering “with what intellectual tools are we to replace the unspoken value consensus that underly British Conservatism in the past” . He concluded “An analysis based on the work of Charles Maurras is, I suggest, the surest way of reaching the correct answers” . Timothy Beardson agrees. Beardson is an active Monday clubber who has been convicted for the vigour with which he disrupted left-wing demonstrations during his time at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he was a

student. He holds soirees in his rooms there, to which his cronies come to here Nazi music. He has frequently dressed up in full Nazi gear, and was British organiser of the “Wallace for President” campaign. A hard-core, nazi extremist, he and his young “right-radical” associates are making great headway in forging an ideology for the Monday Club, hitherto barren of all ideas.

But these individuals aside, the nexus of MC power lies in its parliamentary grouping. Two recent successes include the Night Assemblies Bill, which will outlaw rallies and demonstrations while being fronted as a control mechanism for Pop Festivals, (see 7 DAYS No. 17) and the quashing of the Anti Sex- Discrimination Bill. M.P.’s include Amery, Biffen, Biggs-Davidson, Stewart-Smith, Gurden, Bell, Orr-Ewing, Fortescue, Soref, Goodhew, Wall, Woodnutt and many others.

One man has kept his hands supris- ingly clean in all this: Enoch Powell. Every right wing organisation has wooed him. John O’Brien admits that the National Front asked him to lead them. Many, like the mad campaigners of East Anglia, have used his name. Others, like Danny Harmstone, have got the lumpenproletariat out on the streets under Powellite banners. Enoch has never disassociated himself from any of them, but he has only rarely and barely acknowledged their support. He is, at the moment, the isolated, uncrowned King of the right, to whom everyone is looking for a cohesive initiative. The only organisation which he controls is the Powellite Association. This is a para-fan club, run for him by a devotee — Beryl Cartheen who works for the Daily Mail, organising the Ideal Home exhibition. The worst that can be said of the organisation is that Bramwell is an active member.

Powell, it seems, is biding his time. Such organising as he is into must have been done clandestinely. But there are MC parliamentarians who are extremely close to him. One is Biffen: there is considerable evidence to suggest that Biffen is the real author of the “rivers of blood” speech, and many other crucial Powellite texts.

Such secrets are usually closely guarded by Powell’s inner circle. But one of these men has a very loud mouth when he thinks, he can trust his listeners: Roy Bell, who has already had to justify, publicly, his appalling attack on women, made just before he blocked the Anti Discrimination Bill.

Bell is very keen on talking, privately,

about “right-wing revolution” . He has spoken, at closed meetings, about arms and barricades. Once in a particularly expansive mood he said he was a member of the “Powell Shadow Cabinet” .

Meanwhile, the right is organising on the ground. Let’s go back to next Saturday’s proposed TRU-AIM march. The meeting to set it up was held as far back as November 20, 1970. Forty people turned up, and a hard and nasty coalition of the right was bargained out round a table.

The main aim was anti-racist exploita­tion of unemployment. Prominent were Danny Harmstone, ex-boxer, ex- Mosleyite, Parliamentary candidate, and organiser of the pro-Powell march of London Dockers in 1969. He works as a meat porter in Smithfield. Others include Cripps, connected with the Front and the Immigration Control Association, Bill Whitbread, sometime member of the Nazi National Socialist Group, and former industrial represen­tative on the NF’s executive, and Taylor, one of the loudest mouthed, busiest Front extremists.

All three are members of the TGWU. Others attending the inaugural meeting were Colin Jordan, John O’Brien, members of the Monday Club, members of “Powell for Prime Minister” , the National Democratic Party, the Racial Preservation Society, and Mary Howerth, Vice Chairman of the Immigration Control Association. It should be remembered that the Monday Club has been active in industry, having set up the first extreme right break­away “union” , the United Kingdom Association of Professional Engineers.

Jim Merrick, of the Yorkshire Cam­paign Against Immigration, is also involved. TRU-AIM have set up a Front, called the British Workers Committee Against Unemployment, whose call for a mass march and meeting, starting at West Street Car Park, Oldham on Saturday at 3 p.m. mentions only the name of “Eddie Dodds, the well known Т-Unionist”. They will be supported by Orange Lodge members, especially a group from Birkenhead, whom Jordan has recently been cultivating, and perhaps a Northern Ireland Protestant contingent as well.

Saturday’s march must be stopped. Admittedly, we are a million miles from the Powell Shadow Cabinet, but when the right takes to the street, and begins to organise, its ridiculous propaganda and absurd posturing ceases to be just a joke in bad taste.

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