ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1980s, with the National Front having fallen on hard times, the urgency that rallied mass opposition to the NF between 1977-9 disappeared. Not only had the threat of fascism abated, but political space for anti-fascism had also been squeezed by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher whose austere right-wing policies raised more pressing issues for the left. In consequence, in the early 1980s anti-fascism lost momentum and petered out. Although a few local ANL groups continued, the ANL wound down.1 For a moment, there were efforts to re-invigorate it during 1980-1 when the activities of the NF’s main rival – the British Movement (BM) – generated concerns over the rising popularity of the Nazi cult amongst working-class youth. Thatcher may have pulled the ‘racialist rug’ from under the NF but as a result, the ANL believed, violent Nazi hardliners were now winning the argument, ‘offering to sections of disaffected white youth a way to hit back’, trading on anxieties caused by the alarming rise in mass unemployment.2 However, these efforts came to nothing and the ANL failed to establish a permanent presence.3 In then rationalising its departure from the anti-fascist arena, the SWP saw unemployed youth as inherently ‘unstable and difficult to organise’ and the far right was, in any case, ‘prone to disintegrate rapidly if a few key organisers were imprisoned or resigned’ (the BM’s West Midlands organiser was jailed for seven years in early 1981 for incitement to race hatred and for building up an arsenal of weapons; in-fighting had split the BM by late 1981). Moreover, ‘as the riots of 1981 revealed, large numbers of white youth were willing to fight together with blacks against the state’.4 By the end of 1981, therefore, the urgency over the vulnerability of young people to the ‘poison of fascist ideas’ had gone. Tellingly, the size of the ANL picket at the founding press conference of the British National Party (BNP) in April 1982, when fewer than ten activists stood outside in the rain, confirmed that the ANL had come to the end of its (first) run.
