Half a century after David Edgar’s pathbreaking anti-fascist play ‘Destiny’, linking empire, racism and industrial struggle, he examines its 1976 context and resonances in nationalist populism today.
Fifty years ago this year, the National Front came to public attention, winning 20% of the vote in the Leicester local elections and over 12% in Bradford. Hardline National Socialist John Tyndall took over the National Front (NF) leadership, while the equally-rabid, breakaway National Party won two council seats in Blackburn. Following a racist rant from Eric Clapton at a concert in Birmingham, Rock Against Racism was founded. And I had a play on at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.
It was called Destiny and was intended as a warning against what was happening and was to happen; the following year the NF would gain over 100,000 votes in the London locals and violence would break out on the streets. The play had been conceived when I was a reporter on the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, and found myself covering the activities of the Yorkshire Campaign to Stop Immigration, run by a former Tory councillor who won 8.9% of the vote in the Rochdale by-election which elected Cyril Smith, and later took himself and his campaign into the National Front. By May 1973, when I’d left journalism though not Bradford, the Front itself won 16% of the vote (thus saving its deposit) in the West Bromwich by-election. I was now a professional playwright and this was clearly an urgent subject for drama.
The genesis of Destiny
Quite early on, I had the idea that the play should start in India the morning of independence in 1947, and involve three British army officers and a sergeant, clearing a box room with an Indian servant, all four ending up in the same British town three decades later. The Colonel was the dying Conservative MP, the Major failed to secure the Tory nomination for the consequent by-election, the Sergeant ended up as candidate for the Nation Forward Party (a not impenetrable disguise) and the young Indian was a foundry-worker leading a strike.
That summer an antifascist friend in Bradford had put me on to the now legendary anti-fascist researcher Gerry Gable who introduced me in turn to his ally and collaborator Maurice Ludmer, based in Birmingham, where I was born and to which I returned in 1974. That September, Gerry and Maurice produced a pamphlet, A Well-Oiled Nazi Machine, which exposed the current leaders of the National Front as previous fascists, in words and pictures. The source of some of the pictures – a long-standing antifascist mole – was of considerable assistance when I needed to know what actually happened at Hitler birthday parties, a scene I wanted for the play.
Maurice’s contacts with the Birmingham-based Indian Workers’ and Bangladeshi Workers’ Association drew my attention to an upsurge of industrial struggles in which underpaid Asian workers were fighting for their rights against managements and white workers (notably in disputes in the East Midlands), on which the industrial dispute at the heart of Destiny was based. Maurice was generous in giving me access to far-right literature, with a welcome quid-pro-quo that when he and Gerry started publishing a regular, monthly anti-fascist journal (Searchlight) I would write a column on ‘What Their Papers Say’. My thirst for far-right literature led me to the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), for whom I wrote a 1977 article – heavily influenced by Maurice – marking out the clear distinction between racism and fascism – ‘Racism, fascism and the politics of the National Front’.
After a rather tortuous journey to the stage (I’d originally conceived it for a large urban theatre) Destiny was premiered in September 1976 in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s studio theatre in Stratford (the Other Place), from which it transferred to the company’s West End home, the Aldwych, the following spring; one performance was attacked by members of the National Party. A year later, one day after Margaret Thatcher’s notorious statement about the country being ‘rather swamped by people with a different culture’, a television version of the play was broadcast by the BBC.
Exposing the politics of the NF
The political ambition of the play was two-fold. Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, liberal opinion was disinclined to accept that a genuinely fascist party was stalking the land (seen by a Guardian columnist as a grandiose leftist fantasy). Destiny’s aim was to demonstrate not just that the National Front was a Nazi Front, but how a neo-Nazi party could emerge in a country which had stood alone against Hitler thirty-five years before. The answer was the play’s message to the Left: the aspirant Fuehrers of the National Front were exploiting a real sense of grievance and loss, blamed on entirely the wrong people.
Increasingly involved with direct campaigning against the NF through Searchlight, the Anti-Nazi League, the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and IRR, I was aware of being involved in two projects – one, through the campaign, exposing the National Front; the other, through the play, understanding how it worked. It was a privilege to be able to try and do both at once.
So, what did the play get right and what wrong? The play predicted how the National Front Nazis, sensing success, would split into two factions, as the German Nazi Party had in the early ‘30s; one pro-capitalist, the other seeking to attract a working-class vote with economically populist policies. It was – happily – wrong about the success: the NF was humiliated in the 1979 general election, winning 1.3% of the votes in the 303 seats it contested. It underestimated Mrs Thatcher’s capacity to win over National Front votes (the purpose of the ‘swamping’ statement). And it was incorrect, at the time, to suggest that the British ruling class would support the far Right, as German bosses had supported Hitler, to protect it from a militant working-class.
Mainstreaming far-right ideas
Today, the play looks alarmingly prescient. Contemporary national-populism is built on the twin pillars of ethno-nationalism and populist, pseudo-left economics, though – as in the ‘30s – the latter tends to be dropped, as has already happened with Trump, the French National Rally and Reform UK: the morning after Brexit, Farage claimed it as a victory over big business and the banks; last November, he chose the City’s Banking Hall to assure the multi-millionaires that surround him that his party is now ‘shamelessly pro-business and pro-entrepreneur’. (No nationalisation of water for Robert Jenrick.)
Most chillingly, the conspiracy theory that underpinned NF rhetoric in the ‘70s has reemerged, red, white and blue in tooth and claw, in the form of the Great Replacement Theory, now increasingly acceptable in polite political circles, alongside ever-more-strident calls for ‘remigration’. In the 1990s, Nick Griffin decided that compulsory deportation of all black and Asian people from Britain was no longer politically possible to argue and dropped it from the British National Party’s programme. Now, calls for forcible deportation are mouthed by allegedly mainstream politicians.
The cordon sanitaire which prevented the traditional Right from allying with the far Right began to fray in the early 2000s and is now in tatters. Half a century on from the electoral destruction of the National Front, the awful warning of the 1930s carries less weight. The protests against the ICE stormtroopers’ bloody rampage through Minneapolis, the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations across America, the huge turnout for anti-racism in London on 28 March and the deposing of Viktor Orban in Hungary may not be the full turning of the tide. But they might be rays of hope in a dark sky.
The key scenes from Destiny will be read at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, followed by a discussion of the play’s relevance today, at 2.00pm and 6.30pm on Sunday 3 May. Book tickets here.
Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar’s The Little Black Book of the Populist Right (Byline Books) has been republished in a revised and updated edition.