Thirty years ago, over five thousand protestors took to the streets to prevent a march of five hundred National Front supporters, protected by five thousand police, from getting through Lewisham, south London.
The decision by the National Front (NF) to hold a march through Lewisham in August 1977 divided the opposition as to tactics, like no other issue had done to date. Lewisham was an area in which many Black people lived, the NF had been campaigning there on the basis of high levels of black crime the police had recently carried out raids on homes of supposed street criminals and arrested twenty-one people. A demonstration in support of the Lewisham 21 had been attacked by the NF and a prominent Black activist had been chased and beaten up by racists in a public lavatory just weeks before.
After the NF’s march through Wood Green in April 1977, which was met by a large but disorganised mass opposition, local anti-racist/anti-fascist groups had become established across London and affiliated to one All London Anti-Racist Anti-Fascist Co-ordinating Committee (ARAFCC). In addition to locally-based groups, there were also groups formed on the basis of being gay and being women – Women Against Racism and Fascism (WARF, of which I was a member). All these groups were essentially broad fronts opposed to racism and fascism which drew their members from a whole cross section of local organisations – from trades councils and tenants associations to local churches and even, on occasion, the local police. In that sense, the local groups had to adopt strategies and tactics which could command the support of the majority – despite political and other allegiances. Some groups were more militant than others.
When it came to the Lewisham NF march, the local group, All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, decided on its tactics. Basically, it did not want a showdown with the fascists, it simply wanted to publicly demonstrate its opposition. Guided by the police, who also did not want a street confrontation, the local group decided to hold a protest march on the morning off the NF’s afternoon march, taking a different route, though still in Lewisham. This march would be led by dignitaries such as the mayor of Lewisham, the Bishop of Southwark and prominent politicians. On the other hand, left groups, especially the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), took a different view. The fascists must not be allowed to march, they had to be confronted.
ARAFCC decided to support both events. In the morning to march shoulder to shoulder with one of its twenty-three affiliates and then (though this was not publicly declared) to regroup in New Cross to try to stop the National Front, which was to assemble behind Clifton Rise, from being able to march.
Because of the many unknowns on the day – the tactics of the police and what they would and would not let us do, the plans of the SWP and the tactics of the NF – all the groups in ARAFCC prepared thoroughly. Each affiliated group had appointed its own stewards and we had two chief stewards to make decision for the whole committee on the day. WARF, hundreds of us and many more women turned up for this event than were actually members, met up at London Bridge to take the train to Ladywell. I remember the atmosphere – slightly nervous, slightly hysterical, lots of bravado and showing off as to who was wearing the hardest boots. (I was as apprehensive as the rest. I have to admit doing something I had never done before or since. I had gone to Lewisham the previous night, just to work out where everything was. Up till then all our protests and marches had been in east and north London, Lewisham felt like an unknown quantity. And as stewards we had the job of getting our contingent from the morning protest, down the hill, to the afternoon one with the knowledge that the police would be out to stop us.)
It has to be remembered that the march in Lewisham had been part of press speculation for days. Some people, especially Lewisham councillors, had called for a ban on the NF march, but this was refused by the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Commissioner. From then on, fascists and anti-fascists were depicted as trouble-makers – equally. Both sets were deemed to be disturbing British peace. A plague on both your houses was the media message. Lewisham was deemed a no-go area for the normal world. Police leave had been cancelled. Businesses and shops were warned to board up for the maniacs were coming. If we were a little hyped-up that day, it was nothing compared with the media hysteria.
The morning passed as planned. We, some 2,000 members of anti-racist, anti-fascist groups, assembled at Ladywell Fields where we all had our allotted places. We marched, WARF chanting its own slogans, ‘The Women united will never be defeated’, and ‘the women’s army is marching …’ (already honed on the Grunwick support pickets). And then it was a mad scramble to move everyone from ARAFCC up Loampit Hill to New Cross. I do not remember any attempts to stop us. But when we got there, the area was already heaving with anti-fascists and local young Black people.
It may look a bit invidious to make the last distinction. But it is important. Though the ‘professional’ anti-fascists tried to claim the local youth as their supporters, as it were, the truth of the matter was that these Black youths – mostly male – would never have stood for having white racists on their patch in any event and, they hated the police. Now there were 5,000 of them on their doorstep. And they weren’t in cars, but on the streets. The reaction was to be something similar to what had happened in Notting Hill at the carnival a year before.
Maybe because we had the largest contingent, maybe because we were well stewarded and therefore our troops were biddable, maybe it was just bad luck. But the WARF group was asked to sit down in New Cross Road blocking the way from Clifton Rise where the NF were assembling. That’s what we did. The police tried to get through on foot, to clear a path for the fascists. They could not. So they sent in mounted police, who from horseback, with long batons drawn, rained down blows on head after head – scattering us, beating us as they went, drawing blood and creating mayhem. The NF, with hundreds of police shielding them on either side, were escorted down Pagnell Street and through the anti-fascist ranks.
We got separated from our mates – no mobiles in those days – no one quite knew what to do, some were so upset by the police tactics they decided to get out while they could, and went home. Suddenly the cry went up to get down the hill, get to Lewisham before the NF and stop their rally. The next thing I remember is being part of a band being told by Kim Gordon (of SWP’s Flame) to hold hands fast across the road – as the police charged from the other direction.
Now the police were panicking. With thousands of anti-fascists loose on the roads, no longer in marching formation, but hell-bent on finding the fascists, with belligerent Black youths finding bricks, stones, paving slabs, anything to lob into police ranks, and the fascists themselves, whom they were there to protect, trying to leave a car park where they had been forced to hold the most fleeting of impromptu rallies.
The NF have gone, we were told. But no one believed the police. And then, absolute chaos. Someone senior somewhere must have given the order to clear the streets. The huge transparent riots shields came out – this was the first time they and the long batons were used in mainland Britain. Police were charging us with the shields. As I stopped to help someone on the pavement who was injured, I felt myself being lifted by a shield, thrown through the air and come cracking down on the pavement kerb. We were being ordered to leave the area, but whichever way we went, we were met by more officers, also in charge mode. I sought refuge in a shop doorway, only to find myself joined by a Guardian reporter, also fleeing the random violence.
It was a weird sensation to be somewhere that was totally unfamiliar, with no sane people on the street that one could ask help from. We found that all the local stations had been closed – for security. We had no idea how we could actually leave. Eventually a group of us, all women, got together and someone decided to phone a friend for a lift. But all the phone boxes were vandalised. We went to Lewisham hospital to use the phone. The hospital was ringed by police, we were forbidden entry. Eventually someone stopped and gave us a lift to central London – a car-full of shell-shocked women.
At home, I got straight in the bath to find that I could not sit; it was absolute agony – the base of my spine had been hurt when I hit the pavement. The phone rang, it was my friend to say that she was being violently sick. She thought it was from that blow to the head from the baton. The most frightening thing on that Saturday was not the NF, but a police force completely out of control. That level of violence was unknown outside Northern Ireland. But it was to be surpassed just two years later in Southall and with more devastating consequences.
On the Monday, when I read the Guardian, I could not believe my eyes. That same journalist who had cowered with me in the shop doorway had filed a story in which all anti-fascists were depicted as violent extremists and the rout of the NF as a riot in which police had suffered heavy casualties. I rang her to remonstrate, to remind her of what she had witnessed. But she was adamant, the Left was to blame, it was all the fault of outsiders who had descended on Lewisham to play out their own political agendas.
Incensed, we put out a press statement from ARAFCC, stressing the broad nature of support for the anti-racist and anti-fascist cause, emphasising just how many local people and groups from all over the country, which were not affiliated to the SWP, had felt strongly enough about the NF to take to south London’s streets. But to no avail.
The media had a field-day. Anti-fascism was vilified – with NF supporters and their opponents equated as thugs who wanted no part of democracy. That anti-racism and anti-fascism were essential moral (if not political) positions never got aired in the discussion.
We might have won the battle of Lewisham, but we lost the propaganda war.
Interesting article, Jenny. I wasn’t there but when I became active in antifascist politcs Lewisham was often held up as an example of how militant antifascism should be. Of course just because something is held up as an example doesn’t mean much of course and sometimes deserve to be challenged. However, in this case I don’t agree. The fascists needed to be physically confronted. When I worked as a teacher in Oldham in 2001 both the NF and BNP came into the area, threatened many students and teachers, with an Asian colleague of mine having his car bricked and threatened with baseball bats, others I know having their windows smashed, threatnening phone calls and in one case a house firebombed and in another a house broken into and a pregnant woman attacked. It was necessary to confron the fascists on the street to throw them into disarray, to defend our working class community against attakcs and racist division and the fact that we did this and that this was followed up with years of sustained antiracist campaigning in the community frove the fascists back. Another good though much smaller scale militant antifascist demo was in Altrincham when the BNP tried to bring Le Pen over as the elder statesman of respectable fascism- instead there was pandemonium and most people get th emessage fascists means violence. What some liberal journalist in the establishment press thinks isn’t nearly as important as winning the battle of ideas and action in the working class communities. For that militant no platform and organised self-defence is not enough- though it is a necessary starting point- we also need sustained antiraicst campaigning against the cuts, the poverty, the lies and the media campaigns of hatred that breed the despair of fascism. For that we need to see the struggle for Black liberation and against racism as part of wider class struggle for the rights of all workers. The Battle of Lewisham should be celebrated but we also need to reform a sense of Black identity as part of a wider class struggle for working class power in society.
Just come across Jenny’s article from four and a half years ago and it’s a good account from one person’s perspective. I recall seeing the police attack the WARF contingent from a distance – shortly before I got hit in the head by a half brick (thrown by an anti-fascist on the other side of the street who overshot his target). As one of the ARAFCC Stewards I was supposed to have an overview of the situation but in reality I was no more aware of what was happening in the next street than anyone else.
I attended a big gathering at Goldsmiths for the thirtieth anniversary in 2007 but the discussion there was dominated by talk of the August 13 Ad Hoc Organising Committee and what a great job they’d done (this was the SWP front who got most of their supporters trapped by the fuzz in Clifton Rise). What Jenny doesn’t mention (although she does know it) is that the SWP had refused point blank to co-ordinate their mobilisation with the London Anti-Fascist Committees (through ARAFCC) and when we met John Deason in a pub in Deptford Church Street the week before the demo he simply told us we had to follow the SWP lead or they would ignore us – which they did. Whether this disunity reduced the effect of the demo on the day is hard to say but it certainly left a bad taste in the mouth of many non-SWP anti-fascists, which was exacerbated some months later when the SWP unilaterally launched the ANL as an alternative to the broad based Anti-Fascist/Anti-Racist Committees and I suspect that echoes of this were partly responsible for the failure of the Trent Park Conference in 1978 (the ill-fated attempt to create a broad National Anti-Racist/Anti-Fascist organisation not dominated by any one leftist political group).
Thirty nine years on I still think we were right to try and block the streets and stop the NF from marching but I am much more ambivalent about the no-platform policy in Colleges and universities (which I was also involved in promoting at the time). Back in the 70s we tried to stop racists and fascists from preaching their hatred on campuses but now Islamists (Clerical Fascists) are preventing (with the collaboration of cowardly Student Unions) secularists and socialists from speaking on campuses (and engaging in intimidation and disruption when they fail to get speakers banned – see the video of these thugs trying to prevent the heroic Maryam Namazie from getting her message over at Goldsmiths just a few months ago).