When Britain’s Trade Unions Fought Fascism
In 1970s Britain, trade unions responded to the growth of the National Front by mobilising on the streets — a lesson today's workers' movement must rediscover to defeat a new fascist threat.
Anti-Nazi League protest in the street of London, UK, 17th July 1978. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)
‘It is absolutely clear that the ability of the labour movement to defend existing rights and gains for the working population, let alone advance towards greater democracy and workers control of industry and society, is menaced by fascism, racialism and racialists. To remove that danger is a crucial task for socialists and trade unionists in our day — as the capitalist class well knows.’
Fifty years ago this October, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), Britain’s largest trade union, produced the pamphlet Racialism, Fascism and the Trade Unions. Authored by Brian Nicholson, leading London dockworker, Communist Party activist, and co-chair of the recently-established Chile Solidarity Campaign, the 17-page booklet appeared in the aftermath of the police killing of Warwick University student Kevin Gately at Red Lion Square, during a protest against the then-ascendant National Front (NF). It opened:
‘Trade Unionists of the older generation were doubly shocked when reaching for their newspapers on the 16th June 1974. Firstly, they learnt of the tragic death in a Central London street of a young man, Kevin Gately. Then they read deeper to discover the circumstances of his death. They were to find that the ugliest and most brutal of twentieth century movements — fascism — which they had dearly hoped was buried forever in 1945, had returned to the streets to plague us anew.’
The ‘resurgence of fascism’ that the NF represented, the pamphlet explained, was of paramount significance to Britain’s organised working class. ‘Racialism and fascism […] represent true dangers for the trade union movement. This publication aims to closely examine both.’ Nicholson, later TGWU president, now cuts a controversial figure in UK labour movement history, but his union’s pamphlet was and remains of pronounced significance for British trade unionism.
Today’s British labour movement, separated from that of the 1970s by five decades of retrenchment and decline, faces another such fascist resurgence. The recent torrent of anti-immigration riots and racist pogroms, targeting Muslims and people of colour from Plymouth to Rotherham and Liverpool to Hull, has sparked a scrambled response from progressives across the country, with a phalanx of sizeable counter-demonstrations on Wednesday seeming to have parried their momentum at least for now.
But it’s evident that physical-force anti-fascism will remain a pressing duty for the UK left under a triangulating Starmer administration. Gestated for decades through xenophobic tabloid headlines and electoral migrant-baiting, a far-right social-media and street politics under the godhead of Tommy Robinson demonstrably enjoys a non-negligible social constituency — or at least a reservoir of political sympathy — throughout much of 2020s Britain.
Grifting support among white populations in austerity-ravaged areas, far-right efforts (assisted by grim commentariat outriders) to annex for their racist politics a ‘popular’, or worse ‘working-class’ political identification entail an urgent danger to the prospects of the multiracial socialist class politics upon which all progressive hopes depend, against which Britain’s organised labour movement must emphatically stand.
At this precipitous juncture, the leading role of trade unionists in beating back fascism in decades past — and the importance of a sense of collective history for their capacity to popularise anew an anti-fascist identity among working people — represents a vital moral resource for our movement today, as it prepares to dig in and face the fascist serpent once more.
Workers Against Fascism
Racialism, Fascism and the Trade Unions was devised following a summer 1974 TGWU executive resolution ‘calling on the TUC and the Labour Party to mount a campaign exposing the National Front as a fascist organisation, pointing out the disastrous effects of fascism and racialism in the 1930s in Europe which could be repeated in this country now’ — itself spurred by the NF’s ‘announce[ment] that they are concentrating their propaganda activities on working-class organisations such as trade unions and tenants organisations.’ With the union a prime target for the NF since the infamous support of some London dockworkers for Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, historian Nigel Copsey explains, the TGWU’s pamphlet was ‘no doubt a response’ to the establishment of the National Front Trade Unionists Association.
Aiming to curb the threat of NF seduction within Britain’s trade unions, the pamphlet exhorted the cultivation of ‘new vigilance’ and concerted opposition on the shop floor and in wider society to ‘the racist propaganda which the extreme Right is directing at workers’ as part of efforts ‘to resist the further growth’ of the far-right — ‘one of the main priorities of socialists in Britain […]. Under no circumstances must the fascists be permitted to gain a toehold in the labour movement.’
Commended by the TGWU’s left-wing general secretary Jack Jones ‘for examination and educational use by trade unionists’, the pamphlet returned to the labour movement struggle against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) four decades previously, explaining:
‘To counter this gathering anti-semitic offensive, trade union militants and socialists from a variety of different organisations within the labour movement struggled defiantly to build sufficient unity inside the working class as a whole to defend the embattled Jewish minority and defeat the Mosleyites. The Labour Party and trade unions published anti-fascist pamphlets but it was abundantly clear that the written word, however cutting, was inadequate armour against trained blackshirts. Taking to the streets to meet the fascists in the open, to match their physical force, was an unavoidable task.’
In this vein, it quoted extensively from the iconic account by Phil Piratin, thereafter Communist MP for Mile End, of 1936’s Battle of Cable Street, on the role of Jewish and Irish trade unionists in ensuring that Mosley’s thugs did not pass: Our Flag Stays Red (1948). Jack Jones, author of the pamphlet’s preface, had himself physically fought fascism during the 1930s: on the streets of Liverpool picketing BUF meetings, and along the banks of the Ebro with the Attlee Battalion during the Spanish Civil War. Now a veteran union leader, Jones invoked the vanquished ghosts of his own generation’s contest with fascism:
‘Although they may deny it, the National Front is the modern version in Britain of the fascism of Hitler, Mussolini and Mosley. […] The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. This pamphlet should spur us on to be vigilant and active against fascism in all its forms.’
With memories of the Second World War alive and resonant, particularly among older workers, trade unionists in the 1970s understood the significance of their movement’s heroic anti-fascist history in mobilising the fight against the far-right in their own time. Routinely compared with the regimes of Hitler and Franco, the Pinochet junta in Chile after 1973’s military coup became the subject of intense antipathy among trade unionists in Britain; the district secretary of the Portsmouth docks engineers’ union, explaining their resolution to refuse work on a Chilean warship, claimed that his members had ‘felt like sinking the ship which was, after all, what they had done to the fascists’ ships during the Second World War.’ In that same regard, the name of the broad-front organisation marshalled to take the fight to the National Front after London’s anti-fascist battles of Wood Green and Lewisham in April and August 1977 respectively — the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) — spoke for itself.
The labour movement was integral to the life and operations of the ANL, embracing 50,000 members across some 250 branches. Historian of the organisation David Renton writes: ‘Fifty [local] Labour parties affiliated to the ANL, along with thirty AUEW branches, twenty-five trades councils, thirteen shop stewards’ committees, eleven NUM lodges and similar numbers of branches from the TGWU, CPSA, TASS, NUJ, NUT and NUPE. By the end of the campaign, even Len Murray, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, could be heard addressing anti-fascist rallies in London’s Brick Lane.’
Arthur Scargill of the mineworkers’ union and Ernie Roberts of the engineers stood beside Labour MPs like Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner among its prominent supporters, while different union sectors formed active chapters: ‘Teachers Against the Nazis’, ‘Engineers Against the Nazis’, ‘Miners Against the Nazis’, ‘Firefighters Against the Nazis’, ‘Rail Against the Nazis’ — the last sporting a banner depicting fascist thugs being mown down by a speeding engine.
Moreover, Commonwealth migrant and diasporic working-class formations like the Indian Workers Association under Avtar Singh Jouhl were greatly important to the ANL’s activity. Many Afro-Caribbean and Asian radicals were understandably suspicious of British trade unions, given their communities’ pervasive postwar experiences of racism from white workers (and shop stewards), but despite continued political and social tensions, the partial bridging of the gulf between white trade unionists and anti-racist community activists through cohabitation within the anti-Nazi movement of the 1970-80s helped spur the broader fight against racism and for black sections within Britain’s labour movement.
The assertive posture of the massed ranks of trade union militants at the head of ANL demonstrations, like at those against BUF provocations in the decade of Tribune’s foundation, unquestionably helped stem the flow of working-class support to the fascists’ cause. This is not to claim that the trade unions were alone or even primarily responsible for these victories: community self-defence groups (Jewish, black, and Asian), Communist and Trotskyist party cadres, women’s and gay liberationists, artists, punks, students, and the organised unemployed all contributed to the united front that smashed twentieth-century British fascism.
Nor is it to proffer some hagiography; the modern record of British trade unionism is far from unblemished when it comes to racism, and as the TGWU’s 1974 pamphlet recognised, trade unionists ‘including shop stewards and activists’ have been variously known to heed fascist siren songs. Nevertheless it remains the case that Britain’s labour movement has time and again comprised a potent bulwark against the proliferation of fascist appeals among the working class. Renton concludes of the 1970s:
‘This episode as a whole demonstrates above all that trade union organisation has acted as a general barrier to fascism, and indeed that this barrier rose, as demands were put upon it. While individuals from working-class backgrounds might have been open to fascistic ideas, there was no danger of fascism becoming a working-class force, while the unions were opposed.’
The Fire This Time
The Britain of the 2020s is unmistakably a profoundly different landscape from that in which Racialism, Fascism and the Trade Unions appeared fifty years ago. From an economy boasting the Janus-faced fruits of two full centuries of capitalist industrialisation to the blasted heath much of our country’s socio-economic fabric resembles today, the long arc of neoliberal ‘reform’ and concomitant decline in union density has undoubtedly helped open new swathes of a despairing British society to the appeal of fascist racism.
Amidst the UK’s worst xenophobic riots since 1919, leaving many workers of colour frightened to leave their homes for fear of random attack, the urgency of a muscular response from our historically enervated but lately resurgent trade union movement could not be greater. Mass, semi-spontaneous demonstrations like the 10,000-strong mobilisation attended by this author in Walthamstow are an encouraging start after the horrifying spectacle of burning libraries and besieged asylum hotels, but to kill the snake rather than just scorch it, a more coordinated, concerted national campaign will be required.
John McDonnell’s recent call to ‘relaunch the Anti-Nazi League’ is timely, recognising the importance of actively resuscitating our country’s historical tradition of popular, working-class anti-fascism. The social heft required for such a campaign to take the fight to the racists, not only in London and Bristol but throughout Britain’s onetime mill towns and declining resorts, can only be provided through bold, organised labour movement initiative.
Many among the trade union movement have already done their duty to their history — with Mick Lynch’s RMT living up to the legacy of ‘Rail Against the Nazis’ in their provision of union auxiliaries for the physical defence of mosques and refugee centres. But other union leaderships, despite unanimous condemnation of racist attacks, have yet to adequately rise to the demands of the moment, with the quiescent TUC having as usual lagged far behind events on the ground. Well-intentioned but unfocused interventions advocating ‘Unity Not Division’ fudge naming and confronting the enemy before us as it really is: not mere disunity, but violent fascism.
The same bread-and-butter industrial economism which has kept certain labour movement leaders away from London’s weekly pro-Palestinian demonstrations has also been evident in politically anaemic ‘more-in-common’ appeals following Britain’s racist riots. As Jack Jones’ TGWU recognised fifty years ago: ‘Racialism is not generally removable by the mere adoption of traditional militant postures on purely trade union issues’.
The fight against racism and fascism is ‘unavoidably a general political question’ in 2024 as much as 1974, and just as the ‘campaign exposing the National Front as a fascist organisation’ that led to the Anti-Nazi League placed itself firmly within the tradition of Cable Street and the International Brigade, so too must our movement today rediscover and rearticulate its proud, fighting anti-fascist inheritance. There is no time to lose.