The British Radical Right’s Connection to the Past

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Historian and broadcaster David Olusoga with force against the idea that decolonizing was simply about banning white authors, as the report suggested. True, deep decolonization of the curriculum is about representing the experiences of all people within the subjects offered and giving expression to those often rendered voiceless by traditional histories. But what place does this have in the study and history of the radical right in Britain?

Diverse Sources

Though many of the groups we study, especially those of the far and extreme right, are small and ultimately have very little impact on Britain as a whole, we should not underplay the harm that these organiztaions and their activity often inflict on the communities they target. This can be through the creation of a culture that is permissive of violence, as was argued by the made by Searchlight — an archive of materials documenting the activity of fascist and racist organizations — to the Macpherson Inquiry, or indeed in a more targeted fashion against those they felt in conflict with, as I’ve about previously. 

The actions of these groups, and the material they produce, not only speak to events in our broader sociopolitical history in Britain but also to the specific experiences of those groups targeted by the far right, such as the Jewish and black communities. While including these community experiences is an important first step, to truly answer David Olusoga’s call to give a voice to those previously marginalized, decolonization must also include the use of sources from both the radical right and its targets.

Of course, we must also be careful not to reduce community experiences to simply the opposition and hatred directed toward them. But we also must not ignore those experiences. Studying the radical right and the use of its material is one way we can engage with that.

Recently, at the University of Northampton, the team has been undertaking a funded exploration of how material related to radical activity can be used to not just teach our own undergraduates but to engage the wider public with this history. This culminated in a one-day workshop in December last year that brought together academics, archivists, librarians, digital resource providers and others to help explore best practices from a range of perspectives. A best practice guide will soon be made available based on the findings.

Not only did the workshop underline the importance of studying radical movements and their materials in terms of broader student engagement and attainment, but it also demonstrated the possibility to engage people from broader and more diverse backgrounds with history as a discipline. Examining the actions of the extreme right gives an opportunity to examine the responses from communities and activists, whose voices are often ignored or minimized due to their lack of scholarly standing.

These responses and the material, however, can be problematic given the circumstances of their creation. It is important that this material is used in a sensitive way, with the affected communities engaged in its curation.

Building the Next Generation

This engagement with the community can also have great benefits in the classroom. As the Runnymede Trust in 2015, although black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students make up around a quarter of all school-age children, they only represent 8.7% of those studying historical or philosophical subjects at an undergraduate level. This means there are few trainee teachers specializing in history who come from a BAME background.

One of the solutions proposed by Runnymede for the secondary curriculum is a better approach to teaching the history of migration in Britain and the impacts of colonialism. Part of this history is the reaction against migration and decolonization, driven by the radical right, and teaching it at the undergraduate level will help prepare the next generation of teachers to tackle these curriculum changes. 

More than that, however, it makes the history curriculum more attractive to BAME students when they see their experiences taught and valued as part of British history. A more diverse classroom, representing greater experiences, helps stimulate discussion and, in turn, peer learning. undertaken at Northampton has shown that engagement increased when material from the radical right was used in the courses. Engagement increases attainment and can also be a step to tackling the recognized in British universities between white British and other ethnic groups.

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In telling the stories of how the radical-right narrative against migration took hold and how it was opposed by anti-fascist movements and by community responses, the study of the radical right has an important part to play in decolonizing the curriculum. Through engagement with primary sources that reflect these experiences, we can deliver deep decolonization that allows for thoughtful conversation and impactful learning experiences.

We can help provide the opportunity for related subjects to recruit more diverse student populations and, in doing so, be part of generational change. As more diverse students go into teaching history, as well as into archive and heritage roles, they will be able to make the decisions on how history is preserved and presented.

If the decolonization of the curriculum were indeed a shallow and tokenistic effort that simply seeks to ban white authors as the Sewell Report seems to suggest, it would indeed have been at the very least a wasted opportunity, if not actively harmful. However, that is not what decolonizing the curriculum is. In studying the radical right, we have an opportunity to not only engage people with difficult histories but to do so using innovative sources and to engage outside of academia. That is an opportunity we must take.

 *[51łÔąĎ is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Should the Study of Extremism Be Part of the Curriculum? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

In early October 2018, a photo emerged that showed former leader of the English Defence League, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) posing with a group of Army Cadets. The response was sizeable, with the Army launching investigations, and the UK government’s counter-extremism chief that this was typical of the far right to target and co-opt the military and its symbols.

The question of why the far right seeks to develop and exploit military connections was explored by British Forces Radio program , in an interview I was lucky to be involved in at the time. It is important that we examine the historical incidents and figures from the far right who have attempted to use the military in similar ways, and understand that even though Tommy Robinson likes to present himself as being new and different, his behavior is very much an established form of activism by the British far right.

First of all, it is important to separate out three angles by which the far right approaches the military. The first is in copying its styles and structures, most starkly shown in the prewar period with the colored-shirt organizations like the Blackshirts, Brownshirts, the Silver Shirts, etc. This continued into the post-World War II period, with groups like the National Socialist Movement operating its Spearhead paramilitary force. We also saw attempts to do this legally in the postwar period, with Searchlight magazine reporting in February 1975 on how then-chairman of the National Front, John Kingsley-Read, had previously been involved in private military groups like the Frontiersmen who operated from rifle clubs in Britain.

The second is through the adoption of military heroes — and society’s reluctance to criticize them — to enable radical views to get a wider hearing. In Britain, we can look at figures like Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, one of the most senior establishment figures to be interned under Defence Regulation 18B. Admiral Domvile, who had supported the British People’s Party before the war and helped organize the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship, emerged from his postwar obscurity to lend his credentials to the National Front by joining its National Council upon its founding.

The third route includes the attempts by the far right to utilize the military as both a recruitment ground for those with military skills but also for possible access to weaponry, as well as a method to prepare themselves for the inevitable race war they felt was to come. More recently, we have seen this tactic with National Action gaining a great deal of coverage in 2017, which was no doubt on the British Army’s mind when the picture of Tommy Robinson with its troops made the rounds.

Postwar Exploitation of the Army

In the immediate postwar period, with national service still in force, all able-bodied nationalists of a certain age would find themselves in the barracks at some point. As paper clippings in the show, the British Army was quick to discipline those who were seen to be engaged in barrack recruiting for the Union Movement in the early 1960s, with stories even hitting the national press on occasion. It is interesting that many of the Union Movement stories do focus upon the Parachute Regiment. Although there is insufficient material to truly explore this, it does raise some interesting questions about whether the regiment’s reputation for being one of the tougher outfits in the Army made it a target, or whether it was simply the luck of where Union Movement youth members would be posted.

There was, however, sufficient a concern to raise questions in Parliament.ĚýAt the same time, Colin Jordan, of the National Socialist Movement, was to find his best recruiting grounds at the Royal Marine Commando depot in Plymouth.

We see this story, notably around the Parachute Regiment, resurface after killings in Angola, where it emerged that the British officer recruiting mercenaries to fight against the communist forces was a disgraced member of the Parachute Regiment and the man handling security for a former member of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. In July 1975, Searchlight further reported that one of the mercenary officers accused of mass executions was a former paratrooper who had been involved in one of the most infamous events of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry.

These revelations raised fears that there was a free flow of people with these radical-right ideas not just into the UK army, but that they were also putting their army expertise to use in their own causes across the globe. This followed on from earlier concerns after it emerged former youth members of the Conservative Party-linked group Monday Club were going to Southern Rhodesia to fight in the Bush War against black majority rule.

We can see from this how the far right attempted to exploit the military and its need for soldiers in the immediate postwar environment. With the imminent end of the British Empire and the beginning of the Cold War, the far right saw opportunity in this period of change and also in the fact it had people well placed by necessity within the military. When this didn’t come to fruition, we see in the moves to support the Bush War and the involvement in the conflict in Northern Ireland an attempt to put the resources the far right had gained in these failed infiltration attempts to good use. It moved on from the crisis of empire and found a new space in the remaining colonial-style conflicts.

Of course, this wouldn’t last. The coming intensification of the Cold War and the rising fear of racial violence at home, stoked by figures like Enoch Powell, led the far right to once again intensify efforts to infiltrate the military and pervert it for its own use. This fear of a coming “race war,” explored most famously in far-right fiction favorite The Turner Diaries, meant that it was important the far right was ready and prepared. It no longer had a cadre of young men fresh from the battlefields of Europe or the wars at the end of empire — the generation who just missed the war was increasingly middle aged.

Training New Cadres

Searchlight and the anti-fascist groups had grown concerned over the exportation of singular radical-right figures to Africa as mercenary soldiers —Ěýmen who were chasing glory in attempting to thwart African self-rule. These concerns rather paled after it , in 1976, that the officer placed in command of a small training cadre of two Territorial Army members and a unit of Army Cadets, all armed with live weapons, was himself a member of a far-right paramilitary group called Column 88.

The officer in question was not even quiet or secretive about his political affiliations or ambitions to use military means for far-right ends, having been a member of Spearhead, the paramilitary force of the , and having been convicted of two firearms offences in the 1960s. He used his position to arrange for his Army Cadet force to train alongside units of Column 88 and help spread military training and access to live firearms to the radical right.

Though initially denied by the UK Ministry of Defence when questions were raised in Parliament, just a day later apologies were issued to the House of Commons for these denials, and the officer in question was immediately discharged. Column 88’s success, however, contrasts rather starkly with efforts such as those by Tommy Robinson. Column 88 had avoided the more infamous and well known far-right personalities, just as previous clandestine far-right groups had tried (such as the , for example) and instead went about their business quietly — although, it was claimed, with the tacit support of leading far-right figures.

We should not, however, exaggerate the influence or threat posed by such formations. A group that Searchlight estimated at 200-300 people led by a council of 13 was not likely to seriously challenge the British state, but the fact it was able to get into positions of command and access weapons was a wakeup call. This also echoed earlier concerns in the 1960s that ex-servicemen had been using military connections to funnel weapons to these previous military outfits like Spearhead.

National Action

These tactics were not isolated to Column 88 — although it is perhaps the most successful example — and there were coordinated attempts by National Front activists to utilize the Army in the 1970s. In Essex, it was reported that activists had made attempts to infiltrate Territorial Army units amidst a rise in local political violence in the area. In Chorley, Lancashire, stories emerged that the National Front had at least eight Army Cadets in uniforms helping them raise funds, giving displays of camping and cooking, and other survival skills to well over 100 National Front supporters.

Although in the case of Chorley it was suggested that the National Front had attracted the cadets’ involvement through duplicity by pretending to be a Methodist group, combined with the Column 88 revelations this was sufficient for the Army to begin a probe into the involvement of far-right groups, notably the National Front, with the Cadet Force and the Territorial Army Volunteer Reserve. These efforts continued over the years in various forms, recruiting former servicemen to run training camps for the youth or alternative scouting organizations focused far more around preparedness for some white nationalist uprising, as mythologized in The Turner Diaries or in its much later Colin Jordan-authored British variant, Uprising.

The far more prominent event in recent history was the attempt by avowed neo-Nazi terror group, . In 2017, a number of people, including some in the armed forces, were arrested for being members of the proscribed group. Notably, Lance Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen, a member of the Royal Anglian Regiment, was to be actively attempting to bring other soldiers into the National Action group he was involved in. A believer in the race war theory, he had been stockpiling weapons — these included pump-action shotguns — for this coming fight and expressed a desire to create a National Socialist haven within several villages in Wales.

Perhaps more worrying than his survivalist fantasies were his statements, which emerged during his trial, that he had groups of other soldiers within the Royal Anglian Regiment who were committed to National Action’s beliefs, and that he was overtly attempting to use their access as soldiers to gain equipment and uniforms. Despite the fact that another Royal Anglian soldier on trial with him was acquitted of membership of the terrorist group, he was discharged by the Army nonetheless, showing that it took Vehvilainen’s threats seriously.

Unfortunately, it would be easy to pick out more such examples over the years. It is clear that the far right in particular, and the radical right more broadly, recognize the value, both in training and in terms of access to arms and equipment, that active and former soldiers bring to their organizations. The fact that there is little success from these operations owes a lot to the investigations by the police, the military and the media that uncover these plots, but it is also clear that existing procedures at filtering can be subverted and worked around.

No system will ever be perfect. But, given the increasingly coded language of the radical right and the use of complex and dense ideological touchstone phrases that can easily pass as moderate speech, it is important that researchers of the radical right engage with the Army and other groups to help them properly understand this threat and ensure that the ideas and activism of the radical right do not spread to their ranks.

*[The Ěýis a partner institution ofĚý51łÔąĎ.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post The Far Right Has a History of Infiltrating the British Army appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Since the arrest of former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson for breaching reporting restrictions on a trial and his subsequent imprisonment on contempt of court charges, a large movement has gathered to demand his freedom. Despite Robinson’s release from jail following an appeal — which will see him face the charges of contempt of court once again, but this time with additional time to consult his legal counsel — the “Free Tommy” movement shows no signs of dying off.

Since his release, Robinson has even been given a prime-time interview on the American network Fox, and it has emerged that the American ambassador for international religious freedom, Sam Brownback, has with the British government.

The “Free Tommy” campaign has also been revealed to have received significant funding from various groups, including five-figure funding for the “Free Tommy” protests, from the conservative US-based think tank the , as well as around transfers from online supporters alongside various other internet fundraisers. This has led some to question why an avowedly pro-Israeli group such as the Middle East Forum would fund protests that include deeply anti-Semitic figures, and why American groups are funding a figure on the British radical right.

Ideas and Money

The contradiction is not as large as it might first appear — the answer lies in how they view Israel. The concept of a single-race ethnostate, which is how many in the radical right view Israel, is appealing to them. There are various attempts to establish a whites-only country in the US, perhaps most famously the notion of a white state in the Pacific Northwest, championed by the recently deceased Harold Covington’s Northwest Front, among others.

Groups like this would point to Israel as a justification for their desire. If there could be a Jewish state for Jews, why not an Aryan-only state for whites? Of course, this deals with a simplified understanding of Israel’s nature, but nonetheless frames the far right as victims of oppression as they claim they are not permitted the freedom given to others.

It is also not the first time we have seen transatlantic funding cultivated by the British radical right. At the start of the early 2000s, Mark Cotterill founded the American Friends of the British National Party, making contributions and being praised by the party leadership for its support of its election campaigns. It also fostered ideological links: One of the first trips made by Nick Griffin after taking over the BNP was to America where he met with David Duke and other members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Advocating his new methods of selling nationalist and white-supremacist ideals through seemingly moderate language, Griffin clearly found fellow travellers of the right he could work with. The values he spoke of then can be seen as a blueprint for the post-2000 radical right, and mirror the way the “Free Tommy” campaign has used traditionally positive values like freedom of speech. Speaking on in April 2000, Griffin stated: “There’s a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas … that means basically to use the saleable words, as I say, freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can criticise them. Nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas. They are saleable.”

This was neither Griffin’s first nor his last visit to the United States, and these ideological links had been well established even before his leadership of the BNP. The transatlantic links have also been fruitful avenues of funding and co-operation over the years, allowing American and British groups to expand their potential readership for their magazines. Many copies of American publications from men like William Pierce came into the UK, several of which are in the Searchlight Archive and stamped with National Front and BNP branch stamps to indicate the reseller. Pierce was himself a long-term friend of the BNP, having attended their national conference in the mid 1990s at the invitation of then BNP leader John Tyndall.

Pierce, who as leader of the group National Alliance in the United States, was an avowed white supremacist and neo-Nazi, is perhaps most famous for his book TheĚýTurner Diaries. The book tells the story of a nationalist uprising in America against a restrictive government intent on punishing hate crimes and how this leads to a world war and elimination of the non-white races.

It has remained popular in radical-right circles since its publication, and many prominent extreme-right terrorists have counted the book in their collections, including —Ěýthe man who killed British MP Jo Cox. His group also had a small British offshoot, known variously as the National Alliance UK or the National Socialist Alliance. Primarily a publishing group, National Alliance UK held no membership of its own. Instead, it pushed all memberships and money to the US headquarters and offered reselling of its material, including audio tapes, books and magazines. Alongside this it ran its own magazine, The Oak, which often republished content from National Alliance publications. What is perhaps more interesting when discussing the finance connections is that documents within the Searchlight Archive suggest that links between its publishers and the neo-Nazi music-based Blood and Honour network were explored. A Europe-wide brand, Blood and Honour raised huge sums for nationalist movements on a transnational basis.

Fostering Links

Of course, we can go back further and look at the World Union of National Socialists foundation that occurred in 1962 when George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, was smuggled into Britain via Northern Ireland to meet with the British leaders of the National Socialist Movement in the Cotswolds. We can see how access to American finance and money even then would have been a huge boon — it takes only a cursory glance to see the quality of American National Socialist publications was several orders better than the cheaply reproduced material pumped out by their British counterparts.

What this does show though is that each generation of the radical right has fostered these links, that though they started within the extreme aspects such as neo-Nazis, they have spread out into the broader mainstream of the radical right. In studying these movements we also see that along with money come ideas, that those who support you financially will expect a degree of ideological alignment, and that this can help create homogenous messaging.

This messaging resonates deeply when the radical right adopts, as Nick Griffin advocated, the language of freedom, security, identity and democracy, because each group can understand these to mean something different in line with their own national context. So, in bringing US money into the British radical-right scene, “Free Tommy” is moving along a well-traveled road that has seen money flowing in both directions. What is perhaps new about “Free Tommy” is both the scale as well as the way in which the campaign acts as a bazaar to connect this money and its attached ideas and values to groups from across Europe.

Through “Free Tommy” big American funders are now rubbing shoulders with pan-European nationalist networks, including violent neo-Nazis, with the notion of values like free speech to sanitize the situation and make it acceptable to all involved. It has long been a firebreak that the anti-fascist movements have sought to maintain, trying to expose and prevent any attempt of well-funded sympathizing groups to press money into the hands of the extreme right. Now that firebreak may well be breached.

*[The Ěýis a partner institution ofĚý.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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On June 9, London saw a convergence of thousands of demonstrators to protest the jailing of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known to most as Tommy Robinson, formerly of the radical-right English Defence League (EDL). Robinson had been arrested for breach of the peace in Leeds whilst he was live streaming outside of a court, in violation of restrictions put in place by the judge; he pleaded guilty to contempt of court and was sentenced to 13 months’ imprisonment.

The “Free Tommy” protest brought together large crowds drawing from the more extreme and more violent end of the radical-right spectrum, with figures of the more respectable end of the scene — those like Anne Marie Waters of For Britain, the former editor of Breitbart London Raheem Kassam and Dutch anti-Islam campaigner and politician Geert Wilders. They addressed a crowd estimated at “as many as 10,000” by , around 15,000 by , and the radical right themselves seem to claim a figure of 15,000 to 20,000.

These thousands include groups from Generation Identity (a European white supremacist movement), White Pendragons (who recently invaded the Fabian Society conference in January), members of the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, former British National Party (BNP) and imported extremists from Belgium’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish interest) and from Poland’s Wolność (liberty) parties. Will Allchorn, of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, has examined what this tells us about the role of Tommy Robinson within the radical right, and what it tells us about . But if we consider the historical context of the “Free Tommy” protests, we can see how the responses to the protest are failing to understand the real message: that it is neither about free speech nor is it, really, even about Tommy.

“Free Hess Now!”

This isn’t the first campaign of its type on the radical right. For a large part of the postwar period the call was not to free Tommy, but to free Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who was serving a life sentence for war crimes following a conviction at Nuremberg. Appearing in the March 1965 issue of the British nationalist magazine Spearhead, the call to “Free Hess Now!” described him as an “emissary of peace” who had sought reconciliation when Germany was winning the war; through this the radical right sought to reframe the whole nature of the war and those who still had sympathies with the fascist cause. Spearhead, which would become the official magazine of the National Front and later BNP, was also not alone in this campaign, with the British Movement and other far-right groups putting out stickers and pamphlets bearing the slogan “Free Hess!”

The radical right, in their own claims, were the true champions of peace and human rights in their lauding of Hess, in comparison to “African inciters to violence, hack politicians, and other blood-drenched darlings of creeping Bolshevism.” The key point here is the claim that support for this cause was the duty of all British citizens “who still believe in peace and justice,” posturing themselves as champions of these ideals central to British identity while framing the governments that insisted on Hess’ continued imprisonment as enemies.

It was not just the appeal to British identity, though, that showed how useful these value-based freedom campaigns were. In February 1978, Martin Webster wrote in Spearhead about the campaign run by Wolf Hess, Rudolf’s son, to gain his father’s freedom and the recent by the Soviet Union to agree to release Hess. The campaign, based on values and not overtly on politics, had, Webster boasted, brought together Liberal, Conservative and they suspect even Labour politicians on board, conflating UK government and parliamentary support for Hess’ release with their campaign.

Webster and Spearhead even spoke of the links the campaign had made in other countries, bringing them together with Spanish neo-Nazi group CEDADE. They used this international and cross-party support as a bulwark against attacks from others, notably from Maurice Ludmer, editor of prominent anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, whom Webster castigated for his observations that this international support was from the far right and thus, according to Webster, brought politics into a matter of principle.

A similar campaign was attempted, with much less impact, when Joe Pearce — editor of the Young National Front’s newspaper Bulldog — was jailed for publishing material likely to cause hatred based on race in 1982. Given the rather unpleasant content of Bulldog, a sentence of just 6 months, the fact that Pearce was not well known to the general public, and the decline of the National Front, the campaign did not gain much traction or public awareness. However, we can still see the impact it had within the movement. Despite wide, and rather bitter and personal, divisions between the National Front and the New National Front/Committee for Nationalist Unity, the campaign still managed to unify people from across the radical and extreme right, and from both competing movements, to support Pearce.

Pearce’s incarceration was used to highlight the cause of freedom of thought and expression, and what the nationalists saw as unacceptable curtailing of their rights to oppose non-white migration. Spearhead, in its February 1982 issue, took particular objection to the fact it had to moderate its language rather than its message to get around the law. The far right also revealed in this piece one of the purposes of deliberately breaching these laws and provoking these campaigns, suggesting those who chose to break the law did so in the hopes that “it will surround the victim with an aura of martyrdom and inflame public opinion against our lawmakers.”

The Real Success

We can learn from these historical campaigns as to what the “Free Tommy” campaign is about, and why it is showing some success. If you understand it purely as a campaign to free Tommy, it is currently a failure and is almost certainly going to remain so, as Tommy Robinson will serve time until released by the proper procedures. Britain is equally unlikely to ever alter its laws to allow to hold the court in contempt the way Robinson did, where in breaching the order of the judge not to report on the case he could prejudice the trial, expose the names of vulnerable people and could have made any conviction unsafe and likely to be challenged on appeal.

However, if we understand it instead as a way to attempt to claim important values such as freedom of speech and use that to appeal both nationally and internationally to a broad movement that brings together groups who would otherwise never be willing to stand together, then we must accept the campaign it has been a success. Libertarians marching with their “Don’t Tread On Me” flags alongside neo-Nazis, nationalists marching alongside white supremacist pan-Europeans marching alongside elected politicians of various parliaments — it shows the very real, and very worrying, networks that the “Free Tommy” campaign hopes to create and exploit.

*[Ěýis a partner institution ofĚý. Updated: July 11, 2018, at 11:10 GMT.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Anyone listening to the news coverage of the 2018 British local elections would have heard a clear narrative around the radical rightĚý— that, at least electorally, things were not going well for them. The UK Independence Party (UKIP) lost heavily, despite recent pivots toward embracing groups like the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, and it was much publicized that the British National Party (BNP) lost its final councilor, failing to even defend its last seat.

There is no sign of this trend in elections going away in Britain, with UKIP predicted by many to suffer a similar scale of loss next year. These national narratives, however, can only ever tell a small part of the story with radical-right groups, often splintered and having for most of their history enjoyed sporadic support usually focused around key areas of strength.

Northamptonshire is a sleepy East Midlands shire. It’s main town has a population of under 300,000 and has failed to be made a city, despite formerly being a favourite residence of the royal court under the Angevin kings. It is commuter belt for London, and the east of the county has diverse populations in towns like Wellingborough, with the University of Northampton showing relatively high BME (black or minority ethnic) recruitment for the shiresĚý— 40% of undergraduates in the 2016 reports.

Yet we find a strand here which bucks these national trends. Rather than seeing a declining radical right, it seemsĚý— at least locallyĚý— to be preserving its strength in many ways. In 2016, local former BNP organizer tried to forge a unified front on the radical right from Northampton, and he has in recent years used Northampton as a base from which to organize training weekends for younger members of the nationalist groups. More recently in 2017, soldiers from Northampton were arrested as part of an operation to end infiltration of the armed forces by the banned group National Action, with Larry Nunn again appearing in coverage of the event in .

In the town of Desborough, we find a UKIP town councilor — though now resigned — who stood in the 1997 General Election for the National Democrats, the renamed National Front. In the same town, just as the BNP were laughed at for losing their last councillor in the 2018 local elections, we have seen the re-emergence of a BNP candidate for that town council. Further south along the A6, in the town of Higham Ferrers, at a February by-election involving a BME candidate, we saw the involvement of White Pendragon shortly after the group’s invasion of the Fabian Society conference —Ěýthankfully, it seems, just in chatter rather than practical action.

The local UKIP branch that covers Higham Ferrers is now active in promoting links with radical groups like UKIP Christian Soldiers, including talks from climate change deniers, and is especially vocal in promoting its support of the Democratic Football Lads Alliance. The same branch garners over a thousand likes on Facebook, over 10 times the support of the ruling local Conservatives.ĚýWhile not a sign of electoral support, it does suggest a core of dedicated activists who will continue to maintain activity long into the electoral decline.

The answer to why there is this stubborn seam of the radical right in the area, stretching from its more acceptable side to its most intolerable, cannot simply be answered in contemporary events and politics. That understanding must be informed by the history of the area, the radical right’s past networks, and also by its geography and the links between towns. Specifically in the case of towns like Desborough and Higham Ferrers, along with towns of historic radical-right presence like Rothwell, these all reside along the A6 corridor down from Leicester, a former bastion of the National Front, the British Movement and other groups.

The violent nature of some of the radical right in Northamptonshire also has echoes in 1970s Leicester, where Peter Ash and Tony Verity took over operations following John Tyndall’s return to leadership. Verity was a former member of the more violent Honour Guard section of the Front, while Ash ran the regional printing operation that helped support activity across the East Midlands. Leicester was a stronghold for the National Front in the region, as the group’s own internal newsletters held at the Searchlight Archive reveal spending well over £1,200 ($1,600) in the 1976 elections alone — well over £8,000 ($11,000) in today’s money.

This successful operation had worked to support National Front activity by the Loughborough Group in 1972 at the Mansfield Hosiery Mills, with support of strikes across the region against migrant labor, continuing with leaflets in 1973 and most famously opposing South Asian strikers at the Imperial Typewriters in Leicester itself in 1974. Loughborough, of course, sits north of Leicester, connected once again by the A6.

We can trace, through the newsletters, the action days and activity with campaigns in Oadby and Wigston district (and Oadby straddles the A6) and Blaby district, southwest of Leicester. There are even letters in the archive where violent groups discuss use of an abseiling and wilderness skills center near Higham Ferrers for training during this period. Yet most of these campaigners are now gone. The parties they represented broken apart and fragmented.

In terms of direct influence of the National Front along the A6 corridor, rather obviously there is little. Yet that history and legacy remain an explanation for why we see today continued activity of the radical right in these areas in strength that would counter national narratives. The geography of the area and its history can help offer a possible explanation for why we see these movements in areas we don’t necessarily expect.

In the meantime, if someone says that the 2018 local elections were the end of any of the political parties of the radical right, remember that in Desborough on May 3, 4% of voters were still willing to put a cross for the British National Party.

*[TheĚýĚýis a partner institution ofĚý.]

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