The Searchlight saga continued An editorial in the issue of January 1994, calls for ‘the investigation of nazi terror groups either to be put into the hands of a special police unit attached to the Police National Intelligence Bureau, or to be turned over to MI5 and MI6…. this proposal might astonish some of our readers. But it is clear that Special Branch’s head office in London had failed to comprehend the dangerous nature of groups like Combat 18 here and abroad, or even give recognition to what they are already doing. Instead of infiltrating their own officers into these groups to gather intelligence, they have poached a Searchlight informant on at last one occasion.’
In February it continued its absurd campaign against Larry O’Hara and anybody else who dares to challenge it. Alex Baron is described as ‘one of the most prolific distributors of anti-Jewish material…… ‘
This is simply not true.
Larry O’Hara was described as ‘at the centre of attempts to destabilise Searchlight‘s intelligence gathering capacity….. [and]…. appears to have the disruption of the anti-fascist movement in Britain and parts of western Europe as his goal.’ (p. 13)
What, all on his ownsome?
Yes, it’s the Revolutionary Conservatives….
One of the irritating things about the British left in general is the casual and generally inaccurate way the terms nazi, neo-nazi and fascist are chucked around. (This reached some kind of peak of absurdity in the Midwinter ’93 edition of Casablanca in which the Libertarian Alliance was described as ‘anarcho-fascist’!) It appears to be the central strategy of Searchlight to attach one of these labels to everyone they perceive to be right of the centre of the Tory Party.
This tactic really came into its own in the Soviet bloc in the post-war period. Part of the rationale for holding onto its Eastern European satellites was the claim that without it ‘revanchiste’ elements in Germany would rise up and start World War 3. (Looking at events since the Berlin Wall came down it is clear that there was a grain of truth in this claim.) The Soviet Union thus had a considerable vested interest in the maintenance of a ‘fascist threat’ in Europe, and the labels ‘fascist’ and ‘neo-nazi’ were plastered over all and sundry. In Britain this line was thus transmitted through the CPGB, until recently the biggest group on the British left, and thence out into the wider left.
The other grouping with an interest in maintaining the existence of a ‘fascist threat’ has been the Israeli lobby. Crudely, a post-war fascist threat in Europe helped legitimize the existence of the state of Israel.
Both strands come together in Searchlight. Publisher Gerry Gable was a CPGB member, and Searchlight‘s ‘European Correspondent’, Graeme Atkinson, worked for the party’s paper, the Morning Star, until being fired in 1986. (On Atkinson see ‘Yard probes Len’s sorties in Sofia’, Barrie Penrose and David Connett, in the Sunday Times, 21 September, 1986.) Searchlight so persistently ran a recognizably Soviet line on the fascist threat in Europe, and rarely if ever criticized the Soviet bloc, some on the British right see Searchlight not as a Jewish or Israeli, but as a communist operation.
The casual attribution of the labels like neo-nazi occasionally back-fires. In January the Sunday Express ran a piece headlined ‘Traitors: the ultra-right Tories who plotted against Major’ – a piece recycled in the Labour Party-supporting Tribune (18 February, 1994 under the predictable heading of ‘Major’s Militants’). It didn’t amount to much: a branch of the Tory Party had passed a resolution calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister. (Shock, horror.) On investigation, the branch turned out to have briefly contained a number of people from the far right of the Tory Party. Some had once been associated with Western Goals before it folded, for example, and are now associated with the absurdly titled Revolutionary Conservatives, and the Campaign for Conservative Victory, an umbrella group for the Anti-Federal Europe Movement, Conservatives Against a Federal Europe, Conservative Patriotic Forums etc. (Both the Revolutionary Conservatives and the Campaign for a Conservative Victory are at BCM 6137 London WC1N 3XX).
The chair of the Campaign for A Conservative Victory is Sam Swerling who was in the Monday Club in the seventies, and was one of those named in the anonymous 1972 pamphlet The Monday Club – A Danger to Democracy. To judge by the statement of the aims of the new Campaign for Conservative Victory, with its emphasis on ‘coloured immigration’, Mr Swerling’s views have not changed much since the early 1970s. Mr Swerling took out a libel action against the Sunday Express for an alleged ‘neo-Nazi’ reference to him in the original article.
Some of this is recounted in ‘Play Mistley for Me’, in the Guardian tabloid section of March 25, 1994. Most interesting to me in that piece is the information that some of the Sunday Express’s original information came from Conservative Central Office (Dr. Julian Lewis and co.). Is Conservative Central Office, I wonder, also the original source of the also the original source of the smear stories about Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo which, after a year or so of gossip, have been appearing regularly in print in the appalling but irresistible Scallywag? (PO Box 2925, London NW3 5DO)