1. Getting even more ugly
I confess: I have given up buying Searchlight. There just isn’t anything that can be believed in it. In any case, other people send me the good bits – if ‘good’ is the right word. In June’s Searchlight this paragraph appeared;
‘Seasoned political observers in Northern Ireland say that the UDA and parts of the IRA are jointly controlling some of their criminal activities and use the same drug traffickers.’
This is classic disinformation (see also ‘IRA Godfathers’ et al, ad nauseam) that the British state has been running since about 1971. The story continued:
‘Now they are exporting their money-spinning activities here through people like Charlie Sargent and his closest associates in C18. Those in the know say that the row between the BNP and C18 has little to do with ideology and is more about organised drug dealing.
‘According to inside sources, the war between the BNP and C18 will move into a new dimension shortly, turning into a war between those who support the UDA and those who follow the UVF and are taking a strong line against the politics of drugs being brought into the mainland by Charlie and his crew.’
Evidence for this? The word of ‘seasoned observers’, ‘inside sources’ and ‘those in the know’. Must be true then, right?
This comic strip continued:
‘If Sargent is such a keen Loyalist, why is he using a Catholic, who posed as an anti-fascist researcher, as a courier to Ulster for meetings with a key Third Positionist who straddles both communities?’
Did this paragraph mean anything to you? It didn’t to me beyond the fact that it is clearly trying to drop Sargent and this ‘Catholic’ in the mire. But Larry O’Hara said it was immediately obvious that he was the ‘Catholic….. posing as an anti-fascist researcher’. Well, OK, says I, but apart from you, who else is going to recognise this? I should have known better. The unnamed author of a piece in Ulster Nation (Vol 2, no. 8, August 1994) recognised both the individuals alluded to – and named Larry as the ‘Catholic’. He/she also pointed out that whereas in Great Britain the worst that is likely to happen to someone set-up this way by Searchlight is getting ‘beaten up and possibly hospitalised or perhaps his home is trashed. Here in Ulster the consequences can be fatal. Searchlight could be setting up people for murder.’
September’s Searchlight returned to the story.
‘When Searchlight referred to Charlie [Sargent] using a Catholic teacher [sic: it didn’t mention ‘teacher’] from London to convey messages to a man called Kerr in Ulster (see Searchlight, June 1994) it was thought that this was David Kerr from Patrick Harrington’s Third Position. In fact it may have been another man called Kerr who is on the political wing of the UDA.’
And just to assist Searchlight readers guess the identity of the ‘Catholic teacher’ – why so coy suddenly? – Larry O’Hara is the subject of two of the next three paragraphs.
Just for a second to look for a quasi-rational defence for what is virtually a conspiracy to get Larry O’Hara assaulted – or worse – Searchlight could be said to have this key position:
Nobody is allowed to talk to fascists; those who do will be vilified; no platform, no contact with the enemy.
Except, excuse me, isn’t one of Searchlight’s directors Michael Billig, and didn’t he interview members of the nationalist and neo-fascist parties for his book, on the National Front, Fascists? So the rule really says: no-one but Searchlight, and its agents, and researchers approved by Searchlight, is allowed to talk to the nationalist /fascist fringe.
You’d never guess that messers Gable and Atkinson of Searchlight were once employed by the Communist Party of Great Britain, would you?
RR
2. Searchlight – an appreciation
If Searchlight seriously wanted fascist activity to decline one might expect it to attempt to prevent people joining the far Right, and prevent far Right groups at home and abroad from getting in touch with each other. In fact Searchlight are always printing contact addresses and telephone numbers of far Right organisations, both British and foreign. Furthermore, many of the groups Searchlight effectively advertises free of charge are the most pro-Nazi (in the true sense of the word) and pro-violence. Looking through Searchlight from the start of 1992 to October 1994 the following groups and publications – all UK unless otherwise stated – were ‘advertised’.
2/92 Church of the Creator (COTC) (USA);
3/92 SS Veterans (Worldwide);
5/92 NBP HQ, Leicester BNP, Cardiff BNP, Rebelles Europeans (France), National Offensive (Germany);
6/92 John Morse’s address, COTC (USA), Harold Covington/Combat 18 (USA), Knights of the KKK (USA), Invisible Knights of the KKK (USA), DNP (Germany),
7/92 Revisionist Seminar/Historical Review Press (HRP), Republicaners (Germany), Ewald Althan’s address (Germany);
8/92 Mosleyites;
9/92 Birmingham Aryan Resistance Movement (ARM), Newark BNP, HRP, NMI (Norway), address for the Rudolph Hess March (Germany);
10/92 International Third Position;
11/92 Third Way;
1/93 Revolutionary Conservative Caucus, BNP HQ;
3/93 BNP HQ, John Tyndall’s address, Skrewdriver Services;
4/93 Croydon BNP, Combat 18 (via USA);
5/93 ‘Last Chance’, ‘Thor-Would, American Front (USA), Front Nationale (France);
6/93 ARM, AWB (South Africa)
7/93 Birmingham BNP, NF’s telephone number, Glasgow BNP, ARM (Canada);
8/93 BM, Bradford BNP;
9/93 COTC White Berets, White Ayran Resistance (USA);
10/93 British KKK (via USA);
12/93 Birmingham KKK (via USA), DVU (Germany);
2/94 NSDAP/AC (USA);
3/94 ‘Putch’;
4/94 ‘The Oak’; National Alliance UK, British Historical Society/HRP;
7/94 NF;
8/94 Gottfried Kussell’s address (Austria);
9/94 Leicester BNP, Anthony Hancock’s address (UK and Portugal)
Never let it be said that Searchlight does not provide a service for its readers!
As it happens, I know enough about Sheffield to shed some light on certain claims made by Tim Hepple in Searchlight’s publication At War With Society. Hepple describes the Three Cranes hotel as ‘our pub, the Three Cranes, Queen Street, Sheffield.’ (Just in case one can’t find it in the Yellow Pages….) Apparently local fascists ‘John Wood and Barry Bolton…. continued to prop up the bar of the Three Cranes’ and the landlord was a ‘friend of John Wood’. Things may well have changed since the late 1980s, and there may be a different landlord now, but the Three Cranes is not now a fascist watering hole. For a start, the Sheffield Humanist Society hold regular meetings there. For instance, on July 13 a talk by Peter Jackson called ‘The South African Election – an Observer‘s Account’ took place there. On May 24 the Three Cranes hosted a debate on the future of socialism between those two well-known fascist front organisations, the Communist Workers’ Organisation and the Socialist Party.
Hepple also declares in At War With Society that ‘[his] constant visits to the Independent Bookshop in Surrey Street, Sheffield, were interesting because I read all the local anti-fascist bulletins.’ I visit the ‘Indie’ probably as often as Mr Hepple claims to have done, and I have never seen a local anti-fascist bulletin in the shop. Indeed, why should anti-fascists give out details of their activities so that Hepple and his cronies have advance warning of them? Why are Hepple /Searchlight so keen on publishing the addresses of this hotel and bookshop?
3. Searchlight and the New Communist Party
I had long dismissed the NCP as a small Stalin fan club, which only survived through funding by Czechoslovakia. (What a waste of hard currency by Prague……) Now I’m not so sure. The NCP are, for a start, extremely pro-Searchlight, more so than any other group on the British Left. For instance, the NCP’s Documents of the Sixth National Congress in 1987, declared that one of its ‘vital campaigning issues’ is ‘increasing the circulation of Searchlight – Britain’s leading anti-fascist magazine….’ (1) In practice this seems to extend to the NCP’s New Worker and Searchlight sharing journalists and photographers. (2) Daphne Liddle is a member of the NCP; works for both the New Worker and Searchlight; defended Searchlight in the Labour Briefing debate on Searchlight in late 1992; edited Forewarned Against Fascism in the late 1970s; and was apparently the lover of Searchlight’s ‘mole’ in Column 88, Dave Roberts. (3)
The NCP was funded by the Czechs from not long after its formation in 1977 until the so-called Velvet Revolution in late 1989. After the flow of cash from Prague dried up, the NCP started courting other regimes. Mengistu’s Ethiopia was one such, until the Dergue collapsed in mid-1991. (4) Iraq at the time of the Gulf War was also courted (unsuccessfully, it seems), with opposition to Sadam’s regime being replaced with praise of the ‘great revolutionary’ and his ‘non-capitalist’ country. (5) The NCP also announced its support for the attempted anti-Gorbachev coup of August 1991.
At the time of writing the NCP appears to have thrown its lot in with China and North Korea. General Secretary Eric Trevett visited Kim Il-Sung in early 1993, and indicated to the ‘Great Leader…. that problems arising from the profound capitalist crisis in countries like Britain where the quality of life was very much inferior to that enjoyed by the workers and peoples of the DPRK’. (6) There have also been NCP contacts with China in an effort at ‘developing friendly links with the Chinese people and their Communist Party.’ (7)
As the Czechs were the most trusted servants of the KGB/GRU in this country, it would seem highly likely that MI5 took an interest in the NCP. Curious, then, that the NCP’s funding from the Czechs did not become the centre of a new ‘Red Scare’ during the days of the New Cold War of the early 1980s. (For that matter, why has the NCP not been singled out as a new ‘subversive’ threat to Britain in the 1990s?)’
Father Christmas
Notes
- NCP, Documents of the Sixth National Congress: A New Communist Review Special, December 1987, p. 33
- O’Hara et al, A Lie Too Fa r, London, 1993, p. 53.
- Letter to Labour Briefing, September 1991; articles in the New Worker, 2 September 1994 pp. 1, 2 and 7; Alexander Barron, Editors! Are You Being Fed a Load of Bullshit?, London, 1994, p. 32.
- Paul Mercer, Directory of British Political Organisations, (London, 1994), p. 247.
- New Worker 14 April 1989, p. 6.
- Mercer op. cit. p. 247.
- ibid.