This is one of a large and intriguing collection of films made by West Yorkshire Police, going back to an Amateur boxing tournament and a police sports day, both in Wakefield in 1939.  Most of the films cover the 1960s and 1970s, with demonstrations of one kind or another prominent.  About a dozen of these cover demonstrations relating to anti-fascist activities in the 1970s, mainly in Bradford, but also in Dewsbury and Rotherham, as well as here, in Huddersfield.  The YFA also has a similar...

This is one of a large and intriguing collection of films made by West Yorkshire Police, going back to an Amateur boxing tournament and a police sports day, both in Wakefield in 1939.  Most of the films cover the 1960s and 1970s, with demonstrations of one kind or another prominent.  About a dozen of these cover demonstrations relating to anti-fascist activities in the 1970s, mainly in Bradford, but also in Dewsbury and Rotherham, as well as here, in Huddersfield.  The YFA also has a similar collection of films from Humberside Police – see Anti NF Protest in Bradford (1978-1979). 

According to their Yorkshire and Lancashire Region organiser at the time, Eddy Morrison, Huddersfield was the largest Yorkshire branch of the National Front (NF) in the early 1970s – having their own headquarters in the town.  He claims that the then Chairman of the NF A.K. Chesterton was so pleased by the influx of right wing Tories that he was ousted as being too young and too working class.  Another member of the time claims that the speeches of Enoch Powell helped to cause this political shift from the Tories.  In 1970 the NF stood in 13 of the 15 wards and averaged more than 10 per cent of votes.   The support for the NF in Huddersfield even prompted an academic study (Duncan Scott, References).

For those wanting to know more about the immediate background to this protest the University of Huddersfield holds the tapes and transcript of the witness seminar held at the University of Huddersfield on 3 May 2003, sponsored by the History Department and Huddersfield Trades Council.   An extremely detailed summary of this material has been written up as a Witness Seminar (References).  Most of the information here has been obtained from this source (this also has a useful list of references).   For more on the general background to fascist and anti-fascist activity in the 1970s see the Context for Demonstration:  Dewsbury November 1975.   

The Witness Seminar notes that, “There was an active branch of the Indian Workers' Association of Great Britain (IWA) in Huddersfield, chaired by C.S. Cheema, and branches of the Pakistan Association and Caribbean Association.”   Huddersfield didn’t really have an equivalent to the Asian Youth Movement in Bradford, although young Asians from Huddersfield did help up those in Bradford, as with the Manningham Lane demonstration in April 1976.  Interviews with local immigrants give an account of clashes with the NF in Sparrow Park and Greenhead Park in July 1970.  Other contributors to the Witness Seminar though state that those opposing the NF had to find new ways of confronting them as when it came to any physical confrontation, the NF would usually – not always – have the advantage, with young working class youth more used to being violent.  One such tactic was the sit down protest in the middle of Manningham Lane in Bradford, with people wearing party hats and holding balloons – film of this is also held with YFA.

The lead in organising the counter NF demonstrations was taken by the Trades Council, of which the present Huddersfield TUC secretary (2011), Bob Stoker was a member; his father being the chairman at the time.  They were both also members of the Communist Party ,which along with other left wing groups was influential on the Trades Council and very active in the anti-fascist campaign.  This was aided by the links that the Communist Party had with the Indian Workers' Association. 

One local activist, Steve Dorril, wrote a pamphlet in the 1970s outlining the origins and support for the NF in the town.  One issue that he highlights in first building their support was when Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, declared unilateral independence in 1965. Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister and local MP, declared an oil embargo, with the United Nations agreeing the declaration was illegal.  A long and bitter stand-off ensued, with a fair amount of support in Britain for the white minority government of Smith.   The prominence of this issue can be seen in one of the banners seen on the NF march, ‘Stand by the whites in Africa’. 

In 1969 a local estate agent, Colin Campion, set up of the British Peoples' Union, an anti-immigration group, supporting the position taken by Enoch Powell at the time – in 1939 ex-members of the British Union of Fascists set up a similarly named British People's Party which supported Hitler during the war.  There has always been a wide spread within the far right between those with an extreme nationalist stance at one end of the spectrum and out and out pro-Nazi on the other.  The political in-fighting between all the various shades in between has greatly bedeviled the movement over the last sixty years.

From the testimonies of the time there can be little doubt that Enoch Powell’s speeches on immigration, five in 1968, including the infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in Birmingham on  20th April, contributed greatly to increasing hostility towards immigrants.  Edward Heath sacked Powell from the shadow cabinet as a result, calling his Birmingham speech racist; a charge Powell denied.  According to Heath, Powell deliberately placed ‘startling assertions’ in his speeches as a way of bolstering his own power base to challenge again for Party leadership – after failing dismally in 1965 (Heath, p. 291).  A Gallop Poll at the time found that some three quarters of those asked agreed with Powell, although Heath claims that the vast majority opposed him.  Yet despite Heath’s obvious disgust with Powell’s use of the race issue, his Government still passed the Immigration Act of 1971, severely limiting those entitled to entry to Britain. 

The immediate context for race becoming an issue in the 1960s and early 1970s was the breakup of the Commonwealth and the persecution of some Asian communities in East Africa, many with British passports.  In 1968 around a thousand Asians were arriving each month from Kenya, fleeing after the imposition of work permits in late 1967.  This prompted the Labour Government to introduce emergency measures to end the freedom of entry of Asians - but not white settlers.  Some have contended that Labour’s clear racist response to just 5,000 entrants did more to fuel hostility towards immigrants than Powell did.   A hostility that was re-fuelled when 38,000 Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin arrived in 1972.  The evidence is that it doesn’t require large migrant populations to stir up racism: in 1971 in the West Riding non-white immigrants accounted for just 2.3 per cent of the population (85,000 out of 3.8 million).  In Huddersfield, with a population of 131,000, there were perhaps 5,000 West Indians, 4,000 Pakistanis and 1,000 Indians: forming 7.6 per cent of the population – plus about 1,000 originating from Poland.

As James Callaghan, the Home Secretary in 1968, has stated, although more people were leaving the country than coming in, those who did arrive went to the most deprived areas.  This has been a common theme for many who have sought to combat the influence of racist organisations: the attraction of the NF was helped by the neglect of working class council areas, so that there was already plenty of resentment towards the mainstream political parties.   Immigrants were the easy targets to blame for inadequate housing, lack of jobs, poor school facilities and so on – a situation that was not of their making.  Campaigners for racial tolerance have accused politicians of playing the race card, detracting from the real causes of these conditions.  Of course, there are those who are simply outright racist no matter how many immigrants there are.

Later on, in 1978, the Huddersfield Action Committee Against Racialism (HACAR) was set up by Huddersfield Trades Council.  This saw itself as combatting racism through cultural initiatives, such as a ‘declaration of racial friendship’ printed in the Huddersfield Examiner (23 March 1978).  It also started an anti-racist festival in Greenhead Park in May 1978; becoming the Caribbean Carnival that continues to this day.

References

Edward Heath, The Course of My Life, Hodder & Stoughton, 1998.
Duncan Scott, “The National Front in Local Politics: Some Interpretations”, in The Politics of Race, edited by Ivor Crewe, Croom Helm, London, 1975.
Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985, Basil Blackwell, 1987. 
Paul Ward, Graham Hellawell & Sally Lloyd (2006): WITNESS SEMINAR: Anti-Fascism in 1970s Huddersfield,
Contemporary British History, 20:1, 119-133. Online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619460500444981
Wade, Donald. 1972. Yorkshire Survey: A Report on Community Relations in Yorkshire, Leeds: Yorkshire Committee on Community Relations.
A life in White Nationalism by Eddy Morrison
Enoch Powell Speeches
Mark Lattimer, When Labour played the racist card, New Statesman, 22 January 1999.
Huddersfield Carnival