Whatever happened to the National Front? Is this just history repeating?

[GoingDownLikeBHS]

DD23 was asking me was it like this when I was young - is the racism worse now or in the 70s/80s? Made me think - we had the National Front and the Anti-Nazi League, and aged 16 I was a keen member of the latter. I remember marches and some protests but not sure how accurately I'm recalling it. According to Wikipedia, at one time in the 1970s, the NF was the fourth largest "political" party in the UK!

Apparently rules were put in place so that NF members were barred from certain professions - sounds like a sterling idea, and surely one which we should apply to the English Defence League and the hams taking part in the violence now. Just hoping these current thugs go the same way as the NF/BNP and fade into obscurity.

Have we seen this all before? Personally it seems more serious, more threatening, but then in the 70/80s we didn't have any social media. What do other older MNetters remember?

@Icedlatteplease I don't think they're getting easier. But the 70s and 80s weren't a piece of cake either.

But they had basic needs met. Home, health, food

Mechanisation, automation and computerisation, have changed the workplace. Given historically will value people by how much money we can make from them there are more and more people being told they have no value, little prospect of owning a home or even stable renting of one, and poor access to healthcare.

Immigration when you have inherent wealth, social integration and cohesion works. It become more challenging if you make no attempt to find and maintain shared values.

We've had a 20+ years of David Cameron and tone style scapegoating style politics. I'm not sure we have anything different with starmer

They never went away, they just rebranded. Same ideology, same motives, different logo. Even they realised the old one was a bit much.

Ah, so it's everybody else's fault that the perpetrators are racist thugs is it?

Just like when abusers blame their partner for making them angry.

We weren't talking about personal responsibility for individual actions.

We were talking about why we as a society are creating optimal conditions for these situations to develop.

Personal responsibility means being able to inflict punishment. It's hard to inflict personal responsibility when they have insufficient finances to cover damage and an over capacity prison service

"Mukhtar Dar, 62, is another prominent member of youth movements that confronted the far right in the second half of the 20th century. He is one of the founding members of the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement (SAYM), and described the recent far-right riots as “very concerning” but disagreed they were unprecedented"

Timely article in the Guardian today (think they nicked a bit of my thread title): https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/07/anti-racist-activists-1970s-far-right

I am ethnically Indian. In the 1980s members of my family were regularly harassed and assaulted by the NF and then later the BNP. In some cases beaten senseless. This was routine and in the 1980s the Police were not responsive and in some cases would find it amusing. As time went on attitudes changed and also black Asian communities became more empowered and challenged the lack of any response and the high levels of discrimination. Whilst we have no returned to the 1980s, the people who supported the BNP and NF are still with us as are their children and racism is imbedded quite deeply. So ever so often it surfaces again. It happened to some extent at Brexit and it is happening now under the cover of "anger" against migration.

Robust action against anyone rioting will make it clear that racist behaviour remains unacceptable. I think this will be successful, however in 2023 Farage and others are in Parliament and can make statements that lead towards supporting racism. Farage i clever- he picks words carefully so that he can reinforce racist views without saying things that would be legally difficult. For example suggesting there is two tier policing with no evidence what so ever and suggesting his party was set up by an actor.

i think that the tories and
Farage and co have legitimised this new rise of the far right with their anti immigration rhetoric.

Who's this 'we'?

Just spotted there's a programme on Channel 4 tonight about the National Front in 1979 and the death of Blair Peach.