Living in the past

Spin, spin, spin - that's all politics appears to be nowadays. There's the scandal of the illegal immigrants found working in the security services which, given the current level of terrorist threat to this country, should be a resignation issue for our Home Secretary. But it's not, instead she offers her weasel words in a string of excuses which are almost as bad as the phoney outrage being displayed by the Tories. Neither the Government or the Opposition intend to take any fundamental steps to deal with the situation, they are just spinning words to give an impression that something is being done. If I was Home Secretary, my very first announcement would be an end to all immigration from midnight and when the European Union kicked up a fuss, I would immediately terminate our membership of that anti-British club.

Now we even have 'spin' from the boss of the Bank of England telling us to expect two interest rate cuts next year. That's just a cynical ploy to get people to spend more on their credit cards this Christmas and to encourage the public to keep on paying inflated house prices. With the financial markets facing the biggest upheaval in their history, because of the sub-prime scandal, how irresponsible can it be to encourage people to get further into debt because that is what his announcement was all about.

When I start shouting at the radio I know it's time to turn it off and just bury myself in producing Freedom. I also like to escape back into the past and after Tuesday's blog I have had a good exchange of views over the 1979 Conference in Yarmouth and about those early days in general. One query from Pam was how I first got involved and what it was like at that time, so I shall take this opportunity for a quick trip down Memory Lane.

In 1974 I was a member of the Liberal Party but after the two General Elections that year I didn't want to be involved any more. I had been to a couple of meetings and the key activists just seemed to be oddballs. I was working for the Inland Revenue in Durrington and picked up a National Front leaflet on the train coming home from work on day. I didn't do anything immediately but received a couple of information packs over the next few months and in the end I joined up and arranged a meeting with the Sussex Regional Organiser.

I was a betting shop manager working for Arthur Prince in Brighton at the time and the meeting was to take place in my lunch hour. When the smartly dressed gentleman with one arm came into the shop I knew that it must be my contact, Charles Parker.

From that lunchtime I have never looked back. I used to meet Charles and Vi, who were to become John Tyndall's inlaws, most Friday evenings where we would retire to Charles' study and discuss strategy over numerous glasses of wine. I was made the new Worthing organiser, given a list of the members there for the past three years and told to get things up and running. The old organiser was a chap called Oliver Gilbert who had fallen out with the Parkers and it wasn't too long before he was on the telephone wanting a meeting. Now Oliver was an imposing character and worked as a film extra who regularly portrayed elderly well-to-do Englishmen in TV advertisements and plays. At the time he was on the box most nights reading a copy of The Times and giving a knowing look to the camera. I met him in his luxurious flat overlooking Worthing seafront but the two hour meeting was pretty fruitless as he spent the whole time explaining his conspiracy theories and attacking Charles Parker.

Worthing Branch boomed during 1976 and the first half of 1977. Our first meeting was held in a private house with twenty people present and the next one was in the Forrester's Hall where over forty people attended. When I booked the hall, the Free Forrester's Association were confused as to who we actually were. I spent 10 minutes explaining but the committee of three elderly gentlemen still seemed under the impression it was something to do with the National Trust. We were a very mature branch in the beginning with the vast majority of members over fifty and over half of them ladies.

I had a good team around me although the chairman, Les Stone, a former Conservative councillor, was a bit of an embarrassment. His opening line to any new members was the story about how he went to demonstrate against the first boats arriving in this country bringing in immigrants from the Caribbean. The treasurer was a superb lady, Miss . . . and sadly I can't for the life of me remember her name. She was a former librarian and a spinster. Not only was she ultra efficient but also very generous always keeping the books balanced if we had overspent on newspaper adverts, leaflets or social evenings. My main assistant was a chap called Andrew Tulett who worked very hard, often going off for the whole day leafleting when his job in a local nursery permitted. He also had a lot of sound advice and was a steadying influence when I started getting carried away with the excitement of it all.

Things went very well with leafleting sometimes taking place on a Thursday as well as the regular Tuesday evenings. We were putting out the excellent 'Fed-Up' leaflet and it certainly created a lot of interest. The local newspaper was delighted with our appearance on the scene and we regularly made the front page. We launched a Young National Front association in Worthing which was fronted by the two most photogenic and articulate students, Caralyn Giles and Andrew Moffatt, anyone could ever want. It was a PR dream with their bright-eyed and smiling faces beaming out from the front page of the Worthing Herald.

It all seemed very easy at the time although the one concern was that there was a steady stream of new faces at our meetings and activities, yet they seemed to disappear as quickly as they had come and in the end the bulk of the work still rested on the shoulders of a handful of activists.

Everything changed after the Lewisham March. Peter Hain and Paul Holborrow set-up the Anti-Nazi League and there was a branch in Worthing which the local newspaper found just as exciting as us. As the political temperature was raised, a lot of the less committed members decided to keep their heads down and as things polarised so the internal disputes started to emerge, disillusioning the membership even further.

The Forrester's Hall remained our venue for the next four years and there were still some excellent meetings held there. But that time of unbridled optimism which lasted for the first 18 months of my time as a National Front member was gone for good. For the next twenty-five years nationalist politics was to be a hard and depressing slog ,with that light at the end of the tunnel never getting any nearer.

Looking back to see what the future holds for UKIP

I see from my inbox this morning that the divisions within the United Kingdom Independence Party show no sign of healing after the UKIP Grass Roots Conference at Bournemouth last weekend. An open letter to Nigel Farage asking for more openness was dismissed by the UKIP boss with a curt, "Best of luck with your new party" put down.

In our conference week, UKIP's internal difficulties take me back to 1979 and the National Front's AGM that year held on Great Yarmouth pier. I travelled by train from Worthing and it was a long journey which took most of Friday but after booking in a room in a seafront hotel, I arrived in time for the Friday late afternoon and evening sessions.

The Saturday morning saw Great Yarmouth under siege. Police had closed off most of the promenade in an effort to keep 1000-odd opponents away from the pier and delegates had to go through three or four police checkpoints to get to the venue. There was a good turnout, around 500 if my memory serves me correctly, but what went on the meeting was thoroughly demoralising.

First of all there was the faction called the Constitutional Movement run by Paul Kavanagh which was critical of the party's leadership. Their supporters handed out a pamphlet to delegates listing their concerns. A lot of them were probably valid but most of us who were officials had already been briefed that these people were only interested in destroying the NF so I didn't give their leaflet a second thought. I do remember one of their spokesman giving an impassioned speech but his proposals were voted down.

Then their was National Front chairman John Tyndall, who told the Conference that he was the only person that could lead the Party through these difficult times and asked to be granted dictatorial powers to be able to do this. I voted against his request as did a slim majority at the Conference and that rejection led to John Tyndall forming another party, the New National Front, the following year. There was real division over this especially in my branch in Worthing and along the whole South Coast. I remember one evening making my way to the Foresters Hall in Newlands Road for a Worthing Branch meeting only to be refused entry and told that I was no longer the organiser. The whole region just started to disintegrate.

Nearly thirty years on, I can foresee a similar scenario being played out within the ranks of UKIP. There can only be one end for that Party and I just hope some of its good people don't waste their time fighting a fruitless battle within that dying vessel but jump ship now to the BNP and use their energies to fight the real enemy - the old gang parties that have sold this country to the Eurocrats in Brussels.

For me personally, the Great Yarmouth Conference was a turning point. Up until then I had just been a political activist and local official and apart from the monthly Worthing newsletter to members hadn't put my hand to writing anything much at all. At that Conference someone gave me a bulletin called Newham Front Page which was a local NF newsletter but aimed at a more public readership. I liked the idea and went back home and started work on the first edition of Sussex Front which started me on the very road that I still find myself on today.