By Lee Billingham, LMHR Organiser 2002-2010
It’s brilliant to be able to look back 10 years now to the year that really broke the back of the fascist British National Party (BNP)’s support in Barking and Dagenham. Barking is a different place now. But it takes committed people and movements to change things. And looking back is not just a history lesson – the poison of racism needs urgently confronting again.
The Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) campaign began in response to the BNP gaining council seats in Burnley, Lancashire in 2002. The racist party, led by Nazi Nick Griffin, was also gaining ground in other parts of the country. LMHR was launched by Anti Nazi League (ANL) supporters and musicians to help turn the tide against the BNP’s momentum, and the racist division, and violence which came with it, by using our strengths and proud traditions – the music that brings people together, and getting more young people actively involved.
The BNP won their first seats on Barking and Dagenham Council in 2004. Then in 2006’s May local elections it became the second largest party there to Labour, winning 12 out of 13 seats they stood in, on 41 percent of the vote.
LMHR worked alongside ANL successor Unite Against Fascism (UAF) in Barking and Dagenham to organise and encourage local people opposed to the BNP and racism.
LMHR particularly focused on finding the local young music fans and artists and others we knew were there in this multi-racial community who wanted to do something about the BNP.
UAF organised local anti-racists to leaflet local estates against the BNP, including to their credit Labour councillor Milton McKenzie and the now council leader Darren Rodwell. This local support helped finally secure a tiny Goresbrook community centre for an LMHR gig in June 2006. It was well attended on a Sunday afternoon by local young people coming to see Grime & RnB stars Donae’o and Gemma Fox alongside local youth dance group Move It Aside, and a few new local people joined the campaign.
Drew Smith was one of the first. He remembers,
“I was born and grew up in Dagenham, and had moved back after going to Uni. I’d just studied fascism at Uni and was appalled when I saw a BNP stall at my local Dagenham Heathway tube station like it was just a normal thing. I was into punk too, so I knew about Rock Against Racism. Soon after I was at a club in the west end and saw a LMHR flyer there. I got in touch and that was it – I was Dagenham LMHR!
“In terms of instilling some sort of political consciousness in local young people, LMHR was very important. Lots of people’s parents voted Labour but it was like it was out of tradition rather than principle. LMHR made it cool again to be believe in something”.
Support from local trade unions was crucial. Through the local National Union of Teachers (NUT) – now the National Education Union (NEU) – and its determined secretary Dominic McArdle, two local schools agreed to hold special assemblies in July 2006 with invited music stars and LMHR campaigners speaking out against racism. Ms Dynamite & Akala agreed to play at Barking Abbey school, with boyband Fade2 playing to 800 students Dagenham’s Jo Richardson School.
These events were an important breakthrough. New young activists emerged from both schools and threw themselves into building LMHR and UAF activities locally. Carolynn and Frances were two Barking Abbey students who joined up that day. Two years later they were interviewed in a major article on LMHR in The Observer by Sarfraz Manzoor:
“Carolynn and Frances, two 18-year-old students … are part of the new generation of anti-racist activists. The girls live in Barking in east London and are studying at the same school ‘It was the music that got us interested,’ Carolynn [said], ‘but then we got into the ethos of what LMHR is about.’ The girls have been handing out flyers in their classes, [and] they help out in the LMHR offices”.
The Barking Abbey school event in particular drew positive national media coverage.
Mercury Prize-winning artist Ms Dynamite had recently stolen the show from the likes of U2 and Elton John at the huge “Live 8” concert in Hyde Park, while Barking Abbey old boy Billy Bragg also pitched up to speak to pupils, with Labour minister pal Ed Balls in tow. This really put the anti-BNP campaign on the map across London and well beyond.
Dynamite later said,
“I played at the first LMHR carnival in Manchester in 2002. But even more important for me were the shows we put on in schools in Barking in east London, where the BNP were organising, and the LMHR film we made for schools highlighting the dangers of fascism” (Alan Miles’ NUT-sponsored Who Shot The Sheriff).
Local people told us the principal of Barking College would be keen to support the fight against racism. This it turned out was Ted Parker, a veteran socialist and anti-racist Londoner who’d been involved in the “Battle of Lewisham” – a key demo against the National Front – in 1977. Ted was incensed at the rise of the BNP and offered the college, with its large multiracial student body, as a venue for an LMHR “Black History Month” event in October 2006, where Lisa Moorish and Babyshambles’ Drew McConnell performed.
For his troubles, Ted was visited and threatened by BNP councillor Robert Bailey, who warned him of “problems” from BNP members if the event went ahead. “He seemed to be saying our students were in danger”, Ted told a local newspaper. “As he left he said, ‘You have been warned’.”
We lined up a gig bill of ex-Libertine Carl Barat’s new band, East London grime heroes Roll Deep and Dagenham grime act OT Crew (featuring future star Devlin). The area’s only major venue – Barking Broadway Theatre – was again sadly pressured not to host us though, so we ended up at a huge pub called The Cauliflower in neighbouring Ilford. Some 500 mainly local kids mobbed it out. Greeted on the LMHR stall by fellow locals like Drew, Carolynn and Frances, more signed up for local UAF activity.
Now our momentum was building. Regular leafletting and stalls in the borough continued. There was huge concern about possible BNP success in the 2008 London Assembly elections – and the council polls in following years. A big anti-BNP campaign across London was organised. Crucial to mobilising the anti-BNP vote would be the huge LMHR Carnival in east London’s Victoria Park on 30 April 2008, celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the iconic 1978 Rock Against Racism carnival headlined by The Clash.
The Carnival was a huge success with an incredible 100,000+ attending to see the likes of Damon Albarn, The Clash’s Paul Simonon, Roll Deep, Jay Sean and many others.
The event was covered live by Radio 1, reviewed by every national paper, and filmed to be shown for an hour on Channel 4 the following Friday, but the Barking Recorder paper was a main sponsor too – the paper covered the Carnival and other LMHR events faithfully by this point, and the BNP were hopping mad.
Although the 2008 campaign didn’t quite achieve its main aim of keeping the BNP from gaining a member on the London Assembly (Barking and Dagenham BNP councillor Richard Barnbook), the BNP only came third in the Barking and Dagenham poll. The work done on the ground and the publicity for beating back the BNP in the borough saw numbers willing to get involved with UAF and other campaigns locally grow again, raising optimism about the campaign to stop them (as we saw it then) gaining more seats or even winning the Council in 2010.
The local campaigning, gigs and schools work continued in 2009. Elsewhere though, BNP leader Griffin managed to scrape a seat on the European Parliament in the North West, and in November announced his intention to stand as MP for Barking in the 2010 General Election.
This further galvanised the campaign locally, which built up to daily mass leafletting in the borough in April and May 2010. LMHR played its part again with a packed out gig in late April – finally now at Barking Broadway – featuring punk ska band King Blues and grime veteran Ghetts, which memorably ended with an impromptu gig on the steps of Barking Council’s offices, with a big crowd of young people chanting “who streets, our streets!”. People who’d gone out leafletting got cheap tickets too!
To the huge delight of anti-racists everywhere, the big campaign to stop the BNP in 2010 finished with the fascists losing every single seat on Barking and Dagenham Council amid a big drop in their vote. Nazi Nick came a miserable third in the race to become Barking’s MP. The BNP limped on a few more years, but together with similar losses in other former strongholds like Stoke, the writing was on the wall.
Racists were turning to the street thuggery of the English Defence League (EDL) – who also ended being beaten back by mass mobilisations, but that’s another story.
It wasn’t LMHR that was decisive in beating back the racists and fascists in Barking and Dagenham. The hundreds of anti racists, trade unionists and by now Labour supporters who mobilised from the borough and across London did that. But LMHR was a key spark in lighting the fire which spread slowly but in the end unstoppably to engulf the Nazis, and in the process got many local young people involved in doing that, and in politics more generally. We’re delighted to now be asked by the local council to work together with them to celebrate what we all achieved back then to stop the BNP, and to deepen the fight against today’s racists.