Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, 1976-1982

Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right

by David Renton

By 1976, the National Front had become the fourth largest party in Britain. In a context of national decline, racism and fears that the country was collapsing into social unrest, the Front won 19 per cent of the vote in elections in Leicester and 100,000 votes in London.

In response, an anti-fascist campaign was born, which combined mass action to deprive the Front of public platforms with a mass cultural movement. Rock Against Racism brought punk and reggae bands together as a weapon against the right.

At Lewisham in August 1977, fighting between the far right and its opponents saw two hundred people arrested and fifty policemen injured. The press urged the state to ban two rival sets of dangerous extremists. But as the papers took sides, so did many others who determined to oppose the Front.

Through the Anti-Nazi League hundreds of thousands of people painted out racist graffiti, distributed leaflets and persuaded those around them to vote against the right. This combined movement was one of the biggest mass campaigns that Britain has ever seen.

This book tells the story of the National Front and the campaign which stopped it.

Genres: Music, History, Politics

178 pages, Paperback

First published December 7, 2018

About the author

David "Dave" Renton is a British academic historian and barrister.

He was born in London in 1972. His great aunt was the marxist historian, Dona Torr. His grandfather was the shoe designer Kurt Geiger. One uncle was an activist in Equity, the actors' trade union, while another was the Conservative MP Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry. He was educated at all-boys private boarding school Eton College where he became a member of the Labour Party. He then studied history at St John's College, University of Oxford.

Renton received his PhD from the University of Sheffield for a thesis on fascism and anti-fascism in Britain after the Second World War ( The attempted revival of British Fascism: Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1945-51 ) that was turned into the book Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the 1940s . He also became an academic historian and sociologist, teaching at universities including Nottingham Trent, Edge Hill and Rhodes University and Johannesburg University in South Africa.

Since 2009 Renton has practised as a barrister at Garden Court Chambers in London and has represented clients in a number of high-profile cases, especially concerning trade union rights and the protection of free speech.

He was for twenty-two years (1991-2013) a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and he has published over twenty books on fascism, anti-fascism, and the politics of the left.

Reviews

[Keiron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very good, informative book on the rise of the National Front and the formation of RAR/ANL. although informative, it reads like a condensed version (maybe more so, a rewrite) of David Renton's previous book "when we touched the sky".

[Andrew Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really informative short book on an inspiring - and successful - campaign to roll back the advances of the far right in Britain in the 1970s. From some 10,000 members in 1979 to just a tenth of that six years later, the National Front were devastated by a cultural and political movement that united the different youth 'tribes' in resistance. The story is well contextualised in the industrial struggles of the 1970s, and the background to the NF and its factions is interesting. The high points of the two major carnivals are well-told, as well as the more bittersweet mobilisations caused by the murders of Gurdip Singh Chaggar and Blair Peach. Renton doesn't gloss over the tensions within RAR or the ANL, and gives a fair platform for the different factional takes. Highly recommended.