Channel 4's October 27 Dispatches on the FIGHTING RACISM BNP and Combat 18.
THE DAY Channel 4's programme on the neoNazi terror group Combat 18 went out, a 17year old East End white thug, Nicky Fuller, was released after six months in jail for his part in a horrific attack on an 18year old Bangladeshi.
Student Mukhta Ahmed was one of five Bangladeshis chased through Bethnal Green. Cornered alone in a dead-end, his face was kicked to a pulp.
So severe were his injuries that his scalp became detached from his skull.
Disorder
Fuller was bizarrely convicted only of violent disorder, carrying a maximum sentence of only 12 months.
Only one other member of the white gang has been found. Mukhta Ahmed will bear horrific scars for the rest of his life. Others have died in The scum always floats to the top.. the mounting tide of racist violence since the beginning of TRA UNO But as Dispatches showed the attitude of the Home Office towards the organisers and inspirers of much of this violence, the British National Party and their Brownshirt flankguards Combat 18, is one of studied inaction.
Dispatches concentrated on exposing the lie that Combat 18 has been "proscribed" by BNP leader John Tyndall, showing film evidence that Combat 18 activists act as personal security guards for Tyndall himself.
Whatever the relations between C18 and the BNP. the BNP itself organises and inspires street violence. Deputy fuhrer Richard Edmonds and former Millwall councillor Derek Beackon - an old Nazi who started his career with Moseley - are just two of the most prominent with recent convictions for violence.
Relations between Combat 18 and the BNP leadership have been strained over the last iwo years, but not because the BNP disowns racist violence and terror against left-wingers.
Combat 18 leader Charlie "Ginger Pig" Sargeant ordered a series of attacks against BP leaders thought to have "grassed up" C18 activists under police questioning.
Those attacked by C18 included Tony Lecomber, famed "mad bomber" of the BNP, done in the 1980s for trying to blow up the Workers Revolutionary Party in Clapham.
Lecomber has other convictions for violence, but all this is par for the course in the Nazi underworld; sterling service against the blacks and reds doesn't save you from your comrades!
The BNP recently took the initiative to smooth over the differences in the "nationalist movement".
Combat 18 however is a particular problem because of its targeting of victims and attacks on homes. This has led to people having to abandon their jobs and even move towns.
Yorkshire
Their terror is particularly widespread in Yorkshire. Combat 18 also plays a very special role for the fascists in organising football hooligans, and in the Blood and Honour Nazi rock movement.
The key group of football thugs which acts as C18's organising centre is the "Chelsea Headhunters".
Dispatches revealed the frightening extent of the Nazi network among the football gangs; people who beat the hell out of one another on a winter Saturday, but unite against Troops Out marches and foreign fans.
Arms deals
Another aspect of the BP's dark underworld exposed by the programme is the activity of a sinister character called Eddie Whicker -well known to anti-fascist activists - in supplying arms to Loyalist paramilitaries. Whicker hardly bothers to deny it, but of course has never been prosecuted.
Those with an experience in anti-fascist campaigning will not have been surprised by any of the programmes revelations. Fascist violence, and C18 in particular, are no longer a marginal problem. which the left can ignore.
Terror tactics against the left, although deeply frightening for the victims, are small in scale compared with racist violence.
Self-defence of the black communities, actively supported by the wider labour movement, must be matched by concerted efforts to deal with the C18 thugs.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 71, 3 November 1994, Page 15 Neville Alexander. Send