Deja Vu as Labour's Attempt to Bully Tenants Backfires

Former councillor Paul Fisher
 with Linford Christie on Ivybridge

Back in the mid-1980s the Labour Party in what was then Isleworth South ward launched a sustained offensive to take control of the New Ivybridge Tenants’ Association (NITA). In line with its general policy towards residents’ associations at the time it sought to achieve this by ensuring that whichever members it had in the catchment area were active on the association, and these would then be sustained and promoted at every opportunity by the ward councillors, who would use any influence at their disposal to have them elevated to the most senior Committee posts.

On Ivybridge the Labour offensive was helped along by the fact that one of the people who had been elected to serve on the fledgling Committee was a member of the fascist National Front. Alan Minehan was himself an inoffensive and mild-mannered man, a fact conceded even by his critics, but nevertheless he was a member of an avowedly racist party serving on a tenants’ association on a multi-cultural estate. There were quite valid concerns about the message that his presence on the Committee would send out to estate residents.

Not that I accepted them as valid at the time. For in 1987, when it all began, I was still the NF organiser in the area. Taking its cue from Labour the local NF had also developed a strategy of attempting to infiltrate residents’ groups, and it was not unreasonably assumed that his presence on the NITA Committee had been part and parcel of that strategy.

As it happens though the assumption was incorrect. The first I knew of Alan Minehan’s involvement with the association was after he had been elected to the post. I distinctly recall my sense of surprise when he strolled into the Victoria Tavern in Isleworth that very evening, after the meeting, and told me all about it. He said they had asked him to be Treasurer - I advised him against it, counselling that the man holding the purse strings would be the easiest person for an adversary to set up once his presence on the Committee had become known to the local political establishment. But I told him also that he should hold firm and resist any attempts by anyone to boot him off on the grounds of his politics.

Sure enough, a storm blew up and the appointment made the headlines of the local newspapers. The councillors objected to his appointment and a number of his fellow Committee officials, most but not all of them Labour members, called upon him to stand down. Acting on my advice, he stayed put.

Looking at those events in retrospect I see them now in a very different light. Were a similar thing to occur today I would oppose the presence of a member of a racist political party at the top table of a local residents’ group with every fibre of my being.

However none of this detracts from the fact that Labour’s motivation in opposing Minehan, as both he and I suspected at the time, was primarily a cynical and self-serving one. This was borne out by subsequent events. Just as I had predicted, once he had been removed from the Committee a similar purge was conducted against other non-Labour members, none of whom had anything to do with the NF or held racist views of any kind. And the defection of one of the "approved" group's number to the cause of the purged residents confirmed the accuracy of our suspicions for once and for all.

In those days, as now, there were divisions within the ranks of the Labour Party locally. When a Feltham councillor by the name of David Archer, now sadly deceased, wrote to a local newspaper urging Alan Minehan to leave and denounce the National Front as a resolution to the estate’s sorry predicament I wrote back to attack him for his comments. It is only now that I understand his motive for making the suggestion, far from being hostile, was to offer us a way out of the impasse that had been created which would have well and truly scotched his party colleagues’ plans for the association. Through my own limitless arrogance and stupidity, a golden opportunity fell to waste.

Now let us fast forward 26 and a bit years, and to an incident which has truly demonstrated not only the paucity of Labour’s claim to have been acting out of the loftiest principle back in 1987, but that they have learned absolutely nothing from the emergence of the ICG and its not inconsiderable success, notwithstanding our election defeat in 2010, during the long intervening period.

A couple of months ago former ICG councillor and leading local activist Paul Fisher was co-opted to the Committee of the United Residents’ Association of Ivybridge (URA), the successor organisation to NITA. Unlike Alan Minehan, no claim of racism or fascism could conceivably be laid at Paul’s door. Nevertheless, prior to the URA’s last meeting its officers had been contacted by the local Labour group demanding that it reverses its decision to co-opt Paul.

Apparently Labour in Isleworth still operates under the peculiar misapprehension that it can decide who may or may not serve on the management committee of a local residents’ association. However, unlike in 1987 the association today is truly independent. Even the one high-profile member that Labour has on the Committee, who had been pressured by his party to lead the charge against Paul, told them to do one, and Paul’s continued presence on the Committee was reconfirmed by a unanimous show of hands.

Anybody who doubts that, even if the wake of 2010, the goalposts have moved significantly in the community’s favour in its dealings with the dictators should consider the experience of Paul and the URA and reflect upon it.

Coming Face to Face With My National Front Past...Almost!

This may seem a strange topic to choose for my first post of 2013, but I had a weird dream the other night which I want to consign to record, as much for my own sanity as for anything else, but also to provide some light amusement for those who find such things amusing.

I was somewhere in a run-down area of London, in a derelict back street. The road was busy, although it was in actual fact a cul de sac terminating at the gates of an old factory. I was lazing about on a wall, actually lying down face forward, awaiting the arrival of some people who were going to join me on a demonstration. The factory employed mostly immigrant workers, who were being exploited by their management. The purpose of the demo was to protest against their treatment by the factory bosses.

In very little time several hundred people had arrived. They were a varied and colourful bunch, made up of all types of people. There were men and women of all ages, and from a whole variety of ethnic backgrounds. There were gay people (they seemed to be there as gay people) and, strangely, there was a group of men with shaven heads and identically attired in gold whom I presumed to be a religious sect of some form or another. A similarly-clad group dressed in pink then arrived, to the apparent chagrin of the gold people. I assumed these were from a rival religious sect.

But the folk I remember most vividly were an assortment of left-wing types, not in the union militant or Rocking Russian sense but more your trendy student, look-at-me, faux alternative stereotype. Although we shared a common cause I recall feeling uneasy around these people, not so much out of fear but more a sense of insincerity and general debasement of the mission upon which I was embarked.

The protest involved a march for the length of the street, after which we would turn left into a busy main thoroughfare. There, from within the sunken depths of a major London underground station, a National Front counter-demonstration was going to emerge onto the sidelines of our route comprising two to three hundred shouting, angry neo-fascists.

There was nothing to be frightened of. The whole area was saturated with police, both either side of the march and all around the tube station where the counter demonstration would first manifest itself. Besides, I knew nothing serious was going to happen because I had been there before.

Yes, you read that correctly. This was in actual fact an identical re-run of an event that had already taken place some time previously. Only on the earlier occasion I had been a participant in, and presumably an organiser of, the counter demonstration. As such I knew the whole day was going to pass without major incident.

In fact my only fear as I approached the junction and the counter demonstration, and I recall it was a very real fear, was that I was going to meet myself!

As we turned into the main street there was, bizarrely, a “commentator” at the side of the road with a microphone, giving an account of events to the participants as it was happening. He announced something to the effect of (I can’t recall the exact words): “Of course not everyone here is really one of us, are they Phil?”.

Rather than be shaken or wrong-footed by this, I simply laughed and gave him an ironic thumbs-up as I passed without looking directly at him. One or two of those around me glanced at me, perplexed, but nobody seemed overly concerned. It was, after all, only a dream (and I am blessed/cursed with the ability to usually know that I am dreaming) and I knew this guy was completely aware of my sincerity in supporting the cause of the exploited workers and opposing the fascists, and that he was simply making mischief. Most of those around me seemed to know it too.

But notwithstanding all this I was genuinely troubled, dream or no dream, by the prospect of meeting myself as we passed the counter demo. I can remember this feeling very clearly indeed.

The feared encounter never took place thanks, I think, to the timely intervention of my alarm clock. Nonetheless I remembered the whole thing so vividly, and still do some thirty hours later, that I decided I wanted to write it all down, for posterity or for future reference.

Most people who know me at all will be well aware that I was indeed a prominent member of the National Front many years ago. Some critics of my work in the community would prefer it were still so, and like to pretend that the two decades and more that have passed since I first turned my back on the far-right and renounced its politics have never taken place. Anybody who matters, though, is well acquainted with the full facts.

There was, of course, a certain amount of licence involved where my nocturnal adventure was concerned. Even as a National Front organiser I would never, for instance, have opposed a demonstration in support of exploited workers, immigrant or otherwise. And I have never seen any significant delegation of Hare Krishnas on any anti-fascist protest of my acquaintance, although the middle-class, plastic revolutionaries in duffle coats do ring true a tad.

I like to analyse my own dreams and more often than not I am able to see where they are coming from but at the time of writing I admit to being at a loss to make head or tail of this one. Maybe a friend, or indeed a foe, would like to try and help me out here?

Moving On

I discovered today, after 50 years, that I have gypsy blood.

Not a lot, but one or two of my ancestors were apparently "travelling folk". My mother kind of mentioned it in passing.

Which led me to reflect upon the fact that, had I come to power in the late seventies or early eighties, when it would have been reasonable to have described my political outlook as something not far removed from undiluted Nazism, I may have finished up having to gas myself.

A chilling thought for a chilly night and perhaps a time to be thankful that, in true gypsy style, I made the decision to move on.

No Representation in Lieu of the People?

Despite my relative lack of interest in national and international politics these days I do find myself pondering the current troubles in Libya.

As a leading National Front activist in the late 1980s I was an avid admirer of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (or "Qathafi" as my erstwhile comrades and I liked to spell it at the time, lending us a sense of affected superiority). Where there was a suggestion that his regime was anything short of perfect, for instance his arming of terrorists, I simply ignored the evidence.  In that way I was able to able to maintain a rose-tinted picture of revolutionary perfection throughout.  So ghettoised and unpopular was the NF at the time that it considered Gaddafi and the Ayatollah Khomeini to be desirable sources of political respectability!

Those who find comfort in the traditional view of extreme nationalism in the UK as being motivated only by race hate and driven by a political worldview which sits conveniently to the right of the most hardline Conservatives on the "political spectrum" would be confused by this infatuation with a Libyan revolutionary who includes the word "Socialist" in the title of his "State Of The Masses".

But in fact Gaddafi and his Green Book was one of the many ideological affectations embraced by the very eccentric version of the NF of which I was a member circa 1987-1989, and of all those in the party I was probably at the time his most devoted enthusiast.

So I occasionally have to remind myself that my view of the world has altered radically since those bad old days if I am to take an objective view of the events of the last few weeks over in the "Splaj".

The essence of Gaddafi's ideology is that he believes power to lie with the masses and not with centralised government, and that those who speak for those masses do so as delegates rather than as representatives. No Representation in Lieu of the People is a slogan than reoccurs throughout his seminal work.

I have to admit that I retain a great deal of sympathy for this as an ideal. Nonetheless it would seem to be the case that the practice has deviated from the principle rather a lot, and much though Gaddafi would have us (and himself) believe that he is a mere symbol of the Green Revolution and that he wields no executive power of his own, the actuality is almost certainly entirely different. The replacement of most of his conventional army with an "armed people" may avoid giving off an appearance of a military dictatorship but one suspects that, as on Animal Farm, some of the guardians of the Revolution are in fact more equal that others.

All the same it is quite alarming to listen to the news in the UK and to realise just how little the commentators at the BBC and Sky actually understand, or affect to understand, about Libya.

We are told that the army has gone over to the protestors, with the implication that this must inevitably spell doom for the Gaddafi regime. But rarely is there any hint of an understanding of what little importance the men in uniform actually have in a country in which everybody is armed and where power comes through committees of civilians.

We are told that nobody is supporting the government, and yet it would appear not only to be holding the capital but also launching counter-attacks against cities that have fallen into the hands of anti-government forces, albeit today's attempt to retake Brega transpired to be something of a damp squib.

We are told that the strength of the rebels in Benghazi makes a final and decisive incursion into Tripoli an inevitability, rather ignoring the inconvenient fact that the two cities are several hundred miles apart with a desert in-between and that the rebels have no transport.

We are told that the Libyan government has launched air strikes against its own people, a truly despicable thing to do if it is true. The Libyan government insists it is not true, as of course it would, but the Russians who have been monitoring the situation by satellite are saying the same thing.

The real difficulty that arises when trying to understand what is going on in Libya is that nobody seems to be telling us the truth. Gaddafi, absurdly, has tried to suggest that Al-Qaeda is behind the uprising when a cursory glance at the demonstrators will tell any observer that these protests are not the product of an upsurge of Islamism. Quite the opposite in fact - the hand of the United States and its Western allies suggests itself, which would explain the rather peculiar demand that Gaddafi should stand down after having been partially successful in resisting uprisings of a kind that brought down the leadership in both Tunisia and Egypt. It is the cry of an outside party that has seriously botched its attempt to overthrow a sovereign state and wants to destroy the evidence as quickly as it can.

One considers, but not for too long, whether David Cameron and his government would resign and hand over power to the students should they ever decide to replace fire extinguishers with guns, and single-issue protest with revolutionary intent. We all know that in such an event the response of our government - like that of the Libyan government or indeed any other government when faced with the same situation - would be to suppress the uprising ultimately by using any means necessary.

Of course, whatever lies behind the upheaval the people fighting on the streets of Libya against the regime are not Americans and they are not Israelis. The sincere aspirations of the Libyan protestors would appear to be freedom and democracy and if, perhaps a little arrogantly, we are to assume that our version of democracy is entirely good and that Gaddafi's is entirely bad, we should see this as a positive. But a US-sponsored revolution would, given the choice, replace the current regime with something that was more US- and Israel-friendly, which in turn would provide massive political ammunition to the Islamists who wait in the wings.

Whichever way one looks at it, it is not pretty. As I see it there are three possible outcomes for the immediate future:

1. A bloodbath as pro-government forces use their superior firepower and strategic advantage to reassert control.

2. A "two nation" solution, at least in the short term, with the government remaining in control of a smaller Libya governed from Tripoli and the rebels governing themselves independently from Benghazi, possibly under the protection of the UN, the US and/or the Arab League, or

3. Military intervention by the US and its allies to finish the job they began without (incredibly) any proper knowledge of how Libya operates, resulting in illegal regime change openly imposed by invading powers a la Iraq.

Whichever it is to be, I truly hope that it can be done with quickly and with as little innocent blood shed as is humanly possible.

Evans Above!

When I was first elected to Hounslow Council on 7th May 1998 as a community councillor there were a number of individuals who tried to make capital from the fact that I had been a member of the National Front back in the 1970s and 1980s.

Of course having a history as a senior activist in a fascist party is a cause for concern, but only if there is any reasonable suspicion that the ex-activist in question still holds views of that kind. My renunciation over several years of racist and fascist opinions on the other hand had been very, very unambiguous and very, very public. Anybody who knew me even at that time knew full well that by 1998 I was about as far removed from being a racist or a fascist as it was possible to be.

This is precisely why most of my critics emerged from within the ranks of those people who didn't know me. And this in turn is the reason why I had, and still have, no respect for those individuals who tried to use my history either for political advantage, or just for a soundbite.

Amongst the ranks of the latter was the broadcaster Chris Evans, who for some reason best known to himself felt the need to express an opinion on the "real" views of somebody he had never met and about whom he knew absolutely nothing.

I am not a person who particularly holds grudges, but try as I have I have found it difficult to like this talentless, pointless and opinionated pillock ever since his completely unnecessary intervention in the political discourse of a borough he had nothing to do with and which he had probably never even set foot in.

So when he appeared tonight on a live celebrity version of the excellent TV Quiz Show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I braced myself for two and a half minutes of undiluted embarassment, and the ginger whinger did not disappoint.

However even I didn't expect a radio disc jockey to fail on a question about the lyrics of a hugely successful Christmas song, Fairytale Of New York.

After having asked the audience which words followed "And the boys from the NYPD choir were singing...", and after having been told by 69% of said audience that the correct answer was "Galway Bay", he then decided the plebs obviously didn't know what they were talking about and instead went 50/50.

Needless to say he went out on the following question, having raised just £1000.

Sad though I feel for his charity of choice, I do feel strangely reassured by the fact that the man who made some inane and ill-informed references to me on his radio show over twelve years ago is still just as big a moron today.

Apparently this waste of space celebrates his birthday on April 1st. Why am I not surprised?

MPowering Youth Through Education and Experience

I spent a hugely constructive couple of hours yesterday (Saturday) afternoon at the Hounslow Community Centre as a guest at a workshop for young people organised by the MPower Hounslow Youth Project.

About fifteen youngsters - boys and girls mostly from a Muslim background - discussed a host of topics relating to political and social extremism, not just on the fringes of Muslim society but also street gangs and football hooliganism.


I was invited to the meeting in time to give my own presentation about my experiences as a National Front organiser in the 1970s and 1980s, but I arrived early enough to hear some of the earlier presentations and was amazed by the quality of the information that was being imparted. It occurred to me instantly that this project was deadly earnest about trying to keep potentially vulnerable young people who might otherwise find themselves receptive to extremist ideas on the straight and narrow.

When it was my turn to speak I simply gave it from the heart. Many of the people there were so young they had never even heard of the National Front, but most had heard of the BNP and I circulated some photos and written material demonstrating the extent to which I had been involved, including a fading snippet from a local newspaper showing myself and Nick Griffin, now leader of the BNP, addressing a rally in Isleworth and a letter I once received whilst in prison from an outspoken Ulster loyalist friend (writing from another prison) literally a few months before he was shot dead by members of a fringe Irish republican group.

I spoke of the way in which one becomes "ghettoised" when joining up with an extremist group, rightly shunned by normal society but with the result that one finishes up only speaking to and listening to others who share one's own prejudices, and sliding deeper and deeper thereby into an extremist mindset and way of life.

I think it fair to say that most of these very young people were ever so slightly taken aback to suddenly find themselves being lectured by this middle-aged, greying and nondescript old scruffpot and hearing about a way of life in which guns and bombs, whilst not perhaps a feature of everyday life, certainly existed as a feature of the political dialectic at the time.


I think I have said before on this blog that this is the kind of work, more than anything else, that I really want to be doing. I deeply regret my past as a right-wing extremist, but accept that it happened and believe that I am uniquely placed to offer warnings, advice and guidance to young people who may in the wrong circumstances found themselves being led along the same destructive and dangerous path.

MPower is a superb resource for vulnerable young people and I have already expressed to the organisers my willingness, indeed my eagerness to assist them in their future work should they wish me to do so. My respect for those who dedicated themselves to working with and helping young people in this way really does know no bounds.

Three weeks in the life of...

I can't believe it's over three weeks since I last updated this blog. A combination of cranking things up a gear as we begin to approach the local elections and trying to earn a crust at the same time tends to relegate otherwise important work. On such occasions the protocol is to summarise.

An interesting meeting took place a few weeks ago involving several elected members, the London Borough of Hounslow's Community Cohesion officer team and a wide range of people with a wide range of views comprising the Hounslow Muslim Forum. There had been expressions of regret that the local authority had not supported a recent HMF event but the meeting gave all those present the opportunity to get to understand each other's positions a bit better.

I was pleased to be a guest at three meals in quick succession - hosted by Hounslow Community Transport (HCT), Isleworth & Hounslow Charities and Hounslow Multi-Cultural Centre respectively. Prior to the Charities gig (held at Kneller Hall) a certain Syon councillor who had arranged my attendance had forgotten to inform them that I was a vegetarian. Worse, she had forgotten to inform them that I was a vegetarian who didn't like cauliflower or green beans. On the plus side, the boiled potatoes were delicious. However, dietary idiosyncrasies notwithstanding these three thoroughly enjoyable evenings gave me and other participants an opportunity to ponder the work of some of the real, if unsung heroes of the community.

Following the dinner at the Multi-Cultural Centre I made my way back to Lampton Road to conduct a pre-recorded interview with Paul Moss for BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, which was putting together a feature about the Corporation's decision to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin onto its flagship Question Time programme. I'd never spoken to Paul before but what intrigued me about this particular interview was that, whilst we were arranging it, Paul actually told me quite a lot about himself. He is a West London lad, a few years younger than myself, and had actually gone to school with one of the people I had been in the National Front with back in the early 1980s. Despite the fact that Paul was an anti-fascist, he had a genuine interest in his subject and clearly wanted to know more than time would permit.

Then, at the weekend, it was away to the Isle of Wight with Caroline and Joe (Rosie, despite being only twelve, already decides for herself when she will condescend to come away with us and when she will stay at home instead with her grandparents). This time we stayed at Fairway Holiday Park in Sandown and after a light shower on the first night enjoyed some excellent weather for the time of year.

Back home on Monday, 27th October and two hours or so at a Group Meeting, then Borough Council the following evening where, for once, we argued about very little and got away at a reasonable hour. One incident which could have been a little contentious was when I presented a petition to the Mayor from 250 residents of Waye Avenue, Cranford, calling for improved public safety in the local area. Although Cranford is nowhere near my ward the residents there asked me to present the petition as they lacked confidence in their own (Labour) councillors. Whether this dissatisfaction will express itself in any particular way at next year's local elections I obviously cannot say.

With all my various work I never seem to get enough sleep these days. A couple of weeks ago I turned up at the local petrol station to wash my car, only to realise that I hadn't brought my car with me. Very worrying.

Today I drove 32 miles to take Joe to a football match at Hatch End that was postponed a few minutes before we got there, then all the way across to SW1 and along the Chelsea Embankment to collect Rosie from a "sleepover" at the home of one of her schoolfriends. Luckily I remembered my car this time.

Keens' continued boycott of Hounslow Council gives the lie to victim plea

I hit the headlines again this week, courtesy of the Hounslow & Brentford Times which carried an article about my relationship with the parasitic Keen duo and their lack of co-operation with the London Borough of Hounslow.

For the benefit of anyone who is unfamiliar with this particular story I will elucidate. In May 2006 I joined the local authority's Executive as Lead Member for Housing & Community Safety. Some time afterwards the his-and-hers MPs decided to make an issue of the fact, and they wrote a letter to Councillor Peter Thompson, Leader of Hounslow Council, "reserving the right to withhold our co-operation from your administration" for as long as I remained a member of the Executive. The reason given was my former membership of the National Front, an organisation whose views I had publicly renounced a decade and a half previously.

The letter itself was simply a "hook" for a much wider campaign against me and by association the Community Group, which involved briefing a number of sympathetic journalists from Tribune, the Daily Mirror, and of course the London Evening Standard where the Keens seem to enjoy a naturally cosy relationship with the odious and deceitful Andrew Gilligan. It also included a question in the House of Commons by Mrs. Keen to the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, which to his credit he brushed aside with barely concealed contempt.

The devil in the Keen's "non co-operation campaign" transpired over the coming months to be in the detail. Their principled stand did not, it seem, extend to boycotting publicity opportunities and photo calls organised by the local authority. The non co-operation was to be limited to issues which involved an element of hard work.

Unimpressed by the Keens' selective application of what was supposed after all to be a point of high principle, I put a Motion to Borough Council which had the effect of formalising the lack of a working relationship between the local authority and the MPs in a way which removed the potential for embarrassment to our officers, by declaring that henceforth the Keens would only be admitted to any activity organised by the local authority with the express permission of the administration. The Motion was passed with the full support of the Conservative, Liberal Democrat, ICG and other independent councillors, with only Labour voting against. No more unearned photo ops for the Keens.

Having been hoist by their own petard the Keens and their little band of followers and organised letter-writers squealed concertedly like stuck pigs, just as I had predicted they would. It wasn't fair. The local authority was cutting off relations with the Keens, who had done nothing wrong. They hadn't said they wouldn't co-operate with the council, only that they would reserve the right to do so. And so on. Henceforth the lie was promulgated that the severing of the relationship between the borough and its MPs was all at the behest of the administration, with the MPs being the innocent victims for simply having done the honourable, ethical thing by expressing real and valid concerns about the involvement of the neo-fascist ICG in the administration of a multi-cultural borough.

In order to be sustained the lie had to divest itself of some inconvenient truths. The first was that, in the many months which had passed between the sending of the letter to Councillor Thompson and the Motion to Borough Council the Keens had already withdrawn their co-operation from the local authority. Nobody can name one solitary instance of them having helped or co-operated with the new administration during that period in any way, shape or form.

The second was that, far from being motivated by ethical considerations, the Labour position was actually incredibly confused. My initial appointment to the Executive was made by Borough Council in May 2006 and was supported unanimously, that is by every member of the Council including all 24 members of the Labour Group. Then, in 2007, following the announcement of the Keens' "principled" stance against my appointment, the same Labour Group abstained on (not opposed) my appointment to the Executive on the grounds of my former NF membership (they also refused to support Caroline's appointment as Deputy Mayor, presumably in the belief that previously-held political associations are contagious and can be passed on to other members of the family). And in 2008, which was to be the last year I would stand for Executive, they approved my nomination unanimously once again!

The gist of the newspaper article was to point out that, now I am no longer a member of the Executive, there is not really any justification for the Keens' non co-operation continuing. Yet continue it does, with Mrs. Keen refusing to comment as to why (it also gave a very gratefully received plug to my new anti-fascist blog Walk Away, which is already beginning to attract a small trickle of new visitors).

This petulance and deceit characterises completely the sheer unpleasantness of what New Labour has become today. I am looking forward to the electorate giving these two shameless self-seekers the boot at the next general election and replacing them with people who are prepared to put the welfare of their constituents before political point-scoring and work with the local authority, whatever its political complexion, for the greater good of the community we were all elected to serve.

New blog targets far-right

Yesterday I launched a new blog called Walk Away, which I'm hoping will in time develop into a valuable resource for combating the far-right, not just in Hounslow but throughout the UK.

Having been a member of the National Front and another far-right group myself (1977-1991) and having had to overcome a number of obstacles - some of them understandable but others grotesquely opportunistic - as I have endeavoured to do my human duty to expose the far-right, I make no apology for using my unique knowledge and experience as a lever for trying to encourage others who might be tempted to abandon previously-held racist views and affiliations. I am aware that my efforts will be the subject of attack, both by racists and by so-called "anti-racists", but this project is one that I am determined will succeed.

If fighting racism and fascism is a subject that interests you, please do take a look and feel free to leave a comment. Better still, if you manage your own blog or website please link to it. I'd be happy to reciprocate if asked.

Doth the Keen Machine protest too much?

My article on Friday in which the possibility of an ethical revolt wihin the ranks of the Labour Party in Hounslow following the party's announcement that it was sticking by Ann Keen seems to have ruffled some feathers.

Over at the BrentfordTW8.com community forum long-time Keen bag carrier Robin Taylor responded to the article in the conventional fashion, "revealing" to bored forum users for the umpteenth time that I had been a National Front member back in the 1980s.

Meanwhile on its sister site at ChiswickW4.com one David McLaughlin, who would seem to be a party hack and possibly a rising star in an increasingly empty galaxy, makes much of the fact that I have not been unreservedly critical of the plucky young men and women who briefly occupied the Keens' Brentford home to highlight the fact that the his-and-hers MPs had been conning us all by claiming it to have been their primary abode while accepting handouts from the taxpayer for the purchase of their alleged "second" home, a luxury pad in Waterloo.

Mr. McLaughlin, I am guessing, is gathering quotation material for a pre-election smear leaflet in the mistaken view that the general public actually give a toss about the Keens or their long-abandoned hovel in Brook Road South. Most of people living in the immediate vicinity seem to be missing the squatters, who proved to be helpful, generous and courteous neighbours during their short tenure.

But let's get back to the substantive issue here - good people who had once given their loyalty and support to the Labour Party for the most noble of reasons. People who believe passionately in Social Justice and Equality but who do not subscribe to the smug, arrogant, unjustified assumption of social and intellectual superiority, and indifference to the inevitable reaction against the same even by so many of their own, which seems to predominate what remains of this once proud party today.

The ICG believes there must be a home, even if it is to be a temporary one, for the many sincere people who can no longer abide the company of the types who reign amid the ruins of the house of New Labour. Such people deserve better than to be consigned, fuming but powerless, to the sidelines of local politics.

We are now talking to several of such people. I repeat my appeal to those who still haven't to get in touch and to work in an organised way, if separately, with others who similarly aspire to restore some decency and honour to our local political debate.

Independent community action is the key to freezing out the BNP - but don't tell the politicians!

Old mucker of mine though he may be, I can understand why there are people who would want to throw eggs at British National Party Chairman Nick Griffin. Denounced for years as the leader of a party which can trace its genealogy directly back - via the National Front, John Tyndall's Greater Britain Movement and Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement - to Arnold Leese, the man who first conceived of gas chambers as the solution to the "problem" of Jewish people living in the world and who rejected Sir Oswald Mosley for his moderation, Griffin is now one of two men representing the BNP at the European Parliament.

The problem with Tuesday's egg-throwing protest of course, quite apart from the public order problem it presented, was not only that it allowed Griffin to emerge as the poor innocent victim making a stand for free speech against an intolerant political establishment, but also that he was granted airtime to talk about the egg throwing which he would otherwise have spent having to explain his confused and contradictory policies.

Rather than allowing him the opportunity to explain to the world why his "non-racist" party refuses to admit non-white members, or how it defines "Britishness" according to skin pigmentation rather than place of birth or length of residence, Nick Griffin was able not only to present himself as the champion of democracy and free speech, but even to implicate the three major parties in the egg-throwing protest by virtue of the fact they have given in-principle support to the organisation he alleges to have been responsible for it.

As such there can be little doubt that this exhibition, provoked as it may have been by the powerful call of a justified indignation, came across to most as a display of petulance and an own-goal of not inconsiderable proportions.

But own-goals are what the thing once known as the "Labour movement" has become rather good at. Let us not forget that in both the North West and Yorkshire & Humber the number of votes received by the BNP actually decreased. In both cases the BNP was able to scrape home as a direct consequence of traditional Labour voters, embittered by the betrayal and arrogance of their elected representatives, staying away in protest.

As a result of Labour's failure the rest of us are compelled to share the humiliation of having sent two men to Europe to make common cause with all manner of madmen and lunatics, with all the taxpayer-funded financial benefits that will bring to themselves and their organisations.

But if the failure today is Labour's, then at other times and in other places it will be someone else's. The cyclical nature of British politics is such that the big parties take it for granted that they will have their years in the limelight and their periods in the wilderness. Who is to say that after a spell in governement it will not next time be Conservative voters who are sitting at home sulking, while the BNP sends its people to Brussels on the strength of the votes of three percent of those on the Register of Electors?

Allegiance to the big political parties, allegiances which once were handed down from father to son and which centred around whole communities, are breaking down. There is no longer any clear ideological water separating the main protagonists, and it is not today a contradiction in terms to speak of a working-class Conservative or a "socialist" millionaire. With the advance of internet technology which creates a more level playing field between those with the resources to print and distribute millions of leaflets and those without, smaller parties are becoming less small. At last Thursday's Euro elections nearly 43% of those who voted in the United Kingdom placed their cross next to the name of a party outside of the big three.

In consideration of all this, those who would have us believe that the big established parties are our only defence against the relentless onward march of fascism are short changing us. A few more votes for UKIP or the Green Party in the North West and Yorkshire & Humber would have kept both successful BNP candidates out of Europe. Big party politics didn't protect us, it failed us.

In the London Borough of Hounslow we have six political groups on the local authority where once there were two. Our own, the Independent Community Group (ICG), holds six seats and with it the balance of power on the council. In the community we talk about the issues that local people want to talk about. We get things done. With 1,500 members spread out largely over two wards signed up to a program of positive community action, radical but outspokenly anti-racist, imaginative, unconventional and people-centred there is no space in which the BNP or any other racist party could successfully operate.

And yet this is the Politics That Dare Not Speak Its Name. A popular anti-fascist blog on which I frequently post only ever blocks my contributions when I dare to suggest that it is the community itself, not the Labour Party, to which we should be looking in the fight against fascism.

The concept is not restricted to my own neighbourhood. There are residents' groups and action parties springing up all around the place which strike the same chord as we do with voters who are fed up the mainstream politicians and their parties. They are organic, supported and often joined by those whom conventional politics could never reach, and are fairly much insulated against the ebb and flow of political trends. There is not the slightest shadow of a doubt in my mind that they are, by some considerable margin, the most effective defence against organised fascism taking hold in our communities.

The problem for us for the moment is that, anti-fascism nothwithstanding, we still have more eggs thrown at us than the leader of the BNP does.

If you don't hate, don't vote for my old mate

If you are like me you will be underwhelmed by the imminence of the European Elections which are to take place on June 4th. I haven't even thought about who I might be voting for yet, and if one considers that I'm actually involved in politics on a day to day basis then what does that say for the sense of excitement that the contest must have induced in most other people?

With the recent revelations about MPs' expense claims, the public can be forgiven for being unenthusiastic about any of the main parties. To paraphrase the old poster slogan, wouldn't it be funny if they called an election and nobody turned up?

Sadly, uninspiring though the established politicans may seem or indeed be, not turning out to vote may have far graver consequences than electing some undeserving bounty hunter of whatever political hue. Under the d'Hondt system of Proportional Representation that is to be used for the purpose of allocating seats, any party that achieves more than a stated minimum percentage of votes in any given region will have at least one member elected to the European Parliament.

Even in less cynical times, British voters on the whole never cared have too much who is elected to Brussels. At the previous two Euro Elections, also conducted under PR, a large protest vote went respectively to the Green Party and to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). What is significant is that neither party was particularly in the ascendancy at the time when they achieved their success. They were just in the right place at the right time when the British voter had the opportunity to register a protest.

The party which finds itself in a similar position today is the British National Party (BNP). As an ex-member of the National Front myself (a party in which many of the current BNP leaders, including the Chairman Nick Griffin, cut their political teeth) I have been studying the BNP's recent fortunes at close quarters. Having exploded onto the scene from relative obscurity a few years ago, the BNP has hovered steadily at around its current level for the last few years. Whilst is hasn't imploded in the sensational manner of the National Front at the 1979 General Election, it has flatlined somewhat, with the odd victory being celebrated but at least as many losses being quietly recorded.

Anybody who takes reassurance from this that the BNP will not present a major threat on June 4th, as some anti-racists seem to have done, is a fool. The general public do not know about the internal issues that trouble the BNP, nor will they have a sophisticated handle on its recent election results. The simple fact is that the BNP, like the Greens and UKIP before them, are the ones who are strategically poised to take advantage of the low voter turnout and the wave of quite understandable disillusionment that is sweeping the country at the moment.

In a certain respect as observers go I am in a unique position. It may be nearly twenty years since I abandoned the ideology (or more precisely the ideologies, for they changed like the wind) that I had pursued along with my former NF comrades back in the 1980s, but I have seen many of the current BNP leaders and their methods at close quarters. Along with one or two others I actually pioneered the electoral strategy that much later brought the BNP its limited successes.

Although he is older, bigger and has one eye fewer than he did when I knew him, the Nick Griffin I see on Newsnight and the equally slick performer who graces our various news bulletins is the same guy that I have enjoyed many a curry and a beer with, visited at his home, been entertained by his family (and he by mine) and talked politics and strategy with on countless occasions. Because I believe I always got along well with Nick Griffin and because our parting was political rather than personal, I have difficulty seeing in him the swivel-eyed monster of traditional anti-fascist folklore. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that the election of BNP MEPs on June 4th would be an unmitigated disaster for our community.

As an NF activist in the 1980s one of my pet hates was the media. No matter what the NF did any coverage received, as I saw it then, was hostile and inaccurate. It was so unfair. Worse than that, it was a plot. A Jewish plot. The possiblity that the complexities of the obscure and irrational ideology that I followed in those days might have been innocently misunderstood was not to be contemplated in the black and white world of the fanatic. The whole world was against us. They were wrong, and we alone were right.

And so it is that, rather than rely upon media interpretation to inform my opinion of the BNP today, my instinct is to look at the publications and the public pronouncements of the BNP itself. In recent years the BNP has gone to a lot of trouble trying to remodel itself as a legitimate and mainstream, if still very right wing, political party. It has dropped its lunatic commitment to "the compulsory repatriation of all non-white immigrants along with their dependents and descendants" and has instead adopted an ostensibly more reasonable policy of "voluntary repatriation". It isn't about race any more guv, it's only about numbers.

I giggle slightly wickedly when I read about all this, because having been there amongst the people involved I know the perpetual juggling act that Nick Griffin will have been forced by his own "conversion" to the BNP's new "Civic Nationalist" values to perform, reassuring his own loyal followers that he remains privately "of the faith" whilst simultaneously trying to impress the wider world that he is a changed man. It isn't easy, and the reason it isn't easy is because it isn't honest.

I believe it was this dichotomy which backed Nick Griffin recently to into an ideological corner, compelling him to spell out the old racist values that still underpin the "new" BNP. Speaking to the BBC, he declared that Asian Britons and black Britons "do not exist" and that people from African-Caribbean backgrounds and Asian backgrounds should be regarded as "racial foreigners", irrespective of whether they arrived yesterday or whether their ancestors have lived in the UK for generations. Somehow Nick Griffin and the BNP still insist on trying to square this with their protestation that they are not a racist party.

It is vital that voters who may be disillusioned with the mainstream understand that the BNP are not a benign protest party. People have every right to be discontented in the current climate. It is perfectly legitimate to question the size of the population and the various social consequences of excessive immigration. But the BNP's concerns, as evidenced by Nick Griffin's comments, are not about numbers, nor for that matter about jobs, housing, education nor anything else of that kind. They are about race. Just as they were when I was involved with the far right. All that has changed, essentially, is the packaging.

So if you are of the belief that the hard-working, friendly and decent family living next door to you, born in the UK of Asian parents or decended from Asian grandparents but thoroughly Anglicised, cannot be British due to an accident of birth - or If you believe that the black guy who drinks in your pub and speaks with a London accent and goes to watch football is not as good as you, or the same as you, because his grandfather came to England on a boat from Trinidad to work on the London buses - then the British National Party is maybe the party you should be voting for.

But if your concerns are merely those that we all share, especially at a time of economic privation, or if you are simply angry that so many of our "leaders" seem to more content with filling their faces and living like kings while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet, then there are easier ways of making your protest than by voting for a supposedly "non-racist" party that by its own admission judges people's Britishness according to skin pigmentation.

The beauty of the d'Honst system is that, just as it makes it easier for extremist parties to gain a foothold in our political institutions, so it also provides us with an easy means of keeping them out. Just vote for someone else. Anyone else. If none of the big parties float your boat at the moment there will be plenty of green parties, yellow parties, purple parties, rainbow alliances and Baron Bucketheads putting their fortunes to the test. A vote for one of them will do just as nicely to keep the BNP out.

If you vote for the BNP and it gains seats at Brussels on June 4th you will have done more than register a protest. You will have handed an openly racist party hundreds of thousands of pounds in funding which effectively comes with every Euro seat. The knot you tied in the establishment's shoelaces as a lesson may prove very difficult indeed to undo.

Even if you are as uninterested in the Euro elections as I am, and as uninspired by the large majority of the people who inhabit or seek to inhabit the European Parliament on our behalf, it is in the interests of our strong and united local community that you go out and vote. The Sunday Sport Party might yet see power.

Goodbye, nothing to say

If they were ever to introduce tolls for our roads I would find myself investing in a season ticket for the M3.

Sticking with our usual policy of little, cheap and often when it comes to our family holidays (being a community councillor is not conducive to disappearing for a fortnight at a time) the Andrews household, accompanied on this occasion by my mother and father, spent the weekend just gone at Landguard Holiday Park in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, returning on Monday evening.

Then, the very next day, it was back down the motorway to Bournemouth for the Local Government Association (LGA) Annual Conference, which is where I am as I write.

In an earlier article I spoke of how Kevin Maguire, the Political Editor of the Daily Mirror, had made an inaccurate statement about me in one of his columns implying that I still held the same views which motivated me as a member of the National Front back in the 1970s and 80s, which as anybody who knows me at all will confirm I do not. In that article I conceded the possibility that Maguire had made an innocent mistake, and in order to enable him to reflect upon the falsity of his words I forwarded the contents of my blog article to him. Needless to say I have not heard a word from him since, neither an apology for misrepresenting me nor even an acknowledgement.

As a consequence Maguire has been admitted to my Deliberate Liars Club, where he takes pride of place alongside fellow journalist and Lying-Scumbag-in-Chief Andrew Gilligan of the London Evening Standard.

Those who read that article will recall my admittedly mischievous suggestion that I might challenge Maguire over his remarks at the LGA Conference, where he was listed as a speaker at a plenary event on the subject of "Homes fit for local people".

Now to be perfectly truthful, I never really did have any intention of raising what is essentially a private matter between myself and Maguire at an open forum. It would have been hugely disrespectful of the other 250-300 people attending the session who had gone along to listen to a debate about housing. Nevertheless I did attend the session, strategically positioning myself in a row of seats all of my own at the top of the meeting where I was likely to stand out before any properly-sighted individual seated at the top table.

As soon as the session began I was disappointed to discover that Sir Bob Kerslake (to whom no offence is intended) was to be the only actual speaker and that Maguire had been relegated to a mere member of the six-person panel behind him. Unlike the other panel members, he didn't even receive a personal introduction from the Chair.

Nevertheless I couldn't resist a bit of fun, so I raised my hand and was eventually given the microphone. Congratulating Sir Bob on his speech and expressing my pleasure at seeing "an old Hounslow boy doing so well for himself" (as Chief Executive at the London Borough of Hounslow in the early 1990s it would be fair to say he was not a particularly strict observer of the statutory requirement for senior officers not to engage in political activity, but these were after all the bad old, pre-ICG days of cronyism run rampant), I introduced myself by name and office in a manner which must have left Maguire in no doubt as to who I was. Then, after asking an innocuous question (which, in the event, only Sir Bob made any attempt to answer), I shared my hope that "those on the panel who haven't spoken yet will let us have their views on this subject".

Unfortunately it was not to be. The vaunted speaker turned panel member rose from the table at the end of the 75-minute session without having uttered a single, solitary word. When, as the audience began to make its way out of the impressive Windsor Hall, I headed towards the stage in the hope of engaging Maguire in a few minutes of private conversation, he hurriedly turned around and found somebody else to speak to. Not only a conscious liar, it would appear, but a moral coward to boot.

Tomorrow David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Hazel Blears will be addressing the Conference, then it's off home for a presentation to the Heston & Cranford Area Committee.

And on Friday morning, for the first time in ages, I am minded to buy a copy of The Sun.

We meet at last?

I'm back from Harrogate and eager to take up where I left off but my first offering is more on the antics of my friends in the New Labour Party, I'm afraid.

When it was first announced, in May 2006, that the Conservative and Community Groups would be going into coalition to form an administration at the London Borough of Hounslow, the response from the surviving remnants of the previous administration was both predictable and entirely in character.

Having themselves walked voluntarily into opposition in preference to having to work with councillors from any Group other than their own, New Labour embarked immediately upon a clumsy but flatteringly high-profile campaign to bring the new administration down. Their instrument of choice was myself, or rather my much-publicised, well-known and unambiguously renounced former membership of the far-Right National Front back in the 1970s and 1980s.

The campaign began in the usual way, with letters to the local newspapers and postings on internet forums announcing their "new discovery" about my political history. However it soon became clear that the local Conservative Group were made of sterner stuff than Labour had previously realised and would not take fright and buckle under the strain of the resultant local publicity - which in itself was underwhelming due to the fact that it had already been done to death and was no longer considered newsworthy - and the dirty tricks machine was forced to raise its game in an effort to persuade Conservative Central Office to intervene.

And so the big guns were called in. Embarrassed and angered by the incompetent blundering of the Labour Group in Hounslow, which had voted unanimously to approve a new Executive which included two members of the Community Group (as it did again this year, having abstained in 2007), Hounslow's two alleged Members of Parliament Ann and Alan Keen wrote to the Council Leader announcing effectively that they would not co-operate with the new administration for as long as I remained a member of the Executive. When this absurd and frankly irrelevant threat was laughed off with the contempt it deserved (we had never expected the Keens to work with us anyway - let's face it, they didn't do a great deal to help their own administration!), Ann Keen made a rare parliamentary intervention to ask the then Prime Minister Tony Blair to condemn the Conservative Group on Hounslow Council for going into coalition with us, a request which he quite deftly side-stepped.

Armed with the news of her question to the Prime Minister Mrs. Keen continued to pursue her campaign with a zeal which her long-suffering constituents, many of whom have to go to extraordinary lengths just to get her or a member of her staff to even acknowledge a letter or an e-mail, can only have looked upon with envy. Next stop was the regional and national press.

Understandably the Labour's Party's own Tribune newspaper was first into the fray, the bolshie reporter interrupting my holiday with a message on my voicemail demanding that I furnish him with an explanation for my membership of the new Executive. I didn't return his call - it's not as though I didn't know where he was likely to be coming from, and he didn't disappoint.

The piece in the Tribune then in turn provided the hook for stories in other, wider-circulation rags. It was perhaps inevitable that the first to report for duty would be the completely unscrupulous guttersnipe Andrew Gilligan at the London Evening Standard.

Despite the fact that the Standard is essentially pro-Conservative Gilligan had already, in the run-up to the local elections, acquired a reputation with the ICG as a man with a suspiciously close (and one-sided) relationship with the Keens and who was pretty much indifferent to the truth or otherwise of what he wrote in his political columns, at least where we were concerned.

As well as covering the ludicrous "Reichstag Fire"* (as the alleged "firebomb attack" on a rubbish sack belonging to an Isleworth Labour Party candidate just before the publishing deadline of the election-day issue of the local newspaper has affectionately come to be known) as though it were without question the work of the ICG, during that campaign Gilligan had also wilfully repeated the New Labour lie that I had a criminal conviction for a racially-motivated assualt on a black police officer. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I wrote at the time to both Gilligan and his editor to point out that this allegation was untrue.

This didn't prevent him from repeating the accusation, which he now knew to be false, as part of Mrs. Keen's campaign against the new Executive (when, having done so, this low-grade piece of human manure had the effrontery to call me last June to request a quote for a third hatchet-job on the ICG which he was planning to write at Mrs. Keen's behest, he was offered a short piece of advice pertaining to sex and travel along with an assurance that any factual inaccuracies contained in his article would meet with a legal response. The article never appeared).

If the reason for Gilligan's apparent subservience to the Keens remains a mystery, there was nothing mysterious about the willingness of the Daily Mirror to lend their campaign a helping hand. The Mirror is an openly pro-New Labour paper which seems to have readily forgiven its political masters for their fraudulent war in Iraq, a war which has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and which to its great credit the newspaper opposed at the time). Giving pride of place in his full-page column to Labour's problems in Hounslow, Assistant Political Editor Kevin Maguire announced to the tabloid's readership that I was "a former member of the National Front and a Holocaust denier".

The word which stood out for me was the second "a", which seemed to suggest that whilst Maguire acknowledged that my membership of the National Front was something which belonged to the past, my denial of the Holocaust (which comes as part of the deal with senior membership of a fascist party such as the NF) belonged to the present, which it most certainly doesn't.

Why mention all this more than two years on? Well, while in Conference mode I decided yesterday morning to peruse the agenda for the forthcoming LGA Annual Conference in Bournemouth and discovered that on the afternoon of the second day there will be a plenary session on the topic of "Homes fit for local people". What caught my eye first of all was that the session will be chaired by Sir Bob Kerslake (to whom I was introduced in Harrogate), who is currently the Chief Executive for the Homes and Communities Agency but who also, slightly before my time in office, was once the Chief Executive of the London Borough of Hounslow.

Reading on through the list of participants involved in this session I was even more interested to see the name of one Kevin Maguire, yes he of the Daily Mirror. These kind of sessions seem to attract a modest attendance, and there is every chance that somebody in the audience with his hand raised will get the opportunity to ask a question once the speeches are done.

As we have seen above, that Gilligan is a conscious liar is a matter of demonstrable fact. But did Maguire really mean to misrepresent me in the way he did or was his just a completely innocent act of typographical clumsiness?

Seems I may get the opportunity to ask him!


* In February 1933 the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was subject to a serious arson attack. Adolf Hitler, who had only shortly before been elected Chancellor of Germany, blamed his Communist opponents and used the fire as the justification for a policy of repression against the Communists. Most historians today believe the Nazis themselves to have been responsible for the fire.

On Community Cohesion - the Conference speech in summary

I have been requested by a visitor to this blog, a fellow councillor, to post the contents of my speech to the A Window On Extremism conference, which was hosted by the London Borough of Hounslow in November 2007 and which I addressed alongside Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action in the House of Lords. Whilst to my knowledge the event was not recorded on video, I retain my notes and am happy to summarise them below.

The Cantle Report, commissioned by the new administration at the London Borough of Hounslow and on which the Conference is based, deals both with religious fundamentalism and with the potential threat from the far-Right. It is important however that we recognise that the two are not mirror images of one another. All the same they do have two important factors in common. The first is they each are the product of disengagement and a feeling that those for whom they speak are disadvantaged or disciminated against. The second is that they result in misery for the wider community.

My own specialist interest is in the activities of the far-Right (I need to point out at this juncture that the term "far-Right" is not one which all my colleagues within the coalition feel comfortable with. Being Right-wing in a political sense and being racist are not in any way the same thing. Nevertheless it is a term with which people are familiar and I use it here out of that familiarity, and out of laziness). This is for two very good reasons. The first is that whilst religious fundamentalism is perhaps more evident, its profile especially high whenever a bombing or such atrocity is committed in its name, it is the far-Right which has the potential to present the bigger threat to good community relations in our society in the long term.

The second is that I personally have a history of far-Right involvement, having been a member of the National Front for twelve years between 1977 and 1989, and of a locally-based grouplet affiliated to the International Third Position for two years after that. Whilst I regret my past associations and assert that my views today are as far removed from those I held two decades ago as they could possibly be, I draw upon them and the unique understanding which they give me in my work today.

The young people in our survey who felt that the far-Right was potentially a bigger threat to our community than religious fundamentalism were in my opinion correct. However at this moment in time the actual membership of far-Right parties is tiny and fragmented. The current membership of the BNP, as declared to the Electoral Commission, is around a third of that which the National Front had in its heyday. And yet the BNP has a number of elected councillors, something the NF never managed to achieve, and can call upon the votes of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, in the large majority of cases people who wouldn't contemplate for a moment actually joining a racist organisation. It is clear that these votes are a cry for help. If we are not prepared to talk to these everyday people and listen to their concerns then we should not be surprised if they turn to those who are.

So we need to be engaging the frustrated, sometimes misled, sometimes excluded white working-class community. We need to be pragmatic. We need to recognise that there are times to talk, and times not to talk. We should not mainstream racism, but at the same time we must be prepared to listen to and engage those genuine concerns which it exploits.

It is this pragmatism which should inform our dealings with the far-Right. Being pragmatic does not mean that we abandon fundamental principles. But where we take a position we should do so for a reason, and not at the behest of some mantra chanted idiot-style but the logic behind it only half understood.

One of the slogans which anti-racists were very fond of during my time as a far-Right activist was "No Platform". It meant that under no circumstances would we legitimise racism by engaging its proponents in debate of any kind.

"No Platform" undoubtedly has its merits. I would not have been happy to have had representatives of the BNP or NF sitting at the Conference, far less sitting at the platform and making a speech. That would have been quite absurd. But I would like us to consider the case of Maureen Stowe, a former BNP councillor for Burnley in the North West of England.

Maureen Stowe was elected to the Council in Burnley on a BNP ticket. But not long after being elected she discovered to her horror that the BNP was a racist party, and severed all links with it. She went on to serve with distinction as an independent councillor working for the benefit of the whole community. It may seem difficult to believe that somebody could be so naive as to stand, and be elected, on a BNP ticket without realising that it was a party with racist views, but the fact is the party is small and it is clearly so desperate to find candidates that it will put up people from the fringes, people who don't know what is going on, people whose understanding of politics is limited. Maureen Stowe, it would seem (I have never met her so my information is second hand), is a basically decent person who was misled and has now seen the error of her ways and has gone on to do good things. To give credit where it is due I believe it was the Labour Party in Burnley who helped her in this process. Clearly a policy of "No Platform" directed at somebody like Ms. Stowe would have been counter-productive. With nowhere to turn and no way out, she may well have just become progressively more deeply involved with the BNP and with its ideology. By being pragmatic, anti-racists in Burnley had a result. So it is important that we tailor our strategy according to the nature of the problem. One size doesn't necessarily fit all.

Another area which calls for clarity is where equalities and diversities fit into the Community Cohesion agenda. It is often suggested that the practice of celebrating differences undermines the objective of trying to build a more united, cohesive community. And in some cases it clearly does.

In my experience there are broadly speaking two schools of thought. At their most polarised, what they amount to is this. One school of thought has it that if ethnicity and culture are simply not mentioned, any divisions or problems associated with them just cease to exist. If we just pretend that everybody is the same, with the same life opportunities, then that state of perfection will axiomatically come instantly into being.

The other, conversely, is the victim mentality. As a member of a minority I will always be discriminated against, I will never be accepted by others, and only by legislating to protect my rights can the extent of my misery and hardship be minimised.

Both of these schools of thought, in my view, run contrary to the spirit of Community Cohesion.

Diversity is a fact of life. People look different, dress differently, eat different foods, pray to different gods, or pray to the same god in different ways. This is not to be despised or resisted. It would be a boring world indeed if everybody looked the same, acted the same and thought in the same way. The key to Community Cohesion is in accepting and respecting diversity, whilst subordinating it in the larger scheme of things to the much more important qualities which we have in common, to our common humanity against which all our differences are inconsequential.

On the other side of the coin if we want people to be the same then we must ensure that people are treated the same. It is a necessary prerequisite of Community Cohesion that everybody has the same life opportunities. We cannot say to people that they must be like us, and then deny them the opportunities which we have. We cannot expect people to buy into a concept of "Britishness" while there are people, and institutions, that refuse to accept them as British with all the rights and duties which that entails.

I have long had grave concerns about how we monitor opportunity. We frequently hear the term "BME" - Black and Minority Ethnic. I handle reports which tell me that we have some percentage or another of "BMEs" working in a particular department or using a particular service. What the hell does that mean? Where, on this planet, is BME land?

We have scores of different ethnic groups, speaking over a hundred languages, in this borough. Some of them have different problems to others. More recent arrivals quite often have difficulties in employment, in education and so forth. Some of the more established minority groups, though they may once have experienced the same difficulties, maybe don't experience them today. By lumping all these people together as "BMEs" there is a danger that we just mask a problem.

In order that we can create the conditions for Community Cohesion we need to tackle discrimination and inequality where it truly exists. We need to tackle hate-crime head-on. In Hounslow we are now doing this proactively through Hounslow Against Racial Harassment, a multi-agency partnership driven by a truly excellent team of officers who it is my absolute pleasure and good fortune to work alongside. There must be no tolerance of hate-crime whatsoever. Our watchword must be: "Where there is ignorance we educate, where there is hatred we legislate".

It is also vitally important that we take race out of party politics. Sadly it is our experience that it is not only the far-Right parties who are prepared to fan the flames of racism for political advantage. There should be an agreement between the democratic political parties and groups not to do this. We should not be talking up racism, smearing people and frightening people in the quest for their votes. The well-being of our community is too important to be placed at risk in this way. If you are responsible for doing this and you have any decency in you, please stop it now.

These are some initial thoughts. They are not exhaustive, they may not even be right. But we need to have the debate, and if this serves as a launchpad for that debate then it will have achieved its objective.