Ridley Road, Jo Bloom, 2014, Weidenfield & Nicolson.
Ridley Road, BBC 1, 2021. Executive producer: Nicola Shindler.
The recent BBC TV series Ridley Road is based on the novel of the same name: both are fictional accounts of the real events of 1962. Colin Jordan’s National Socialism Movement (NSM) was one of various British fascist groups set up in the post-war years, following the demise of Oswald Mos ley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). Jordan’s group was built around the cult of Hitler with a nostalgia for beerhall demagoguery, parading and ‘sieg heiling’ which would be infantile were it not for the deadly thuggish aggression he launched against the Jewish community, notably in the East End of London. Opposition to the NSM determined that the fascists would not be allowed any space to appear on platforms or to distribute propaganda and would be met with disruption and force. This became urgent after the fire-bombing of a Jewish school in which one young man was killed and others badly burnt. The police were indifferent to the fascist attacks on the local community. The organisation at the centre of the fight-back was a Jewish group known as the 62 Group based in Ridley Road in Dalston Market, Hackney.
Into this factual account both novel and film interweave a love story in which a young woman from a conservative Jewish family in Manchester arrives in London to seek out the man she loves, who has disappeared. It emerges that he has infiltrated the NSM because he can ‘pass’ as a gentile and is collecting information from the inside. The heroine soon joins him inside Jordan’s group and the danger and romance escalate.
The 62 Group originated from the earlier 43 Group which was formed in 1946 (with 43 at the first meeting) by Jewish ex-service men who were outraged at the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Britain after the Second World War. Group members broke up far-right meetings, infiltrated fascist groups and attacked the fascists on the streets. The 43 Group was, in its turn, a repeat of the anti-fascist fighting in 1936 in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street, also in the East End of London. Those who turned out against a march by Mosley’s ‘blackshirts’ included communists, trade unionists and anarchists, many of them Jewish, but the battle was fought also against the Metropolitan Police sent in to protect the fascists.
Mosley’s turn to downright street violence was the end result of his failure in British politics, although he still retained broad support up to July 1939 – two months before Britain declared war on Germany. He held a ‘Britain First’ rally at the Earls Court Exhibition Hall on 16 July 1939, thought to have been the biggest indoor political rally in British history with a reported 30,000 attendees.
Aristocrat Oswald Mosley (1896-1980) had a most singular life; his first marriage in 1924 was attended by King George V and Queen Mary, and his second, in 1936, by Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda with Adolf Hitler as a guest of honour. He was both a Conservative and Labour Party MP and Cabinet member before he left mainstream politics and founded the BUF in 1932.
Mosley claimed to be a profound political strategist. He was influenced by the 1922 Italian fascist programme of Mussolini for dealing with mass unemployment and a collapsing national economy by bringing the capitalists under the firm control of a state-planned economy. Mosley’s Birmingham Memorandum called for the protection of British industries from ‘international finance’, the nationalisation of industry and a programme of public works to provide employment. Mosley claimed his programme would ‘obliterate class conflict and make the British economy healthy again’. It is believed that US President Roosevelt was inspired by ‘Mosley’s Memorandum’ in devising his New Deal programmes, launched between 1933 and 1939, to address the mass unemployment and crisis ridden economy of the Depression era.
The political intention of Mosley’s version of state monopoly capitalism was, like Hitler’s, to protect the capitalist system and destroy growing support for the Soviet Union among the working class. The Nazi regime conflated historic Christian antagonism to Judaism with war against Bolshevism, identifying the Jews of Europe as subversive agents of the Soviet Union.
Colin Jordan was obsessed with Nazism, its uniforms, symbols and violence. His National Socialist Movement, in contrast to Mosley’s organisation, had no political programme beyond racism, xenophobia and English nationalism. This largely holds true for the various White Supremacist groupings that exist in the US and Europe today and whose political agenda is quite adequately represented by the right wings of the Republican Party, the Conservative Party and the current leadership of Hungary and Poland.
Much of the Ridley Road action is set in a boutique hairdresser in the heart of London’s Soho, with mini- skirts, drinking and musical beats. We get an impression of parallel lives, the liberation of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ existing alongside the vicious old antagonism of East End anti-Semitism. The film adds additional material showing Jordan’s fascist attacks on the newly-arrived Caribbean community in London. As the black revolutionary George Jackson said of parallel lives, the US may be social democratic for the majority of the population but the US state is fascist as far as the black population is concerned.
The TV series extends the drama of the novel by moving the action to the country mansion loaned to Jordan by an aristocratic sympathiser where his troops are drilled and trained for action. The heroine has to escape with a case of incriminating documents so that a charge of importing small arms and ammunition from abroad can be brought against Jordan. Here the plot touches on reality again, because Jordan was charged and imprisoned for nine months in 1962 under the Public Order Act 1936 with attempting to set up a paramilitary force called the Spearhead, modeled on Nazi Stormtroopers.
The 62 Group won a decisive victory against the National Socialists by meeting ‘muscle against muscle’ and making it impossible for them to appear on the streets of the East End. It was a battle that had to be fought again in the 1980s when the National Front attempted to sell its paper attacking the Bangladeshi community in nearby Brick Lane. The permanent enemy, however, remains today. That is British state racism, with its agents in the Home Office and police force still implementing racist laws and suppressing protest.
Ridley Road the novel ends with the happy reunion and marriage of the lovers who plan for a future together in London. The TV progamme, in contrast, concludes with the unexplained departure of the couple on a flight to Tel Aviv. This distorts the reclaimed history of the anti-fascist Jewish activity that took place and was unrelated to any Zionist dimension. The political message that racist thuggery must be resisted everywhere it appears, by violence if necessary, is diluted by the changed ending and weakens the final words that appear on the screen – that the fight against fascism must continue.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! holds regular street stalls and speakouts in Ridley Road market against state racism. We invite readers to join us.
Susan Davidson
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 285, December 2021/January 2022
