“ARYAN SUPREMACY: Keep England White” may seem fairly tame as a slogan compared to most the racist bilge you come across these days but when it’s tattooed onto the neck of the 6ft primate sat opposite you on the 6.18 London Bridge to Selhurst train, it has a swift and very profound impact on your bowel movements.
And if it has that sort of laxative effect on me – a ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ male – you can only imagine how the sareed Asian teenager down the carriage must feel.
The capital’s streets aren’t exactly the ‘rivers of blood’ prophesied during the sixties by Enoch Powell but for many immigrants petrol bomb attacks, indiscriminate beatings and verbal intimidation are as much a part of everyday life as popping round the corner for a pint of milk.
Even more sinister was the recent election in Tower Hamlets of BNP councillor Derek Beackon. Forget the ‘lunatic fringe’, here was a sizeable majority in a traditional Labour stronghold voting for a party that openly espouses ethnic cleansing in the none-too-cunningly disguised form of forced repatriation.
HITTING A NERVE
It was against this background of growing hatred and fear, that Dublin photojournalist Leo Regan decided to spend two years shadowing a gang of young neo-Nazi skinheads round the UK, observing the British National Party’s unofficial footsoldiers at work, rest and –most chillingly –play.
The end product is Public Enemies, a book that prefers not to pass judgement on its subjects but instead gives them a generous supply of rope with which to hang themselves. Regan’s contentious decision to sit back and let the skinheads do the talking proves to be the right one. No amount of reasoned rhetoric could ever hope to damn the racists as effectively as their own words – even if it does make for distinctly unpleasant reading.
“You begin to hate them when you’re forced to mix with them. We’re not the same. We’re nowhere near the fucking same. It’s been proved they are an inferior, subhuman race. When you meet them in the street you feel their contempt, and vice versa.
Violence gets somewhere. You get listened to. You get attention and you get power. You get what you want through violence. If you go out and smash the enemy off the streets, who’s going to argue with you? Beating them. That’s a bigger victory than going for a march or anything.”
“I’ve received a lot of flak,” Regan admits, “for letting comments like that go into the book unchallenged but you’re never going to be able to combat racism unless you know where it’s coming from.
That’s the way these people think and if the Anti-Nazi League, Searchlight or anyone else reckons I’m wrong acknowledging the fact, fair enough, we’ll have to beg to differ. Ignoring a problem or merely driving it underground, doesn’t make it go away.”
So was the intention to let the fascists – and by association the British National Party – shoot themselves in the foot?
“As a photographer, the skinheads present a distilled visual image of racism. There can be no arguments, no hiding their beliefs behind a shirt and tie, these guys have it written – quite literally – on their foreheads. We’ve all seen pictures of skins marching and going on the rampage, so what I’ve tried to do is come at it from a different angle and show the face of the subject in close-up.
“Some people,” he continues, “can’t stomach that. They feel that by giving the Nazis any sort of coverage, you’re glamorising the cause and belittling the victims. It’s complex but my theory as to why they’re so uncomfortable dealing with racism is that an element of it strikes too close to home. It’s a human problem – we all have our prejudices, however minor – and when we see these violent images, there’s something about them which reminds us of our brothers and our sisters and ourselves. It hits a nerve.”
STARK REMINDER
British neo-Nazism is, by its very nature, a shadowy affair. Outsiders are treated with suspicion, if not outright steel toe-capped hostility, and Leo realised from the start that by moving in these circles, he was putting his personal safety on the line.
“They’re dangerous fucking people and I have no doubt that if I’d lied to them or misrepresented my intentions, I’d be talking to you now for a hospital bed. My initial entry point was approaching Ian Stewart and Skrewdriver and saying that I wanted to document the musical side of things. So, with their agreement, I started going from gig to gig, getting a crash course in frontline racism and making the contacts that eventually led me to the Milton Keynes skinheads I concentrate on in the book.
“I remember returning from my first Blood & Honour concert and thinking, ‘Jaysus, what the fuck was that!’. The tension and the threat of violence was overwhelming.”
With the close links that the BNP have allegedly forged with Loyalist paramilitary groups, did Leo feel that being Irish put him under an additional threat?
“Initially,” he confesses, “it was something that worried me but I had a major saving grace in their eyes – I’m white. Once they’d established I wasn’t a card carrying member of the IRA or a communist mole, they weren’t particularly bothered where I came from.
“There’s actually an Irish neo-Nazi band on the Blood & Honour circuit called Celtic Dawn who I got to meet one night after a gig. As usual, there’d been a fight and the police decided to march everyone from the venue and stick them on a train out to the suburbs. I found myself sat next to these guys from Ballymun who were effing and blinding about the Jews and how they were taking Ireland over. That’s something I discovered from day one, when these people don’t have a large concentration of immigrants to focus on, they target other minorities like the Jews or gypsies or homosexuals.
“We – the Irish – don’t have any reason to be smug or complacent about racism. I’ve seen Paddies come over to London and within a matter of weeks start roaring and screaming about ‘Niggers’ and ‘Pakis’. If we ever end up with a sizeable immigrant population ourselves, they’ll get as much stick as they do in the UK.”
As if it was needed, Leo received a stark reminder of just how mindlessly vicious the neo-Nazis can be when the Milton Keynes skins he’d befriended attacked a group of Asians, leaving one man unconscious on the pavement with serious head wounds.
“I’d gone to a gig with them in Hereford,” he explains, “and headed home straight afterwards. These lunatics, who earlier in the evening had sprayed me with tear gas, decided to stay on and wander round town, bumped into a half-a-dozen Asians and proceded to kick shit out of them.
“The first I heard of it was when one of the wives got onto me, in a dreadful state, going, ‘Leo, he’s got nobody to stand bail for him, you’ll have to do it’. Ordinarily, I’d have told her, ‘fuck off, no!’, but I’d spent over a year taking from them and felt that perhaps it was time to give something back. The bloke had pleaded guilty, he was definitely going to go to jail and I wanted to help his family. The Anti-Nazi League have homed in on this as proof that I’m a racist bastard myself and, well, I can see how it might look that way.”
What did the wives and girlfriends have to say about the attack?
“They were furious because it meant themselves and their kids were going to be left without a wage coming into the house. I thought that as their own lives had been thrown into such turmoil, they’d have at least some understanding of what the victims’ families were going through but they didn’t give a shite. And that was their typical response – ‘Oh, they’re only scum’. They didn’t register them as people or individuals.”
FROZEN OUT
What we’ve talked about so far are spontaneous acts of violence which, however abhorrent and indefensible, hardly add up to a cohesive political campaign. Where precisely do the British National Party fit into the scheme of things and was Leo ever aware of someone pulling the skinheads’ strings?
“They certainly move in the same circles as the BNP. When Derek Beackon was elected in Tower Hamlets, I checked back through my contact sheets and his was one of the faces that kept on cropping up at meetings and rallies. The skins identify with the BNP because their beliefs pretty much coincide and they can say, ‘look, there’s a proper political party who think the same way as
we do.’ David Irving fulfils the same function – he’s giving supposed intellectual and credence to their arguments. You see Irving’s books on a lot of shelves but they never look particularly well thumbed.
“At the same time, the more clued-up skinheads realise they’re being manipulated by the BNP and there’s resentment every time an election comes along and they’re suddenly frozen out for respectability’s sake.”
Having observed the neo-Nazis at such close quarters, has Leo come to any conclusions about why they behave the way they do?
“I was hoping to end up with nice neat little answers but, truth is, I haven’t a fucking clue what makes a person a racist. Some of the skinheads I met were thugs, pure and simple, while others honestly believe they’re the latest in a long line of great British patriots and nothing you say or do is going to change that.
“What I did learn,” he concludes, “is that a depressingly large number of indigenous Britons have no desire to mix or integrate with their immigrant neighbours. And I saw this at BNP rallies where little old ladies would come up and chat to the skinheads or stand on the pavement waving their Union Jacks. It could be your own mother and that’s disturbing.”
Leo Regan’s Public Enemies is priced £12.99 and published by Andre Deutsch.