I reckon that’s Terry Fitzpatrick all right.

Look over recent letters pages of the East London Advertiser – the style is unmistakable. In a recent letter to the Black newspaper, The Voice, he boasts: ‘In 1974 ..we organised the Bengali Housing Action Group and organised a massive squatting campaign which took over hundreds of vacant council owned properties and forced the GLC and LBTH into a climb-down that led to the current Bangladeshi community in the East End.’

Prior to this ‘climbdown’ the GLC had the perfectly sensible policy of dispersing Asians in their housing offers – they wished to avoid creating a ‘ghetto’ situation (which perhaps Mr Fitzpatrick enjoyed being ‘the king’ of – although these days he complains that his contribution to ghetto creation has been whitewashed out somewhat).

He also claims to have organised groups of ‘vigilantes’ that organised defence and counter-attacks on known racist individuals and pubs. In other words, he helped defend the Asians of those days against attacks by white racists. Well, good for him. Very commendable. But I wonder how enthusiastic he would be now about defending white people (especially the elderly) in the East End who are forced to live in the Bangladeshi ghetto he says he helped to create.

When I say ‘forced’ I mean that if you are poor then it isn’t very easy to move. Of course, if you battered almost senseless on a regular basis and your home is routinely set alight by petrol-bombers, the council might consider re-housing you. But, by and large, the numbers of white people living in East End social housing who would like to move out of the ‘ghetto’ that Mr Fitzpatrick admits he helped create vastly exceeds supply of available housing elsewhere.

Mr Fitz himself actually has a nice place overlooking the park in gentrified part of South Hackney. And jolly good luck to him too. It’s good that he has made a success of his life.

But just as some people in Barking resent’the Bard of Barking’ Billy Bragg travelling up from his Dorset village specifically to warn them against voting BNP, there are poor white people trapped in a violent Asian East End ghetto who might not take kindly to this lifelong politico boasting that he helped create the sort of East End that exists today.

And – not content with having helped to ruin a decent white working class area – even today apparently (as his letter in The Voice continues) he is involved in ’surveillance and infiltration’ activities against democratically-elected BNP councillors in Barking.

Just like Billy Bragg it seems he wants (in effect) to tell Barking people who they should and should not vote for. Why? He doesn’t live in Barking. Why can’t he let fairly-elected representatives just get on with their job? If they screw up they screw up.

All inexperienced councillors make mistakes, but as BNP councillors gain experience they’ll become more and more effective representives of the people.

“How Journalism Works” – a one-act play by Parma Violets

INT – NEWSPAPER OFFICE – DAY

A young TRAINEE rushes in with the latest dispatch from the paper’s STAR REPORTER. His EDITOR looks on, nonplussed.

TRAINEE: Boss! Boss! Steve just wrote in with this amazing story – “man bites dog”!

EDITOR: “Man bites dog”? I’ll have you know, young whippersnapper, that the human population of this great country is nonviolent and has no links to biting, unlike the bite-happy dog lobby who are running this nation into the ground. Go on, geroff, come back when you’ve got something more newsworthy.

TRAINEE: Sorry, boss. I suppose I just don’t understand the basic principles of journalism.

EDITOR: Well, neither do I. This is the Daily Express, after all.

END.

What would you do when Copeland,s bombs were going off in London and you thought that somewhere in your files there might be a photo.

A long list of suspects was sent to the security forces by Searchlight and Copeland,s name was on the list. He was not a prime suspect and was in fact in the last half a dozen or so.

After he was arrested it turned out that in the Searchlight files was a phote of Tyndall the founder of the BNP standing next to Copeland when Tyndall was hit on the head with a brick outside the Swan at Stratford in September 1997.

If I am not Terry Fitz then I am not the Terry Fitzpatrick who knocked out Chris Harman on the 12th of June 1976 on a demo against racial attacks in Brick Lane.

Small world job again. I was working with the Bangladeshi community in the Bengali Housing Action Group. Remember “The King Of The Ghetto” with Tim Roth playing me?

The SWP tried to take the whole thing over and when, as the chief steward, I and the Bangladeshi stewards put a stop to the opportunism an outraged Harman ran at me waving his fists around. I had my Amateur Boxing Licence removed the same year when it was revealed in court, yes I have conviction for knocking out a Trot, that I had not had a medical for two years and should not, I suppose, legally have belted Harman.

Chairwoman, I have a long memory. And unlike you am not a party hack.

Leon, Shalom.

I aint Jewish. The part about disinformation is right on, hence posting an alternative view of Searchlight (I’ve read similar stuff over the years and known people who’ve worked for them). I’m always suspicious an organisation that works that closely with the state even if it’s, on the face of it, in work I agree with.

Your post originated from Larry O’Hara. Gerry Gable and two other men were arrested in 1963 gaining access to the flat of David Irving by posing as Post Office technicians.

The fashionable view of Irving is that he started out as a more or less mainstream historian and then moved further and further to the right. He has always been a nazi and a racist

When he was a student at Imperial College in London in the fifties he volunteered to produce the Rag Mag, all on his own. When the student’s union asked what was happening, it was a couple of days before they needed it, they had to break into the room he was using and found that the mag was a massive anti black and anti semitic diatribe.

I pesonally do not think that actions like that are to be criticised. I certainly hope not, I have been involved in too many of them myself! Leon, beware of disinformation. I think that you have said that you are Jewish. When I do the second part of the UAF story I will deal with the anti semitism and the Jewish conspiracies.

Interesting that you should mention Stuart Christie. By a strange a strange quirk of fate he and I where both in Spain as teenagers in early 1964. He ended up with a death penalty. I got back to Sussex and ended up on probation!

That, however, is another story.

Terry Fitz

Let me begin by giving a little bit of history, that’s the trouble when you get to my age all you talk about is the past.

UAF was a backroom deal done between a Trotskist group called Socialist Action and the ANL/SWP. SA are a very shadowy outfit to which most of Livingstone’s advisors belong, they control a number of front organisations one of which is the National Assembly Against Racism. This was lavishly funded by the tax payers of London but effectively ceased to function several years ago. The funds have been coming all the time though and just disappear into the pockets of the leadership. The two head honchos were Lee Jasper and Kumar Murshid. The wheels started to come off when Murshid was arrested and charged in connection with a fraud on Tower Hamlets Council involving the best part of a million quid. He was eventually cleared because he had covered his tracks well but it didn’t do very much for the reputation of NAAR.

The ANL were well past their sell by date, the tactics of waving lollipops and chanting “Nazi scum off our streets ” were finished as increasing the Nazi scum were running a very sophisticated operation which didn’t involve marching on the streets.

The NAAR had no activities, no membership and no credibility but through Livingstone they had access to Trades Union money. The Unions wouldn’t touch the ANL with a bargepole becuase of the attempts by the SWP to take over trades union branches and the general shit stirring that they get up to.

Myself and other people did work with the ANL on various anti NF activities around the country and I got on well with the then national organiser Julie Waterson. Although a Trot she wasn’t bigotted like a lot of them and as long as we stayed off politics outside of anti fascism everything was ok.

With the demise of the NF the ANL ran out things to do and it was at this time that the deal was done to form UAF. NAAR could get money and the SWP could order its branches around the country become the local UAF

There had been no love lost between the two groups mainly over the NAAR insistence on “black leadership”. This is part of the “all whites are racist theory” formulated by the “Jasperites”. Julie Waterson was clearly a problem so at the insistence of NAAR the SWP leadership sacked her and parachuted in a complete dickhead called Weyman Bennet who is black. The NAAR put up Sabby Dhalu who has difficulty finding her way around the tube on her own but there was now the correctly complexioned leadership.

From the start the whole project was nothing more than a money making scam as well as way for the SWP to recruit. The problem that UAF had was that there already in existence a nation wide net work of anti fascist groups some of which had been existence for years. They were all closely linked to Searchlight so it was important that Searchlight be kept out. At the first meeting between UAF and the Unions the Unions asked where Searchlight was. Bennet lied and said that they had been invited but had not turned up. Eventually at TU insistence Searchlight had two seats on the steering committee but it was daggers drawn from the word go.

I am going to take a break here. I am still recovering from TB and get quite tired sometimes but I will continue the story later today.

I will say at this point that while I have written for Searchlight and have been involved in various operations against the far right with them I am not a member, in fact Searchlight is more of state of mind than an organisation. I also have differences with them over exactly the issues that I am discussing here. I am very confrontational with the race industry and the political users of the SWP. Hving said that all of the people that I have worked with in Searchlight are dedicated decent individuals but ones who have to work within the constraints of funders and the status quo. I do not.

Hasta la vista

Terry, we are quite disparaging of the “race relations industry” quite a lot here too. So you’re not alone on that. Feel free to send me emails when you get some interesting info.

I take exception to that remark. Yes, the Lancaster UAF site takes information from the Searchlight sites. It also takes information from most of the newspaper and TV news sites in the country, Blink, Al-azeera and a whole host of other sources. Why the hell not? If there’s relevant stuff to diseminate, we use it – and we ALWAYS acknowledge our sources with, if possible, a direct link to the article concerned. We have NEVER passed anything off as our own that isn’t.

‘As everyone should know, UAF is a front for the SWP’

I’m so bored with reading this. Does the fact that it was started by the SWP invalidate it in some way? Does it matter? I’ve never been asked to join the SWP during all my years as an active member of UAF and the ANL before it – and if I had, so what? At least UAF is out there doing something useful. It might not be the same kind of thing that Antifa, 635 and other groups do but something is a damn sight better than nothing.
In any case, there are a LOT more organisations than the SWP involved in UAF and no matter what group they are, they’re ALL anti-fascist. That’s what matters.

Apart from all that, there’s some very interesting information in your post, Terry. Thanks.

Ketlan

Great post clears things up nicely.

The finding of material that could be used in the making of explosive devices was widely covered in the media.

What then happened, because those arrested were charged almost straight away, was that only the bare details could be reported.

Ken Livingstone’s £100 000 a year muppet Lee Jasper was on Sky TV on Saturday saying that the whole thing was obviously a racist conspiracy because those arrested were white and that was why the white power structure had suppresed the whole thing. Mr Jasper is famous in the anti fascist movement for having been forced to apologise to me by the Chief Executive of the Greater London Authority after he sent me an email calling me and all other anti fascists racists.
The guy is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

I was then interested in the post from Clairwil thanking the Searchlight, Stop The BNP and Lancaster UAF for the information that she refered to. Stop The BNP is a part of the Searchlight web site and UAF habitually lift information from it and pass it off as their own.

As everyone should know, UAF is a front for the SWP, and one of the reasons why they put up a no show in Barking and Dagenham in the weeks leading up to the elections and that they were no where to be seen was that, with their Respect hats on, they were all in Tower hamlets and Newham campaigning for the Respect council candidates there. If any of them want to dispute that I will call them liars to their faces.

It is interesting to see Larry O,Hara popping up on this site. Larry has been kicked out of just about every left, green and anti fascist group going over the last twenty years for causing trouble. There are theories that he is so divisive that he must be working for the state. Myself and other people who know him think that he is just a nutter into conspiracy theories like you would not believe.

He used to be involved in a magazine with another paranoid fantasist called Robin Ramsey. They eventually fell out over some argument about UFOs and he now publishes a tatty thing called Notes From The Borderland.

His style is similar to that of Holocaust deniers in that at the bottom of his articles are copious notes which either refer to his own work or to that of other fantasists.

One of the reasons why the press didn’t refer to him over the above matter is that he is considered to be mad.

And now some breaking news about the BNP in Barking and Dagenham!!

BNP watchers were interested why it had been almost a month since Nick Griffin had updated his Blog. The reason it seems was that he was running around the country putting down rebellions.

There is a split in the party in B and D more over personalities that politics. At the last full council meeting that I attended there were only three members present, Barnbrooke and two others. There were apologies from Lawrence Ruston and the three members of the Doncaster familiy which leaves five unaccounted for.

The problem that Griffin has got is to find enough capable people to run the organization and take advantage of the real groundswell of white opinion which is looking for a right wing solution to what they see as their problems. This has meant standing some real dross as councillors in various parts of the country.

The group leader Barnbrook is currently under investigation, along with two others, for falsifying their electoral information by saying that they had an adddress in the borough when in fact they don’t. Barnbrook lives in Blackheath.

He and Griffin are seen as outsiders and authoritarian and, like many of the BNPs councillors around the country, the missing five had no idea of what the life of a busy local councillor is like.

Even though two of Griffins chief aides live in outer east London he is having problems holding the group together.

Tony Lecomber and Eddy Butler live nearby but that has not helped matters. As regards Lecomber and the plot to shoot Cabinet Ministers the only evidence for this comes from a Liverpool gangster, drug dealer and murderer Joey Owens. Owens has acted in the past as Griffin,s minder in the North West and he has just published a book ” The Nazi Assassin “!

He has a site of the same name and the book can be ordered from there. I would be a bit careful of handing out your home address there though.

Thats all for now, getting past my bedtime. I should have my own site up and running soon for lotes of details about the idiocy of the race relations industry and the very latest on the inside of the BNP.

Terry Fitz.

If anyone wants to get in touch directly please publish my eamail address