frame 42 August 2023
Fascists
by Simon Bill
I saw a post on Facebook once that said ‘People who claim they are “not interested in politics” are, basically, neo-liberals’. I’m not interested in politics myself, but I don’t generally mention it because I know it might get that kind of response, and I understand why – it’s often true. Airy indifference masking a secret allegiance to the status quo. But me saying ‘I’m not interested in politics’ (if I ever said it out loud) would just mean that I’m not one of those people who are interested; they really enjoy reading about it and talking about it and so on, even when they don’t need to. To me it’s like thinking about utility bills or whatever. So, crucially, I will think about it when I have to; and, lately, I have had to. In Dover I have encountered fascists and (in some ways worse) apologists for fascists. People ready to make excuses for fascism. Some are people I thought I knew.
I came to live in Dover four years ago, more or less by accident (long story), and I was almost immediately taken with it. It was something like love. And after a while I was actively on the look out for chances to proselytise. The line I planned on taking would go something like, ‘You may have heard bad things about Dover, but it’s not like that. Yes, it’s neglected, but let me show you…etc etc’.
A friend of a friend, who lives up the coast in Deal (which is a lovely town) was interested in my guided tour of Dover, and she came here on a pleasantly warm Saturday in September, with another friend. It was the singer Alison Goldfrapp. Alison was looking for somewhere to live at the time, so this was a sort of property recce. We left my house, almost in the middle of Dover, and I was aware there was some sort of event going on nearby because I’d been hearing music all morning. What I now realise was intended to register as ‘patriotic’ music, including one or two favourites of mine – Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’, for example.
Stepping out of the alley that runs from my road to the high street we found that the centre of town had been occupied by a small but highly confrontational political event. It was Britain First staging a ‘rally’. There were about a dozen of them, some in red sweatshirts with the Britain First logo, most of them in black T-shirts and matching caps with the initials BFD on them. For a while I thought this meant 'Britain First Dover', but actually the 'D' is for ‘defence’ - they belonged to BF’s paramilitary ‘security’ wing. These outfits were completed with camouflage trousers and army boots. Basically, they occupied the high street.
They’d fixed flags to the railings of St Mary’s Church, both union jack and BF logo flags, their sound system was blasting that music, and they were either giving out leaflets, or drinking (it was handily close to Weatherspoons), or standing in that way security guards and soldiers ordered to stand-at-ease do – feet apart, arms behind the back. This made me angry. I was angry because they were playing, and ruining, music that means a lot to me, and because they were intimidating shoppers and clearly getting off on it. They were having a whale of a time.
Another aspect of this that annoyed me, a lot, was the ‘stolen valour’. Some people pretend to have been in the armed forces. I called out to one of them, standing there in his martial posture – ‘Mate, are you in the army?’, and he said ‘Used to be’, a bit defensive. ‘No you didn’t’, I said. He just looked at his feet.
I was very aware that this promotional tour of Dover, letting Alice and Alison know how lovely it is here, actually, had gone wrong already, but I was sure it would be fine again once we’d got away from these fuckers. But I needed to do one or two things first. I couldn’t just leave it. I started by taking photographs of them, clustered in the middle of the pedestrianised high street there, looking all hard. One of them sensed I was not really on their side, and he came up to me and started waving his hands in my face.
Two community support officers were standing nearby (apparently BF didn’t warrant an actual police presence), so I went to tell them something about this situation I guessed they wouldn’t know. The 1936 Public Order Act prohibits the wearing of political uniforms. It was introduced with the aim of curtailing the activity of the BUF (British Union of Fascists), Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts, who would march in to working class and Jewish areas of London and Manchester to start riots. I can’t even remember how I came to know about this – I must have taken some interest in political history at some point.
Now, T-shirts and baseball caps are not a very smart uniform; but, if they’re all black, with matching logos of a political organisation, and worn by a group of men at an organised event, and those men identify as a paramilitary ‘defence’ force, then they certainly are uniforms - unless we’re to believe that they were actually all mortified because they’d turned up wearing the same outfit, completely by accident.
I was right, and these community support officers didn’t know there was a law they could enforce here, and they didn’t seem to welcome this news. They just shook their heads, smiling slightly. One said it was only his third day, so…
I took Alison and Alice on a short tour, first to my allotment on Pilot’s Meadow, overlooking the castle and the port, then on up to the Western Heights.
It was a beautiful day, and we didn’t mention Britain First.
