Last July I spoke on the Fight Against Fascism in Brighton & Hove at a meeting of Brighton History Workshop. It was subsequently agreed that the talk should be written up and turned into a book. There is due to be a public launch for the book at which I will speak in February, details of time and venue will be announced nearer the time. I was very conscious when I was preparing the talk and writing the book that I was standing on the shoulders of giants. People like Morris Beckman and others of the ’43 Group, Maurice Ludmer of Searchlight, Rod Fitch of the Brighton & Hove anti-fascist committee and Bill North his successor as Chairman. I also include in this Dave Hann, who interviewed me for his own book, which his partner Louise Purbrick has now finished, less than a month before he tragically died from cancer and Steve Tilzey, who co-wrote No Retreat with Dave Hann and who I met at a party of anti-fascists about 8 months ago. Below is an excellent video on the ’43 Group and the determination of mainly Jewish ex-servicemen who had returned from fighting the Nazis that there would be no resurgence of fascism in this country or Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. As the video mentions, there were at one time, post-war, about 60 or so fascist meetings a week in London alone. It is gratifying to know that the coup de grace to the BUF was delivered in what became known as the Battle of the Level in Brighton in 1948 when the fascists were massacred and Geoff Hamm ended up with a broken jaw in a Brighton hospital. It’s good that the NHS had just been established or he might have had to pay the bill for his own self-inflicted misfortune! Today ‘no pasaran’ – they shall not pass – applies even more so. Whether it is to the English Defence League, the British National Party or their sympathisers among the Zionist movement, groups like Herut and Betar. Fascism is and always has been the ultimate evil and that is why we are determined to root out the tiny slivers of fascist supporters in Palestine solidarity movement – the Frances Clarke Lowes and Gilad Atzmons.Read and digest this excellent video
Tony Greenstein