Flash Mob

Flash Mob

Just over half way from Amlwch to our nearest ‘big’ town, Bangor, the coast road crosses the old branch railway to Red Wharf Bay. It was my father who pointed out to me, sometime in the mid-seventies, the flash and circle emblem painted on the dark red brickwork of the bridge parapet. I’d imagined it was some sort of warning about buried electric cables.

As graffiti goes, it was quite neatly done, in white paint, and in the mid-1970s it had only just started to fade in the salty Anglesey air. I don’t think North-west Wales was a particularly fascist area, but the activists of the 1930s must have wanted to catch the eyes of the trippers and holidaymakers streaming in their charabancs, Crosville buses and Austin Sevens to Benllech and the other Anglesey resorts.

My father had been a refugee in the mid-1930s from Hitler’s Germany - ending up, by a slightly improbable series of events, as the head of English at the secondary school in Amlwch, on the north Anglesey Coast. But he remarked on the flash symbol without bitterness or indignation; a historical curiosity, a reminder of how we once were, or at least some of us were.

Like Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the symbol on the Anglesey bridge has faded slowly into obscurity. Google Streetview suggests that the site has become massively overgrown. But if I ever pass that way again by bicycle or car, I’ll stop and look for it.

The BUF, and fascism, never caught on in Britain, fortunately. Soon, the country would be fighting real Nazis. My father was called up in about 1940, by a strange coincidence to the Welsh Guards, despite living in Hull at the time. (The move to Amlwch came two decades later.)

The extreme Right as a political movement has never quite gone away in this country, despite the long and bitter years and loss of life of World War II. Up to now, as a nation we’ve never voted in large numbers for such parties. The BUF, and those that followed them such as National Front and BNP, weren’t bright enough to realise that screaming boot-boys on street corners weren’t the best image for courting the middle-of-the-road, middle class people you’d need to build a voter base. Mr and Mrs Scroggins at Acacia Avenue might not have liked ‘coloured immigrants’ very much in the 1970s and 80s, but they probably disliked yelling skinheads even more. 

And they almost certainly didn’t like stuff being painted on walls, however tastefully done, even if they supported the politics. If they were in favour of birching ‘young vandals’, they certainly weren’t going to start voting for them.

The current right-wing lot, Reform, seem a little cleverer, and hence more dangerous. Current opinion polls suggest that they could, at least, be the largest party at the next general election.

Reform has sussed that it pays to cloak anti-immigrant, anti-persons-of-colour philosophy in something a little more measured, more genteel. Many of the people who might vote for Reform would secretly applaud putting the boot in – possibly, quite literally – on unwanted Boat People, asylum-seekers, Blacks, Muslims or whoever current discontent with the state of the nation has crystalised around. But they much rather that Reform didn’t explicitly say that this is what they were about, at least not for the time being. How very British.

Pictured with a pint of ale in hand, Farage looks the embodiment of British reasonableness, a nice guy, almost. 'Look here, can’t we sort this out over a pint or two in the Dog and Duck'. 

What would a UK governed by Reform look like? It’s hard to say. One could take the apocalyptic view, that it would lead to hordes of armed thugs roaming the streets, looking for people to ‘send home’.

But it probably wouldn’t be that, at least not in the early stages. There would most likely be some ramping up of anti-immigration efforts, even the Navy being deployed to ‘sink small boats’, as some enthusiasts have advocated. (If that were to happen, there would be the inevitable public backlash once the bodies started to wash up on Kent beaches, particularly if they were the bodies of small children.)

Life might start to get more difficult if your face didn’t fit – literally – in the new Britain. There could be a lot more flags on lamp-posts, making the mainland look like Northern Ireland. Indeed, Northern Ireland in the 1960s with its rampant and none too discreet discrimination against Catholics might not be a bad analogy. And we all know what happened there.

The most dangerous point might be when, as is inevitable, Reform’s simple solutions to complex problems fail to deliver results. At that point, the electorate might simply tire of them, and go back to voting in boring, predictable mainstream parties. Reform may splutter and fizzle out, as similar political movements have tended to in other parts of Europe. But Reform may up the ante, saying ‘we need to go further, faster’.

No doubt, many of the people who voted for Hitler, while they might have disliked their Jewish neighbours, been jealous of their prosperity, probably at the time didn’t envisage their being herded screaming into gas chambers at gunpoint. If their crystal ball had been powerful enough to tell them that this would be the outcome, they would probably have been horrified. But that’s the trouble with voting in people with extreme views – you never know where it will end.

That all sounds terribly dramatic, I know. I never thought I’d find myself writing like that about Little Old Britain.

Perhaps the Reform tide will start to ebb, and we can go back to being boring old Britain again with its middle-of-the-road, middle-class politics again. That would be preferable to Interesting Times, as the Chinese proverb has it.

I once asked my father if he was proud of what his generation had achieved. Silly question, I suppose. “No, not particularly,” he said. A world war, fascists in control of a vast swathe of Europe, industrial genocide; it’s hard to pick any morsels of joy out of that lot.