22.6.08

Facing the enemy - in my home town.

6th Magazine - 6 December 2005

I casually bulldozed through the human traffic that is carried by my town’s Monday market today. I passed the usual medley of men haggling over shoelaces and kids perusing fake Smarties, rounding the pungent smelling fish stall at the end. Except it wasn’t the end. There was newcomer to the usual market stallers – a group of men stood behind a small wooden table. On the table lay dozens of folded newspapers entitled ‘The Voice of Freedom’. Hmmm, I thought. I glanced at a copy of my dusty ‘Communist Manifesto’ that I planned to read on my imminent bus journey to York. But this looked like a worthy read – probably a fanzine or an ‘underground’ journal or something, or so I thought. “I’ll take one, please,” and handed over 50p to a young skinhead. “Better still if you join,” an older man snarled. The penny had dropped – I gazed down at the paper I’d just bought. The beaming red, white and blue of the BNP logo stared me in the face. A woman came from my right and thrusted a leaflet in my other palm. This one read ‘Islamic Terror Labour Failure – How right was Enoch Powell? How right is Nick Griffin?’ I’d had enough. I fled the scene before you could say ethnic cleansing and crammed the diseased trash in someone’s wheelie bin. I needed a fix; I read Marx from cover to cover as though I were a Communist junkie, all the way to York…