Sham 69 racist rar#
RAR intersected perfectly with the rising punk music scene that articulated youth alienation. Concerts with Black and white bands sharing the stage gave working class youth the experience of sharing the love of music together. RAR was organised around the fanzine Temporary Hoarding, which combined punk imagery, music reporting and political education.
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Simple instructions were sent out telling activists how to pull together concerts, how to get council permission, how to attract bands, how to assemble a PA system and how to protect a stage against Nazi attack. People asking if there was an RAR group in their area were simply told that they were now the organiser of it. The nationwide music magazine New Musical Express (NME) published the letter and the group was overwhelmed by the response. They penned a letter protesting Clapton’s statement and calling for an anti-racist musical movement. Other loud pro-Nazis were David Bowie and Rod Stewart.Ī small group of left-wing cultural activists - Red Saunders, Roger Huddle, Jo Wreford and Pete Bruno - took action. "Get the foreigners out, get the wogs out, get the coons out,” he said. There is plenty of archival footage in White Riot showing just how scary the period was.Īll this was bad enough, but then in August 1976, Eric Clapton told a concert audience that he supported Powell and wanted to “keep Britain white”. In an era of mass unemployment with no hope in sight, the NF started staging colourful marches and attracting youthful members, mostly skinheads. That shock to the national psyche, combined with Labour’s betrayal of its traditional program, gave an opening for fascists to get a hearing.įascist ideology was infamously fanned in 1968 by ultra-right Tory MP Enoch Powell in his “River of Blood” speech, attacking the presence of Black immigrants.
In the midst of a powerful wave of strikes in 1976, the Labour government was forced to beg the International Monetary Fund to bail out the economy. This was a political/cultural, people-power mass movement that changed British society.īritain hit the economic skids in the early 1970s, as part of the international economic crisis resulting from the declining post-WWII profit boom colliding with US deficit spending that financed its Vietnam War adventure. It was by no means an easy struggle, nor was it clear from the beginning what the outcome would be. White Riot is the story of how, in the 1970s, a ramshackle group of do-it-yourself British leftists organised the Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement, took on the fascist National Front (NF) and defeated it.
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