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The history of the National Front in Ulster

by David Kerr

Early in 2010, as part of a history of the old National Front (NF), the independent nationalist magazine Heritage and Destiny published an article on the NF in Ulster (Issue Number 39. Jan - March 2010). This article, written by regular contributor Peter Rushton, was heavy on gossip about named individuals in the NF and some paramilitary groups but had little information about the party in Ulster. David Kerr, a former member of the Ulster NF in the 1970s and a member of the party's Central Ulster Executive and National Directorate in the late 80s, thought that this article did not do justice to the NF and wrote this response. It was privately circulated but it was never published.

In the interests of clarity, it must be understood that after 1986 this article refers only to the 'Official National Front' rather than the 'Flag National Front' which had a branch in Coleraine, Co Londonderry. Mr Kerr ceased to be involved with the NF in 1990. He has agreed to a request from Civil Liberty to publish this article.

The NF and Ulster: an insider's history; 1973-1990

Peter Rushton's account of the National Front in Ulster labours too heavily on gossip about individuals for my liking and it pays far too much attention to contacts between some members of the party and loyalist paramilitary organisations. All the links he describes were informal and based largely on a personal contacts and friendship. There were no organisational or formal links between the National Front and paramilitary groups. Most of the NF folk who were convicted for supplying or attempting to supply arms to the UDA or UVF were usually also members of the respective paramilitary group. Their primary allegiance transferred from the NF to their chosen terror group. Searchlight used to harp on about joint training sessions between NF cadres and loyalist terror groups. This was a figment of their imagination. No such camps ever took place.

During my time as a member of the National Directorate and the Central Ulster Executive I was always concerned that the NF was seen in loyalist circles as little more than a bunch of groupies. Quite a few members came over from England for the annual Twelfth celebrations and then went home again. Instead of setting out the movement's own stall and making its own political space its members tended to hang around the edges of the UDA and to a lesser extent the UVF. This hanging on the coat tails of these organisations had to stop if the NF was to make political headway.

There was a fundamental difference between most loyalists and most NF members; the loyalists had no sense of nationalism. Nationalists visiting Ulster seeing all the Union Jacks, flags and uniforms etc, often thought these folk are just like us. The superficial trappings were the same but loyalist thinking was largely be based on an earlier pre-nationalist contractual 'covenanted' view of the State that evolved from Protestant non-conformity. Many, but not all, loyalists were also suspicious of the NF's perceived hostility towards, or lack of regard for, the Zionist entity in Palestine. Most loyalists knew nothing of the murderous antii-British terrorist origins of that State's founders and took at face value its apparent strong line against terrorism. The older generation, some of whom had served in the Palestine Police in the 1940s, knew better.

For most unionists and loyalists, 'nationalist' was a term used by the enemy. It took time to introduce a sense of 'British nationalism' and later, 'Ulster-nationalism' to a population used to thinking of 'nationalists' as the people who wanted to force them into an all-island Irish republic. The later NF described irredentist Irish nationalists as 'pan-Irish national-chauvinists' or 'gaelic imperialists'. The idea was to deny the validity of any form of nationalism that sought to force Northern Ireland into an all-island state; a so-called 'United Ireland' .

The flag of Ulster nationalism - flying here in South Carolina

The exception to this general rule was the maverick Assembly member George Seawright. He had been a member of the DUP but had been expelled for a number of intemperate outbursts. He went on to found his own Ulster Protestant League. He was sympathetic to nationalism and the National Front but was wary of some of the Catholics in high places in the movement. Nevertheless, he did send solidarity greetings to the NF at its AGM. I still have a letter he wrote to a member of the Central Ulster Executive from Magilligan Prison setting out his patriotic ideals and saying hello to Nick Griffin, the then NF Chairman.

Seawright was assassinated by a vicious Marxist gang calling itself the Irish People's Liberation Organisation. The NF was represented at his funeral. The paramilitary UVF claimed him as one of their volunteers a few years ago in a booklet published to commemorate the organisation's fallen members. This came as a surprise to me and others who knew him. If true, he was very discreet about it.

The National Front first entered the Ulster political arena in 1973. A rudimentary group had been set up in Belfast. William Annett stood against former Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner in the South Down constituency for a new Assembly. The Unionist-controlled Northern Ireland Parliament had been abolished by Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath the previous year. Annett gained 591 first preference votes (0.9%).

National Front in Belfast

The first NF group in Belfast was led by David Riddelsdel, an eccentric Catholic who was a strong British patriot of the old Empire Loyalist school of thought. He died in a tragic hit and run car accident. Both Riddelsdel and Councillor Lindsay Mason had been leading lights in a small ultra-loyalist group called the Ulster Constitution Party. Cllr Mason was actually elected to the old Belfast Corporation to represent the republican Lower Falls area. He was elected by default when republican parties declined to nominate candidates in protest at the introduction of internment in 1971. Cllr Mason was the NF's first representative on any local authority in the United Kingdom after the UCP dissolved in 1974.

Mason edited the lively political journal, The Ulster Constitution. He was another eccentric character with a heart of gold. He had a literature stall outside the Provincial Bank of Ireland branch in Belfast city centre every Saturday. Occasionally he was accompanied by Brian, a huge 'Ulster Wolfhound' that looked very fierce but was actually friendly and good-natured. Mason sold copies of the Ulster Constitution, the Ulster Protestant, the UVF weekly paper Combat and Spearhead. He also had a large collecting tin for the NF. He was a brave man because republican sympathisers would often have a go at the stall. It wasn't all the one way, though. At the age of 16 I was astonished to witness him single-handedly wade into a republican People's Democracy parade that dared to pass by his stall. He tore into their banner with an umbrella.

In line with its newly declared allegiance to the National Front, Issue 5 vol 2 of Ulster Constitution bore the new strap line “for democratic rule by the Ulster majority” above a huge front page photograph of IRA bomb damage in Armagh city under the headline 'THE PROVOS CELEBRATE LEGALISATION! NOW READ THIS' and an extract from the NF policy document stating that “the organised promotion of Irish republicanism in this British province constitutes subversion against the British nation, and therefore should, in whatever form – violent or otherwise, be made illegal.”

The back page announced that the magazine would give its support to the National Front, 'the leading British Patriotic political party' and that members of the UCP would shortly be receiving a letter from the leadership. This letter announced that the party had been dissolved and its few assets were to be turned over to the NF. The next issue carried a lengthy speech given by the then party chairman John Tyndall in the Park Avenue Hotel in Belfast recognising that Ulsterfolk were loyal to a Britain of an earlier time rather the untrustworthy sell-out merchants inhabiting Westminster, denouncing the Tories and the other Westminster parties as untrustworthy and calling for a new alliance between loyalists and the only party that sought to return to the strong Britain of the British Empire.

Former NF leader John Tyndall-himself of Ulster stock

The Ulster Loyalist Front was a short-lived affair which did involve some UVF and NF members, notably 'Richard Cameron', the then editor of Combat who had once been a member of the League of Empire Loyalists. Combat then often carried NF press statements and welcomed the opening of the NF office at the bottom of the Ravenhill Road in Belfast. The ULF ceased to function when the newly legalised UVF launched its own party - the Volunteer Political Party – at the end of 1974.

The February 1974 general election saw the first National Front party election broadcast. This attracted new members in Ulster, myself included. The party conducted its first ever march on April 27th that year in protest at a conference of leftist 'liberation groups' meeting in Belfast as guests of the Official IRA-linked Republican Clubs. The march went from Tennent Street in the loyalist Shankill area to the site of Mason's literature stall outside the Provincial Bank. It was led by another councillor, Michael Brooks from Castlereagh Borough Council and addressed by Bernard Ward, the joint editor of the pro-NF Ulster Worker and secretary of the Belfast branch of the party.

The NF candidate Martin Webster had saved his deposit in the 1973 West Bromwich bye-election and brought the party a lot more respect and attention. The then party chairman John Tyndall and his deputy J Kingsley Read held a well-attended public meeting in an east Belfast hotel and met members of several unionist parties and loyalist groups. Members of the NF canvassed for Rev Robert Bradford who was elected as MP for South Belfast. His election agent was a member of the Belfast NF. This individual is no longer politically active and now pastors a church a short distance away from the site of Bradford's murder at the hands of the IRA.

The NF in Ulster produced two members who would become prominent in wider nationalist circles: Steve Brady who has been mentioned by Mr Rushton and Dave McCalden who wasn't. Both Brady and McCalden were to break with Tyndall and back Kingsley Read in 1975 when they helped to found the National Party of the United Kingdom. McCalden had been active in the Hunt Saboteurs League and was the first editor of their paper, Howl. He brought these fine journalistic skills to the NF streetpaper Britain First, a student paper provocatively called Spark to annoy the campus commies and a series of themed Nationalist News giveaway sheets. He later edited Beacon magazine. When the National Party of the UK fell apart he moved to California where he became involved with a number of historical revisionist groups and ran an Ulster loyalist support group.

NF splits leads to fresh ideas about Ulster

As is often the case with splits, the 1975 NPUK/NF breach disillusioned a lot of members. The NF in Ulster virtually ceased to function. Leading lights dropped out, moved to England or found other political or paramilitary outlets for their talents.

In this time of political ferment, a number of ideas were discussed in unionist and loyalist circles. Vanguard produced some fine original thinking in discussion documents. Professor Kennedy Lindsay argued for a Dominion of Ulster, reprising ideas first suggested by prominent unionist dissenter W F McCoy in 1948. Other pamphlets argued for a federal Community of the British Isles, voluntary coalition with the SDLP in a devolved assembly and total independence.

The ideas of W F McCoy taken up by modern nationalists

This latter idea was taken up by a number of loyalists, notably the paramilitary Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee in 1976 and the UDA-linked New Ulster Political Research Group in 1977. Beyond the Religious Divide, the NUPRG document, was a well-researched, sophisticated document which received a lot of attention and praise as an honest attempt to reach a settlement of the national question in Ireland. Unfortunately, the UDA leadership made no attempt to push this document among its own membership and it withered on the vine. However, it did inspire many people, some of whom assumed leadership roles in the Ulster NF and the Ulster Independence Committee.

The NF had been sporadically active in Ulster in the late seventies and early eighties. It did provide an outlet for some discontented Protestant working class youths with its support for Oi bands and skinhead/punk image, but it made little impact politically. Some of these discontented youths – the Shankill NF Skinz – were to emerge as the core of the UDA's infamous C Company a decade or so later. Papers were sold at Linfield home matches but little solid political organisation took place.

This changed as it became clear that the Tories were once again planning to betray Ulster. This betrayal – in the shape of the hated Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Hillsborough Pact – signed on November 15th 1985 galvanised public opinion in a manner rarely seen before or since. Ulster, in the words of a devastated Ulster Unionist MP, Harold McCusker, was placed on the window ledge of the Union. Over 200,000 loyalists burned effigies of Margaret Thatcher outside the Belfast City Hall at the launch of the Ulster Says No campaign a week after the pact was signed.

On the same day, the National Front's AGM discussed an emergency motion from Nick Griffin backing independence for Ulster as the only way to avoid a united Ireland given that the Tories were hellbent on detaching the province from the United Kingdom. This motion was passed and signalled the biggest change in NF policy on Ulster since the party's foundation in 1967. This became party policy before the Flag Group split off from the NF in 1986. It was not something adopted just to be 'radical' by the 'political soldier wing' as Mr Rushton asserts. It was adopted as a real answer to what was perceived as a real problem. The NF harked back to Carson's formation of a Provisional Government of Ulster in 1914 in anticipation of a Lloyd George government sellout. Had the Great War not intervened, the PGU would have taken control of Ulster to prevent what was then miscalled 'Home Rule'. Hillsborough could have been the spark that lit the national revolution in these islands.

The idea that Ulster was a nation and had a right to self-determination did seem for a while to tap into the genuine sense of loss experienced by the loyalist community. The unionist parties had unleashed the beast of mass civil disobedience to the State and then got frightened when it ran out of ideas. Contrary to what Mr Rushton says, in the late 1980s the NF was not a shadow of its former self. It was the peak of its influence. National Front News was selling 4000 copies per issue door-to-door and in the streets at parades and protest meetings. In August 1986 NF News published a Six Point Action Plan to go beyond just saying no and take things further, setting up parallel structures to bypass the State, economically, politically and in policing.

This was taken seriously by the Ulster Clubs, a grass-roots protest movement that emerged to oppose the Hillsborough Pact. It published a later document that built on the ideas first promulgated in NF News. This was an umbrella group in which NF members openly played a full part alongside members of a wide spectrum of loyalist opinion. Two leading members of the Ulster Clubs were assassinated by the Provos; Charlie Watson and Colin Abernethy. Both the short-lived Movement for Self-Determination and the Ulster Independence Committee emerged from the ruins of the Ulster Clubs after the DUP cynically swamped it with party members and defanged it.

Hillsborough Castle - where infamous Pact was signed

In May of 1986 the NF opened up new leased premises in Templemore Avenue. This functioned as a meeting place, accommodation for visiting comrades from Great Britain and a book and souvenir shop. Initially sales were brisk and the shop generated a good income for the party. However, this didn't last. The shop demonstrated that there was a market for loyalist flags, memorabilia and books, etc but the NF didn't have the capital to sustain in the face of competition from the UDA and UVF who opened shops of their own and had deeper pockets to stock and sustain them. The lease was not renewed as it was costing the movement more money than it brought in.

NF/UDA spat debunked

Mr Rushton's story that a UDA security chief forced the shop to close down is not true. Perhaps he carried out an act of petty vandalism on the outside of the shop to please his friends and timed it just before the UDA's Ulster magazine carried a pro-Flag group article. This criticised the NF for having contact with Libya and selling copies of Colonel Qathafi's Green Book, me for my 'profound Hitlerism' and claimed that only members of my family voted for me when I stood for the NF in a council bye-election. Oddly enough, given the mythological status it has later been given, no mention was made of Patrick Harrington's appearance on a Channel 4 Dispatches programme in which he tried to give a nuanced critique of the IRA's armed struggle. This has since been mythologised to claim that he was offering support to the IRA's aims and objects, either personally or on the NF's behalf. This of course was nonsense. The article went on the say that some UDA folk called round to 'discuss the matter' but nobody was in, so it suggested that perhaps we were up at Milltown paying respects to (recently deceased IRA volunteer) Mairead Farrell.

I wrote back pointing out that the UDA itself had Libyan connections as leading members Glen Barr, Tommy Lyttle, and my near neighbour Harry Chicken had visited Tripoli a few months after the UWC strike and persuaded Colonel Qathafi not to support the IRA with arms. This succeeded until Thatcher allowed the USAF to use British airbases to bomb Tripoli and allegedly kill Qathafi's adopted daughter. His revenge was to resume arms exports – for free – to the IRA.

I got no reply, but if the UDA really thought that the NF was a nest of closet Provo supporters in its bosom, I have no doubt that they would not have bothered to criticise us in a magazine article. They didn't have to come to the shop either. At the time I lived only a couple of streets away from a prominent member of the Inner Council so they could have taken me out any time if they were really serious about it. The NF left Templemore Avenue because it was losing money. The reason for the hurry at the end was that we didn't take into account the three-month rent free period at the beginning of the lease.

We had to leave sooner than intended to give vacant possession back to the landlord. In a way the UDA did its bit to close down the shop by absorbing its market and exercising financial rather than physical muscle. I have no idea where Mr Rushton got the alleged quotation from former Central Ulster Executive member Stuart McCullough, 'If the UDA want a war, they can have a war.' He never said anything like that in my presence. While he could be headstrong and opinionated, I doubt if he would have been stupid enough to shout 'bring it on' to a well-organised army of scary men with guns. When he eventually left Ulster it was because the RUC advised him that his name was on a Provisional IRA death list. By that time he had ceased to be involved with the NF. He had become an activist in the ITP and local animal rights groups.

The NF did receive a hearing for a time in the heady revolutionary times from 1985 to 1989. Gradually, though the fervour of the revolt against the Hillsborough Pact faded. Molyneaux and the UUP wilted; Paisley ranted and roared but did nothing, having infiltrated and neutered the Ulster Clubs. Peter Robinson gave up after his arrest and trial in Dundalk after his symbolic mini-invasion of a small town in the Irish Republic. More respectable groups such as the Ulster Independence Committee and the Movement for Self-Determination assimilated the pro-independence message. The revolutionary moment had passed but at the time we didn't notice.

The NF had two problems that were likely to alienate potential support; the movement's support for the ideas of Colonel Qathafi and some of the ultra-Catholic material in movement publications. The NF clung to official denials that Libya had anything to do with the IRA. It was all just dismissed as 'propaganda'. This became untenable when the French navy seized the MV Eksund full to the gunwhales with arms and ammo for the Provos.

The NF's position was officially non-sectarian even though most members came from the Protestant, unionist, loyalist tradition. One Norwich-based leading member with responsibility for NF News and other movement publications made things difficult for his Ulster comrades. The Ulster 'back front page' on NFN and other propaganda items were written by Ulster members but sometimes items were subtly edited. For example, a mass circulation leaflet produced for the 1988 Twelfth looked back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with the slogan 'Fight Tyranny!' It likened the post-Hillsborough structures to the Stuart tyranny prior to 1688. This was watered down to 'Stuart dynasty'; which was factually correct but not appropriate for a polemical leaflet. Even worse, the July issue of NF News was due to carry a similar article on the alternative Ulster 'back front page'. This was replaced without our knowledge by a bizarre historical article on the Fenian Cycle from Irish mythology topped with a huge green Celtic knotwork shamrock! This was one issue that would never sell 4000 copies!

Ulster Nation is born!

The Central Ulster Executive met, sent most copies of this issue back and decided to cut back Ulster's NF News order in protest at this sabotage. In order to ensure no repetition of these incidents the CUE sought and obtained permission from the Directorate to produce a local A4 paper, the original Ulster Nation.

This sold well and appeared regularly. It continued to stir interest in the Movement's ideas for an independent Ulster state. These were codified in the well-received pamphlet Alternative Ulster which appeared in 1988, the year the Ulster Independence Committee (UIC) was formed. The initially more respectable UIC took what it liked from the menu and won a lot more members and supporters than the NF ever managed.

As if that wasn't enough, the NF suffered another damaging split when a number of members left to form the more 'spiritual' International Third Position. As always after a split, many disappeared into other groups, both political and paramilitary, many dropped out altogether and a few remained in successor organisations, Ulster Third Way and the Ulster Motherland Movement – but that's another story.