Political Fringe Groups

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31077, 4 June 1966, Page 4

Political Fringe Groups

The British Political Fringe. By George Thayer. Anthony Blond. 256 pp.

Members of the League of Empire Loyalists dressed up as bishops and Orthodox clergy successfully invaded the 1958 Lambeth Conference to express their disapproval of the invitation which had been extended to Archbishop Makarios. Austen Brooks, looking every inch a bishop with his flowing beard and pectoral cross, denounced Makarios in an unscheduled speech that most visitors assumed was part of the conference. Only when his speech was received with thunderous applause from his supporting prelates who surged forward to congratulate him, did conference members realise what was going on. If the League of Empire Loyalists are as nearly defunct as the author suggests (about 100 members in Britain and perhaps another 100 in the rest of the world) they did not live, in vain. Generations of university capping week stunt committees will read of this escapade and turn green with envy. Mr Thayer is an American who spent years gathering information about a number of relatively small organisations and movements on the fringe of British politics. The

Communist Party is left out because the author thinks it has received enough attention, but he gives a brief account of a number of nationalist movements, Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Cornish, the Yellow Star Movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a variety of groups on the extreme right and left political wings from the neo-Nazis to Trotskyists and anti-Revisionists. The result is entertaining and informative.

The great strength of Mr Thayer’s account lies in the interesting character both of the information and the people to whom the reader is introduced. One would like to know more of the 73-year-old Scottish Nationalist, Wendy Wood. A woman of great charm and dedication, she claimed to be involved in the plot in which four University of Glasgow students stole the Stone of Scone from Westminister Abbey. Mr Edward Martel, founder of the Freedom Group which has succeeded the League of Empire Loyalists as the foremost proponent of right-wing conservative thought in Britain is obviously a man of considerable ability. One can only admire the Reverend William Sargent’s simple, shrewd and effective method of combat-

ting the anti-Semitic activities of the neo-Nazi movements in London. The Nazi’s chief weapon was the street rally. Sargent’s plan was simply to ensure that when the Nazis converged on a Jewish area to hold a rally, they found that all the good street sites in the area were already occupied by opposition speakers. The visiting Nazis were thus left in confusion.

Political fringe groups, Mr Thayer concludes, are not lunatic. The people who take part in them may be eccentric, intolerant and even in some cases mentally unbalanced, but in his experience they cannot be regarded as dangerous to the public safety. The groups are a source of new ideas, a safety valve for natural rebels and a scapegoat for the general public when faced with problems for which no easy solution exists. Fringe groups, the author believes have their uses and should be tolerated, but otherwise they appear to have little to recommend them. The members over-simplify and overstate their case, they spend much of their time quarrelling amongst themselves, they are intolerant, self-righteous, pessimistic and their ideas are out of date.

The great weakness of Mr Thayer’s account is its superficiality. Why do some fringe groups grow into significant movements while others remain still-born? What is there about such groups which makes them prone to schism? Which kind of groups provide the ideas which become a part of the political climate of the day? To these and similar questions Mr Thayer has nothing to say. “The British Political Fringe” is interesting and entertaining, but not profound.