How the Fascists Directed the Notting Hill Riots

Motor-cars were used to direct the racialist mobs in London's Notting Hill last Monday and Tuesday. They cruised around ordering riot squads from one area to another.

In the cars sat fascist chiefs. They chose the targets for attack. They gave the slogans. It was all planned and executed like a military operation.

The fascists began their preparations a month ago with a race-hatred leaflet. It read as follows:

'People of Kensington, act now. Your country is worth fighting for. Fight with the Union Movement.

'Take action now. Protect your jobs. Stop coloured immigration. Houses for white people—not coloured immigrants. A square deal for the Negro in his own country.'

There was a drawing of a group of Africans in national costume, carrying spears. Over them was a notice saying 'Way in.'

Only a minority of the young thugs who roamed the Notting Hill streets this week, kicking and chasing coloured people and besieging them in their homes, were local boys.

On Monday and Tuesday evenings hundreds of ruffians, carrying weapons, swarmed in from other parts of London. Fascists had organized and armed this mob, with the deliberate intention of creating a reign of terror in which coloured people would be frightened to walk the streets.

To a certain extent they succeeded. On Tuesday afternoon I saw coloured people hurrying home with anxious strides. I saw shattered windows hastily boarded up. I saw groups of sullen young men on street corners, staring at any coloured people who passed.

Kept her children in

I heard a young man with a copy of the fascist paper Action in his pocket snarl at a Jamaican girl pushing her pram down Bramley Road.

At a house in Blenheim Crescent a Trinidad woman opened the door to my knock. Behind her two neatly-dressed children played in a tidy room.

'I was scared to let them go out to play,' she told me. 'I believe someone organized the riots. Fascists held meetings here. They wanted to stir people against the coloured folk, didn't they?'

A Jamaican bus worker whom I met in a café asked me: 'When I was on strike the white people at the garage were my friends. Why are all these white people against me now?'