Joe Owens

This review originally appeared on my website here:

http://paulstott.typepad.com/i_intend_to_escape_and_co/2007/07/fun-with-fascis.h...

“Action! Race War To Door Wars - A Life Lived On The Edge” by Joe Owens (£9.99, Lulu, 2007)

The British far-right has not produced much in the way of significant memoirs or appraisals. Astonishingly Nick Griffin failed to follow up his court victory with either a book covering his trial, or an autobiography. Has a British politician ever had such a platform, then failed to build upon it? Anti-fascists everywhere should be grateful for Griffin’s idleness.

Looking at my own bookshelves, veteran fascist John Bean’s “Many Shades of Black” was rather flat, and suffered from the authors need to play down parts of his past, to be accepted as the loyal Griffinite he now is. Anyway, you can’t take a man seriously who wears a syrup!
Of the other memoirs I have read two particularly disappointed me. Knightsbridge Safe Deposit robber Valerio Viccei tells us nothing about his time as a fascist gunman in Italy during the ‘years of lead’, in his “Too Fast To Live” but much about his criminal career in England. As he was to be murdered by Italian police not long after he left the UK, he will never get the chance now.

Burnley man Andrew Porter tells us a lot about Burnley FC’s Suicide Squad in his memoirs, but little of detail about racial division and fascism in east Lancashire. Given he was jailed for 3 years after the 2001 riots, I had expected more. And of course Martin Webster’s “Rum, Sodomy and the Fash” is yet to appear (sorry I made that one up).

Stepping Up To The Plate
So Joe Owens is stepping into a comparatively open market. Now it’s out, what do you get for your tenner? Well, in a way you get three or four books for the price of one. There is plenty here for the lover of ‘real-life’ crime books, plenty of local interest for Scousers or those who went clubbing in Liverpool or Cheshire in the 80s-90s, and Owens background in both the NF and BNP will ensure that many fascists will buy his book. Anti-fascists will also find much of interest here, and not just on a ‘know your enemy’ basis.

If one core element runs through the book it is that Owens sees the importance of standards. In the introduction he comments “I have found in the traditional martial arts ethos and the nationalist outlook value systems to live by”. With this must surely come a sense of disappointment or even failure – the British far-right has traditionally under achieved, and is not associated with ‘high standards’ in many people’s estimation.
One of the things that increasingly interests me is how politics changes over time, but often with no real consensus, or even acknowledgement of the changes that have occurred. The Anarchist movement of today is very different from that of people like Albert Meltzer and Stuart Christie in the 1970s, and concepts of personal development and the perfectability of man seem to have been long abandoned.

Owens’ title “Action!” takes us back to a fascism that was not obsessed with denying what it actually is, but was (is?) an ideology championing nature, physical strength, youth, vigour and indeed violence. Take a look at the lard arses attending the BNP’s forthcoming Red, White and Blue festival and you will understand that “Action” has become an old-fashioned term on the British far-right.

Eyes Wide Right
When sketching his time in the National Front, Owens reminds us of a vastly different political era. In 1979 a Liverpool NF electoral rally brought in 200 punters and 50 ANL protestors, figures few areas could match today. Activists used spit to put up political stickers – DNA testing did not exist in those days!
It is often said on the left that one of the reasons the racist right must be fought is because racist violence automatically follows in its wake. Whilst not disagreeing with the thrust of this, it has become something of a mantra, with evidence not always being considered necessary before it is repeated. Indeed, a political analysis of Oldham’s race problems may well conclude that the BNP followed the violence, not the other way round. It is interesting then that the re-counting of fascist activity in the Kensington area of Liverpool in 1980 so clearly illustrates racist violence following far-right activity, with an agitated community aiming its hatred not upwards, but downwards.

A reminder of the reactionary nature of fascism is given by Owens assessment of the 1981 Toxteth riots. Whilst the local community rose up, with black and white fighting the police with gusto, Joe Owens and his companions were on the other side, heckling and attacking an anti-police march. Anyone who sees fascism as a ‘radical alternative’ really should read these sections, where he appears genuinely disappointed the police did not shoot significant numbers of Liverpudlians!

Humour is not too far away however. When travelling to Manchester to attack the Manchester Martyrs march, Liverpool’s fascists were stunned to be joined in their minibus by an Asian loyalist, looking to fight the IRA for queen and country! Politics can be a complicated business.
Something left out of the press coverage I have seen of Joe Owens life has been his (brief) UDA membership. Indeed his book captures one area – Liverpool – where fascism and Loyalism over-lapped very strongly. His views on loyalists are however scathing “I never once saw any firearms, or any active service whilst in the UDA. They spent most of their time in the pub, or on silly Orange Order marches. Their outlook in life was about maintaining Orange dominance in Northern Ireland, never once seeing the bigger picture or problems that faced us all”. As an epitaph for that brand of Loyalism, I have seen few better.

Spreading The Word
Anti-fascists can gain much from this book. One example is how fascism looks to spread from a firm base – the BNP of the mid-80s looking to expand from its lively Liverpool group into other North West towns (p.73) We have seen something similar in recent years, with the BNP spreading from strongholds like Oldham and Burnley, south into Stockport, the Manchester suburbs and even Northwich.
Who’s going through your bins at night? One fascist tactic revealed is the amount of information the NF and BNP got by stealing the bin bags from outside Militant’s Liverpool HQ. There’s another reason to be opposed to those fortnightly bin collections! Mentioning Militant brings us towards the political realities of 1980s Liverpool – a city that had the rough end of Thatcherism, with a Labour Party divided by Trotskyist entryism, was fertile ground for the left.
Somewhat reluctantly Owens admits that the size of opposition (if not the quality) eventually wore down the Liverpool BNP group and their fellow travellers in other fascist groups. When most of his friends dropped out of politics, so did he.

Doing The Doors
The chapters devoted to working in Liverpool’s clubland are the most violent, and arguably depressing of the book. Here violence is instinctive, routine and tends not to follow the Queensbury Rules. And right in the middle of the gang wars, drug dealers and club owners are people trying to simply enjoy themselves on a night out. It is not hard to imagine that Owens is almost talking about himself, when he says
“Without social goals to aim for, is it any wonder that a large section of young people turned to dance music like a new religion”.

Joe Owens has been arrested by police investigating three Liverpool gangland murders – that of Stephen Cole, George Bromley and the double shooting of Kevin Maguire and Nathan Jones. Whilst on remand in Strangeways for the Bromley shooting, as a Category A prisoner he met many of the regions best known criminals. Here at least he seems to have put his racism to one side – at least in his formal dealings with other prisoners – but the reader is again left with an image of a man slightly out of his time, longing for a world that has long gone.

Discussing a Manchester gangster called Gary Shearer he comments:
“Shearer was the type of guy who, a hundred years ago, would have been out building the empire. Now he consciously regarded himself as one of the Hip Hop generation, modelling himself on the gangster rappers from the American ghettos”. We are even told of another major Manchester figure who “was married to a Jamaican woman”. Whilst the book is quick to condemn examples of black criminality or violence towards whites as proof that integration can never work, examples that contradict such positions (such as the above) tend to be mentioned but never seriously analysed.

Refering to one Liverpool doorman – a black criminal called Negus – it hit me that Owens racism is of the old-fashioned variety. When a person is white and does a bad thing, it is because they are a bad person. When a black person does a bad thing, it is because they are a bad black person. It is a viewpoint common to anyone who grew up in England in the 1970s and 80s (I certainly heard it all the time) That it is rarely articulated today does not mean it does not still exist. It does – you just don’t get to hear it in the UK media.

Returning To Fascism
Unable to work in clubland, Owens appears to have drifted back into politics as much as anything else (p.255) Yet he was soon at the centre of the BNP, driving and guarding its leader Nick Griffin, and making significant contributions to party funds.
Owens even witnessed Griffin offering to shake Abu Hamza by the hook before their Cambridge debate, an incident that surely could not be made up! His doubts about Griffin’s leadership appear to have begun when old Nick failed to listen to advice during Jean Marie Le Pen’s visit to the UK in 2004. Protestors nearly trapped Le Pen in the hotel hosting the BNP’s press conference, leading Owens to conclude “Griffin had dropped a right clanger”.

Indeed Griffin appears to have been dropping them ever since, failing to deal properly with the bizarre approach made by his long term associate, Tony Lecomber, to Owens, that appears to centre on the shooting dead of members of the British establishment. Whilst Owens loss of the BNP’s security remit, and subsequent critiques of those who replaced him can easily be seen as sour grapes, it has to be said that the public reaction towards the BNP’s security team, as currently constituted, is virtually entirely negative. No other political group in the UK – even in Northern Ireland – carries on in such a manner. And I would bet on a fair few anti-fascists in a fight ahead of BNP Head of Security Martin “Fatty” Reynolds!

Fighting The Filth
It is fair to say Joe Owens is unlikely to receive a Christmas card from Merseyside Police. Telling criminal figures in Liverpool that Owens intends to shoot them (e.g. p.248) is a carbon copy of some of the old ‘bad-jacketing’ tricks used by the FBI in the COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panthers. Liverpool doormen have a record of winning major court cases against Merseyside Police that marks any of them out for future retribution. The violence and dirty tricks will continue, whether or not Joe Owens is there.

Where the police tread, crime correspondents are never far behind. This is book with a long and difficult gestation. Heavily trailed on the Internet, it was originally to be co-authored with big-hitting crime author Graham Johnson, published by Edinburgh’s Mainstream and even had the subtle title “The Nazi Assassin?” A website with that name promoted the book for several months, but Johnson and Owens fell out, with other changes following. Graham Johnson’s role in the affair leads to Owens concluding he was looking to get taped confessions from him, to specific murders. If these had been made, and ended up in police hands, Merseyside Police may well have finally got their man. It will be interesting to read Johnson’s response to these accusations.

Summing Up!
As someone who had followed the Nazi Assassin website closely, I do feel a tad short changed. Some of the ‘exposes’ promised have not appeared in “Action!” Whilst some of these were no doubt frivolous – Purple Aki and his press-up fetish for one – I was looking forward to reading an account – from the fascist side – of Ricky Tomlinson’s time in the National Front, especially as Tomlinson has failed to name the fascist who he accuses of hawking his NF past around the media, and sending him poison pen letters on the subject.

Whilst I was left with a clear understanding of Joe Owens personal morals and principles, the book oddly enough lacks ideology, especially given its author has spent a large chunk of his life involved in organised politics. What he thinks about many issues away from loyalty to one’s peers, crime and race are not mentioned. Whilst the NF’s more extreme activism is often decried by Owens for failing to get its message across, he fails to lavish praise on the direction in which Nick Griffin did take the BNP. A contradiction.

Not long after this book appeared, Owens home was firebombed, his elderly mother narrowly escaping the flames. Such an incident is, by anyone’s definition, a news story. Yet the local and regional media did not mention it. “Action! From Race War To Door Wars” is by any definition a book with plenty of content. Much can be learned from it – it should not be ignored.… (altro)