David Renton, "When We Touched The Sky: A History of the Anti-Nazi League".
Paper presented at the New Socialist Approaches to History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, June 6th 2005
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This paper asks why movements work, and why movements fail? For the last seven years, I have been writing about the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, two allied anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns that contributed significantly to the defeat of the National Front, the forerunners of today's British National Party. In the course of my work on this combined movement, I have conducted about 80 interviews with activists from that campaign and written around half a dozen conference papers, one of which was presented to a previous running of this conference. Previous papers have looked at the role of women, music and trade unions in the campaign, or considered the campaign on a regional basis. The focus of this particular paper is on anti-fascism as a social movement. This piece is divided into three sections: (1) a chronology of the movement, (2) an analysis of some of the interviews I have conducted in the past twelve months, which for largely accidental reasons have been conducted with the leaders of the movement (I am now approaching the end of my research, and I left those interviews to last), and (3) some attempts to return to the main theme of why this movement prospered.