The Orange Swastika
The rise of new millennium Loyalist Nazism, By Dr John Coulter

An Orange Swastika is now fluttering over the red-white-and-blue of supposedly loyal Ulster as the far fight makes a concerted bid for power in an attempt to copy the recent British National Party council successes in England.

It has led to the development of a two-pronged assault along social class lines which first found its roots with the start of the new millennium. The term Loyalist Nazi has come to symbolise those working-class Protestants who have become involved in political activity mainly in urban loyalist districts of Northern Ireland.

Their vehicles of recruitment have been the BNP itself, the National Front, the British Nazi Party (also known as the 9th November Society), but especially the White Nationalist Party.

The far right’s secondary tactic is to infiltrate respectable middle-class political parties and clubs. They are known as Unionist National Socialists.

This is not the first time the far right has tried to cross the Irish Sea in a bid to establish a power based in Ulster. It has always had limited success in the past because it has been competing for supporters and members with the loyalist paramilitary groups, especially the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association.

Politically, too, the far right has found itself in direct competition with the Ulster-based parties that speak for the UVF and UDA, namely the Progressive Unionist Party and the now defunct Ulster Democratic Party.

Essentially, the far right attempted to cash in on the Northern Ireland Troubles with an anti-Irish Republican agenda portraying the IRA as the enemies of the United Kingdom. The NF’s bid to capitalise on the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of 1974, which brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing executive between Unionists and Nationalists, ran aground because the NF could not break the political grip of the United Ulster Unionist Council.

The NF tried again in the aftermath of the November 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which saw considerable Unionist opposition to the Dublin accord. During this period, the NF National Directorate member John Field was posted to Ulster, a shop was established in the loyalist heartland of East Belfast, and David Kerr, a leading Ulster activist, contested a council seat as an NF candidate, but secured only a handful of votes.

In the 1980s, the NF tried to push the theory of an independent Ulster, the favoured stance at one time of the Ulster Vanguard movement of the 1970s during the UWC strike era. The 1980s NF campaign fizzled out as the mainland organisation ripped itself apart in internal power struggles.

In the early 1990s, the BNP, the nazi terror group Combat 18 and the National Socialist Alliance – a political umbrella for minuscule groups that supported Combat 18 – all tried to find footholds in the North. But they could not compete, let alone provide a radical street alternative for young Loyalists, with the hardline bootboy tactics of the paramilitaries.

Apart from isolated individual members, the far right lay largely dormant in the North until a series of confrontations within Unionism’s mainstream parties in the new millennium provided the opportunity for both the overt and covert wings to begin street activity and recruiting.

One of the first events that sparked this new wave of activity was a row in Ballymena Borough Council in County Antrim between councillors from Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and the borough’s Muslim community. The DUP members initially refused to accept a gift of an Islamic brass replica that the Muslim community had presented in friendship. The WNP and NF seized upon the controversy and embarked on a sticker and leaflet campaign across the town, with the WNP eventually accused of putting up their flags in potentially provocative areas.

In Craigavon in County Armagh, a controversy surrounding planning permission for a mosque has allowed the WNP to raise its profile in the borough. The British Nazi Party is also thought to be preparing to target Dungannon and the area covered by South Tyrone borough council, where there is a growing population of Portuguese migrant workers.

Given the small percentages in the North’s 1.7 million population of the ethnic communities, which consist mainly of people of Chinese, Asian, Muslim, traveller and Jewish origins, one might wonder why the extreme right would want to organise in a part of Ireland where no previous serious racial tensions existed

The far right is planning to build on two future fronts. First, the Irish Republic has voted to accept the Nice Treaty, paving the way for the creation of a much-enlarged, 25-member state European Union. There is now a very real danger that the perceived asylum-seeker problem, which has dogged mainland Britain and parts of France, will mushroom in the North in spite of the religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants in certain areas. Ironically, it was the internecine sectarian conflict within Northern Christianity that deterred the creation of large-scale ethnic communities during the Troubles in Derry and Belfast like those that now exist in English cities such as Birmingham and Bradford.

Whether the North is governed by a devolved Assembly at Stormont, direct rule from Westminster, or even through joint authority between Dublin and London, a peaceful solution to the Ulster crisis will spark a sharp increase in European asylum-seekers attempting to settle in Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Tactically, the far right wants to be in place and ready to capitalise politically on any explosion in the number of asylum-seekers entering the North. The far right’s key date will be the summer of 2005 when local government elections are scheduled, with speculation that the NF and WNP will try to repeat some of the election successes of the BNP.

However, while the BNP, NF, WNP and British Nazi Party represent the explicit face of neo-fascism in the North, there is also a underlying potential threat posed by implicit Nazi sympathisers within mainstream unionism. Nevertheless this threat should not be seen as more serious than is justified.

Iain Duncan Smith, leader of the Conservative Party, has already suspended the hardline right-wing pressure group, the Monday Club, in face of allegations concerning its position on race and asylum-seekers. The Ulster Monday Club was once one of the most influential pressure groups within the Ulster Unionist Party. Boasting 40 activists in many of the North’s constituencies, it had four UUP MPs in its ranks. However, the Ulster Monday Club, unlike the national organisation, was never dogged by any allegations that it had been infiltrated by fascists or neo-nazis.

There is no doubt that the scandal surrounding the national Monday Club was a contributory factor in its Ulster branch becoming defunct a number of years ago. However, it must be clearly emphasised that none of the serving and former MPs connected with the Ulster Monday Club at that time had ever been linked to racism or fascism.

That is no longer the case in the new millennium and a far-right faction within the UUP would like to see the Ulster Monday Club rekindled. Before the Ulster Monday Club disbanded, membership was only open to card-carrying members of the UUP. A key reason why the modern far right is targeting the Ulster Monday Club name is the esteem in which the Club was once held in Ulster Unionist circles.

One such long-time far-right sympathiser and card-carrying UUP member in an interview with the Irish Daily Star said: “The UUP is not really party in the true organisational sense. It is really a federation of organisations. The UUP is full of cliques, cabals and factions, and we on the far right are just one of them.

“We would like to see the Monday Club reformed in the UUP again, but there is the false impression that anyone on the far right has got to be dogmatically opposed to the Good Friday Agreement. The faction I represent, whilst it would certainly be small, would be classified as far right, but pro-Agreement. We have enough political maturity, experience and common sense between us to realise that the only way to advance our ideology is through mainstream politics.

“The good thing is that the BNP and NF will take the heat off us. We eventually want to organise within the UUP in much the same way as Militant successfully did within the Labour Party and the trade unions in Britain. The hard reality is that whilst they will make a lot of noise in the coming years, the BNP and NF will never be anything more than a ‘two men and a dog outfit’. But they are correct about the threat which the asylum-seekers will pose in Ulster – and in the South – within the next generation.”

The other major danger comes from the Ku Klux Klan, which is recruiting well-educated, middle class Protestants in a conspiracy to expel all asylum-seekers and the Irish travelling community from Northern Ireland. Klansmen from the reformed Knights of the Invisible Empire have been cashing in on anti-Islamic feeling to hand-pick activists from unionism’s traditional educated middle class, dubbed the fur coat brigade.

A spokesman for the Invisible Empire, who wished only to be identified as a “well-educated, middle-class, white graduate from County Antrim”, said his organisation had “permanently binned the movie-reel images of Klansmen in white sheets brandishing American Confederate flags and burning Black Baptist churches”.

He claimed he held the position of “Grand Dragon” in the Invisible Empire and that the rise of “Klan policies” was a “direct consequence of working-class loyalist reaction to the growth in the immigrant and gypsy races in Ulster”.

It would appear the Klan is trying to build a group of nazi intellectuals similar to the League of St George organisation in England, which is one of the main UK representatives in the European nazi network.

The Knights of the Invisible Empire were one of the largest Klan groupings of the last century. “As our title states, we will operate as an invisible empire within the political community. People are selected to join the Knights; to be a member of the Invisible Empire is by invitation only.”

The Invisible Empire, according to the Klan source, is organised along the structures of revolutionary cells in some of Ulster’s 18 Westminster constituencies. It takes its racism from the writings of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and its initiation ceremonies resemble the blood-curdling oaths of Irish Freemasonry.

There can be no doubting that the working and middle-class far right groups are working to a common agenda – preparation for the expansion of the EU and a potential increase in asylum-seekers coming to Ireland, especially to Ulster. The existing Irish travelling community is another target. There is a real danger that generations of sectarian violence in the North could be replaced by racial violence.