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The Left’s angry fight against fascism There is often an authoritarian tendency in its struggle against bigotry

Skinheads were everywhere in Seventies Leeds. Credit: Michael Daines /Mirrorpix/Getty

Skinheads were everywhere in Seventies Leeds. Credit: Michael Daines /Mirrorpix/Getty


July 1, 2021   6 mins

“Growing up between Leeds and Bradford in the Seventies, everyone at my school seemed to be, at best, a casual racist and, at worst, an active member of the NF.”

Una, the graphic novelist and artist, grew up in the same world I did. I spent my youth in a small, white town in the northeast during a deep economic recession;  the only work available was in a very gloomy factory, 20 miles away. Racism was creeping and insidious. The National Front would recruit by standing outside our sink school and handing out leaflets, with headlines about immigrants “taking the jobs” of white men.

Most of the young blokes in the neighbourhood became skinheads, the few Asian families who lived there constantly attacked. After they learned I was a lesbian, I was targeted by the skinheads too. Walking to the shops on our council estate was deeply unpleasant as I was fearful I might bump into groups of young men, looking for distraction from the boredom and poverty.

Even the boys who defended me against the thugs frightened me. I was reminded of all this when I read Eve, new graphic novel by author Una, which though ostensibly about the climate crisis, also considers Right-wing populism and Left-wing authoritarianism. In her book the anti-fascists deployed the same tactics as the racists — just as I remembered from my own experience, and just as we’re seeing today.

I picked Eve up because I had so loved Una’s previous book, Becoming Unbecoming, all about experiencing sexual exploitation at the same time that the Peter Sutcliffe’s psychological cosh was terrorising young women. That book spoke to me because I came of age in the same time and place that Sutcliffe mutilated and killed six of his 13 victims.

The new book is also set up North, in a town similar to Keighley. It has a beautiful landscape, a diverse population — and a lot of tension. But this time it is set in the future. It is, Una tells me, about her worries for her children and the next generation. “It’s hard to talk to my own kids because I don’t feel optimistic for them,” she says. And so she funnelled all those worries into the book.

It is all pretty abstract. But if there is a story, it is about how a young girl and her family cope as society slides into totalitarianism. Their world is in turmoil, something we can relate to in our current angry political moment; and the family fears feel familiar — like something we’re about to experience ourselves. Following some sort of life-changing catastrophe, Eve leaves her community and sets off alone to seek a new way to live.

Eve feeding her chickens

One of the things Una was trying to work through in the story were her memories of that tension in the Seventies. Because she was something of an outcast, she was protected somewhat from the poisonous views: “I knew not to trust what people say when they are in that racist headspace.” The best that most people who might be a target for these attitudes can – and could — do in the Seventies is just get on with their lives and ignore it. Which is precisely what Eve’s family is doing. “Eve is a sort of ideal, artistic, bolshy, outdoorsy loner,” Una tells me. “She had the childhood I wished I’d had. I wrote her as a lesbian because I didn’t want the story to be about Adam and Eve, but Eve and Eve.”

In the novel Eve’s best friend, Si, is a mixed race boy who ends up fighting the fascists. He means well, but he soon becomes more enamoured with the fight than the cause.

As Eve’s mother says in the book: “These kids grow up with the constant soundtrack of spite, resentment, envy, despair… then they pick up this weekend, superiority-based victimhood…Bad things on the Internet. A few psychopaths. That’s all it takes.”

This is what’s happened in today’s world, with many on the Left using social media to bully and harangue women and some minority groups. They claim to be on the “right side of history”, but they are causing misery and distress. Eve refuses to be online and won’t even consider having a Nokia mobile. She describes the internet as being “like a virus, infecting people… and we all like to think we are immune.”

I couldn’t cope with the homophobic bullying when I was growing up; I decide to leave home to look for work. My mum wasn’t happy, it was the last thing she wanted, but she showed me nothing but support. She understood there was nothing there for me, and that my world was becoming a living hell. I needed to leave everyone I loved behind. Eve, in the book, does the same. She walks away from safety and security into the unknown.

When I moved to Leeds, it felt much better. There were lesbians, feminists and, although predominantly still white back in 1979, the city was home to a number of people from black British and immigrant communities.

But the racism remained fierce. The National Front chose Elland Road football ground to recruit from and would sell its newsletter every Saturday morning in the town centre. I lost count of the number of times the flat in which I lived with Rosie, who was mixed race, was vandalised and daubed with racist and anti-lesbian slogans. In the pubs, my girlfriend would be asked “Where are you from?”, and Rosie would answer “Hull”. I was seen by my family and those I’d left behind as someone in constant conflict with the world.

This was 40 years ago. And, yet, we can see the same flames being fanned today. There they are there in Batley and Spen, where race baiting is rife and is poisoning the polls. And the electorate is just getting angrier and angrier. I was the same back then, in constant conflict with the world. Every advert on TV, every comment from a man, every single thing made me angry. Si is angry about the world he inhabits but has nowhere to go other than into battle alongside the totalitarian Left. Si may think he is counteracting the right-wingers, but in fact is becoming almost as bad. Luckily, I found feminism before I could be swept into a hard-Left faction which would have allowed me to act upon my frustration with the ruling classes.

As far as Eve is concerned, she escapes into the beauty and serenity of nature and her writing, which is exactly what I did as a teenager in order to shut out the ugly reality of the despair and hatred all around me.

Eve escapes

But Eve has little faith in her writing skills, despite her mum’s encouragement and praise. Reading Una’s novel uncovered a buried memory for me. As a child, I used to write poetry and, because my dad kept promising to decorate my bedroom and never getting round to it (he worked long shifts and he never had the time or energy), I would scrawl them on my bedroom wall. In these poems I raged against the poverty, violence and brutality towards women and girls, and looked to the day when I could leave that town and escape the pain.

When I came to feminism four decades ago, I realised I hadn’t escaped at all, but rather had space to breath and an opportunity to bring about change. Just doing something — campaigning against male violence — kept me sane amid the devastating realisation that there is nowhere on earth where women are safe. It would never have occurred to me that 40 years later, young women would be having the stuffing knocked out of them by the proliferation of porn used as a weapon by so many of their male peers.

Una channels all her anger through the book, which poses some uncomfortable questions about the kind of society we’re building. The imagery of a world heading into dystopia is powerful and scary, with Una uses the metaphors of racism and fierce nationalism. There is politics: the shadow of Brexit, the idea of northern deprivation, and the fall of the red wall.

But the novel does manage to invoke a feeling of both hope and impending disaster, as though one force is in constant battle with the other. Which, of course, it is.

Eve is a book about human relationships, and in particular mothers and daughters, as well as how we build and maintain community and friendship. Human weakness and conflict are juxtaposed with hopeful futures and painful pasts. It is speculative fiction that feels incredibly timely. The questions threaded through the narrative is, “where will it all lead”, and “what kind of society do we wish to leave behind”?

As Eve says towards the end of the book: “We’ve wasted decades, arguing about things that didn’t matter.”

In the war between fascists and anti-racists in the Batley and Spen campaign, accusations of homophobia and bigotry have been targeted towards young Asian men, and the white, openly lesbian Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, has been aggressively challenged on her position on the Middle East conflict.

Everyone is certain that the arguments about such issues are about the things that do matter, but are we wasting our energy by entering into conflict with those that will never listen? If we wish to avoid slipping further into the dystopia depicted in Eve, we need to wake up to what is staring us in the face.

Back in my hometown recently, I heard from third generation Asians and newly settled migrants from southeast Europe. All had previously voted UKIP. All were disillusioned with the Labour Party, telling me they believe it could deepen divisions between minority groups if they ever regain power. I felt sad remembering the hopes and dreams of my youth, and the boys from my estate who got sucked in by racists. As Una so clearly sets out in Eve, we have choices, and we are standing not by the crossroads, but on the precipice.

‘Eve’ is published by Virago


Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation. She also writes on Substack.

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Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

Julie, I wish very much, every time I read an article like yours – the writer tells us WHY the government felt changing the racial makeup of the cities was the thing to do.

Then Why did they bring in low skilled who will exactly compete with the locals who are hard pressed for work allready? Why – was is good? Did it achieve some plan? If so what?
I was from London in the 1970’s, a middle class area, but you know London, the next town over is likely not. My people were more the Bikers and rockers, and when I return to the old place all the people I knew then have been price gentrified out, have left the area. They could never afford the houses they grew up in. But what is Really Odd is the people living in those houses are mostly old people, and people from very different places, who are NOT prosperous themselves.
Somehow the people who were from there have been priced out, to be replaced by others who are not very prosperous themselves – Why? How? London is now less than 49% native British – why? Was this voted on? People being squeezed out tend to resist, they lose, but may resist during the process….

So Leeds? Do you know the Mirpuri Migration? “More than half a million Mirpuri people, originally from Pakistan-administered Kashmir now live in England. Mirpuri immigrants in the UK are primarily located in Yorkshire. ” Google the study on this…. Tell us how this effected the locals – brought in to work the mills which then closed…..

Get over this “In the war between fas* ists and anti-ra* ists”, where I would call them right wing and Fas* ists (what are called anti-fas* ists are just really fas* ists), but I would also NOT judge the PAST by the Present when it WAS A DIFFERENT TIME then, the whole world was different.
“This was 50 years ago. And, yet, we can see the same flames being fanned today.” YES WE Do see the fanning, it is what today in the West is all about, and articles like this are very much part of this. The past was a different time, place. land, people, society…
Sorry you had a hard time growing up, but having seen a great deal of the world, this is not unusual, I have seen lands where people are starving, terrified of gangs, of the utterly corrupt police, of every kind of horror of poverty – it is hard out there, and 50 years ago was even more so.

Stephen Rose
Stephen Rose
3 years ago

There has been a great deal of incremental change since the 70’s, some of it good. More equality seems to mean more need to distinguish yourself from the mass,the flip side to that is alienation. There will always be extremists looking to leverage your pain and disillusionment. Social media is perfect for that, as is economic turmoil.
Writing novels, drawing, feeding chickens and finding someone to love is a good defence. The seventies were a particularly nasty, violent decade, but I do remember a lot of simple happiness too. On one level there seemed more cohesion, even in opposition. WW2 was only 30 years earlier and its shadow was long, the older generation looked on in amazement at the hedonism and felt it a very strangely won freedom. I grew up with Uncles who had suffered on Arctic convoys and in Japanese prisoner of war camps and spent time in and out of hospitals. They had no time for NF or Socialist worker, regarding them with equal contempt. But an allotment, piece of cake and a cup of tea, that was worth fighting for.

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
3 years ago

Just a thought, Julie, but have you ever considered that Labour is NOT the solution to the world’s problems?

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

Be fair. She thinks the solution to racism is sexism.

Stuart Rose
Stuart Rose
3 years ago

Where in the article did you get the impression that Julie has anything like a sanguine view of Labour?

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Stuart Rose

Well, Julie is an old Guardian War-horse columnist, as many of the Unhers’s stable of writers are – and so my guess is when she hears the trumpets of the Old Labour call she feels a frisson of the old class war battle excitement.

Stuart Rose
Stuart Rose
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

You’re right, I think, that many UnHerd regulars retain a sense of class politics, and class insult, especially if they, like Julie, actually experienced it in their lives. But Labour has so uncoupled itself from the working class issues that they’ve driven away people like Giles Fraser. As for Julie, well, I don’t know but I’d imagine if she votes Labour it’s with no enthusiasm and few expectations.

Julian Rigg
Julian Rigg
3 years ago

EVERYONE in our society has the right to live WITHOUT fear and express their views WITHOUT being abused. The left now seem to be against such wisdom and as a result the Labour Party is becoming less relevant by the day.    

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

all about experiencing sexual at the same time that the Peter Sutcliffe’s psychological cosh

What?

When I moved to Leeds, it felt much better. 

There’s something you don’t hear every day.

Last edited 3 years ago by Jon Redman
GA Woolley
GA Woolley
3 years ago

‘accusations of homophobia and bigotry have been targeted towards young Asian men, and the white, openly lesbian Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, has been aggressively challenged on her position on the Middle East conflict’. You couldn’t get a better example of disingenuous evasion than this.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
3 years ago

See, I have questions.
How did Julie even know that lesbian was a thing as a young’un?
La Wik says Julie grew up on a council estate. Was her family about the only middle-class family around? Or what? Based on my experience as a middle-class young’un in Britland before Julie’s time, I would have steered clear of all working-class lads. Just to be safe.
On my website ukpublicspending.co.uk it says that UK public spending was just short of 40% percent of GDP from 1960 to 1980. the years of Julie’s youth. You think maybe that a c**k-up or two on the public spending and industrial policy and ruling-class ideology front was responsible for all those skinheads?
See, I’m one of those notorious racist-sexist-homophobes of whom you’ve heard tell. And I think that “social” means people collaborating in non-governmental social organizations. If you have government running 40 percent of the economy, you do not have social. You have 40 percent of everything is force.
So you’d expect anti-social skinheads. That’s the whole point of politics, to get people riled up. Back in the day, the Labour Party thing was ginning up class conflict. Now they do racial conflict and gender conflict. Hey, politics is division, and politicians are the dividers-in-chief.
Sorry to be such a bigot and a fascist.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
3 years ago

Skinheads were few in number and located in a few areas. Vast parts of Britain were skinhead free. Those who had seen combat in WW2 had not time for their puerile actions, especially those who risked torture and execution if caught.