ENGLAND, 1946. Rationing, bombsites, the war over, fascism overcome. Or nearly overcome. The images of the Nazi death camps in Europe are still fresh in everyone’s mind, but a resurgence of support for Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts has brought terror back to the streets and groups of British fascists roam the capital.

Gradually men rise up to confront them. Jews back from the war, young radicals and demobbed English blokes determined to tackle in their streets the evil they had spent six years fighting. Armed with fists, coshes and the occasional knuckle-duster, they depend above all on their spirit as a group and their bravery as individuals. And one of the bravest of them all, certainly one of the toughest, is a teenage hairdresser’s apprentice called Vidal Sassoon.

It is one of the most unlikely bits of fashion trivia anyone could imagine. Vidal Sassoon, the man who invented modern hairdressing, gave us the Five Point Cut, the Asymmetric Bob and Mia Farrow’s £2,500 haircut for Rosemary’s Baby, was a street-fighting man.

Never Again

“When I came back to London after the evacuation I was 17,” he recalls. “I wanted to be a footballer but my mother insisted I get a profession. We lived on the fourth floor of a Petticoat Lane tenement building, where the smell of bagels wafted up from the bakery downstairs. The Lane was a maze of colourful humanity, people cared for one another and showed a kindness that knew no barriers of race. But then that popinjay Mosley was released from prison, where he had spent most of the war. And our lives were to change for the worse.

“Suddenly, there were fascists preaching hate on every corner,” says the cool pensioner, his voice tightening a little with anger that seems undimmed by the passage of time. “These rabble-rousers were the same Nazi sympathisers who had spent the war years in prison and were now starting up where they had left off.

“Their speeches and their literature depicted us, the Jews, as coarse, ugly caricatures with long beards and dirty finger-nails, dressed in black gabardine. And they hurled the same abuse that I remembered from the 1930s, when I was too young to do anything about it.

“I don’t remember exactly when we decided to fight back, but the pictures we were seeing from Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau changed the shape of our rage.”

And so it was that the fresh-faced cockney (the measured, mid-Atlantic tones of the modern Vidal are the product of elocution lessons taken in the 1950s) signed up with the 43 Group, a crudely armed paramilitary force which began as 43 Jewish ex-servicemen and which by its peak was to number more than 1,000 Jews and gentiles, men and women.

“We had turned the cheek for the last time,” says Sassoon, “and as a 17-year-old recruit, I was proud to be involved. The men were mostly ex-servicemen. They didn’t want anything but peace, but it was disgusting that having just fought a war against Nazism, home-grown fascists were allowed to start reorganising.

A boy among hardened fighting men, Sassoon was to become one of the toughest and keenest of all the informal soldiers.

Many former 43ers remember Vidal well and his solid reputation of standing firm when the fists started flying. “To think what a big deal hairdresser he would become,” said one of the veterans. “You would never have guessed to see him there, deep in the fray.”

Arrested

Inevitably the police arrested hundreds of people during the five years of organised violence and on at least one occasion the young Sassoon found himself in jail. “I’ve lost count of the number of actions I was involved in,” he smiles, “but I do remember the night we were told to go up to Kilburn [in northwest London], to break up a fascist meeting. There was a real punch-up.

We chased the Blackshirts into a pub, but we were ourselves being chased by the police. They arrested us on the spot, threw us in the back of the van and started calling us filthy foreign Jew bastards. They beat the hell out of my old friend Big Mo Levy and threw us in a cell for the night.”

At every turn, his modesty will not allow him to describe his double life as anything out of the ordinary for the time and place. “I took a few knocks, but we did physical damage to them, too. That’s what happens when there is hate.” But to show up for work, in a ladies hairdresser’s salon of all places, battered and bruised from a night’s fighting, must have been a surreal position for a young man to find himself in.

“Well yes,” he says gently, “I had to have a sense of humour. There was one occasion one morning after a particularly nasty tear-up, I went to work at the salon in Mayfair with a badly scratched face and this refined client looked at me and said, ‘Good God, Vidal, you look terrible. What happened to you?’ “Nothing much, I said. I just fell over a hairpin.

The attack earlier this week on schoolchildren in Toulouse was horrific. But for the last five years the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-semitism has warned that such an attack was depressingly predictable.

Nobody could say where or when. Not which country or what particular brand of hatred the deranged perpetrator hid behind. Sadly, this attack could have happened anywhere in Europe or beyond. It may have been inspired by far-right, far-left or extreme Islamist ideologies and it brings home the key themes of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism. We learned about the scale of Jew-hatred and the potential for outrages. This in turn highlighted the need for parliament to support the Jewish community in all aspects of its self-protection arrangements.

In these aspects, we in the UK are ahead of the rest of the world. The Community Security Trust is a reliable organisation which not only defends and protects its constituents but informs and reassures them – as we saw in the immediate aftermath of the Toulouse attacks.

Parliamentarians work with the CST and others to ensure Britain acts to support minority communities. We were diligent in helping to seek governmental funding for security for Jewish schools and to insist that the police to disaggregate anti-semitic incidents in their data and it our duty and mandate to continue to demonstrate robustness in tackling racism even when uncomfortable to do so.

Somewhere, sometime there will be another attempted attack. We don’t know where or when but that is the point. We do not have the luxury of time. Politicians must take a lead, not just in response to outrages, but also when things appear calm and deal with underlying problems. Our group has had some success in securing action from other parliaments. The Germans, Italians and the Canadians have both held their own inquiries and started to action them. I call on other European parliaments to hold their own inquiries, addressing the issues head on and work alongside the Jewish community.

At times like this we must stand together. But tomorrow when newspapers carry other news, we the elected political leaders must continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community, accepting no excuses for racism and to leave no hiding place for those whose minds are contorted by hatred and evil.

In addition, a cross-party parliamentary motion has been tabled calling on Parliaments worldwide to keep the fight against racism and antisemitism on their agenda.

Lastly, in response to comments by Baroness Ashton comparing Toulouse and Gaza,  Jon Benjamin, CEO Board of Deputies; Richard Benson, CEO CST; Jeremy Newmark, CEO JLC and John Mann MP, on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism said today: “Baroness Ashton’s remarks were both crass and wholly inappropriate. The loss of young, innocent lives anywhere is of course appalling, but the attempt to draw parallels between Toulouse and Gaza was deeply, offensive and unworthy of a person in her position.”

In late 2010 at the LSE, Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in chief of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, referred to the “Jewish Lobby” a number of times, and accused the Jewish students in the audience of “bombing Gaza”. They walked out in protest. Last month former US marine Ken O’Keefe, speaking at Middlesex University, said that Israel “should be destroyed”, before comparing Jews to the Nazis.

This is unfettered hate speech on our UK campuses. Then there are the individual incidents, such as the Nazi-themed antics on an LSE ski trip which included a Jewish student. Forty-two per cent of Jewish students have witnessed an anti-Semitic incident on their campus in the last year. It does not seem as if universities are tackling these incidents as they would if other minorities were targeted in the same way.

Whilst in each of these cases, the universities are now reviewing procedures and looking to guard against future incidents, it is fair to say that their initial responses fell short of what outspoken and avowedly anti-racist institutions would aspire to. For each incident, it has taken the intervention of Jewish or other minority students explaining the problem and driving the reaction.

The Education (No 2) Act 1986 says that higher education Institutions must ‘take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for its members, students and employees and for visiting speakers’. ‘Freedom of speech’ seems to have become the catch-all response for universities faced with examples of hate speech such as those I have cited. What they have not grasped is that it is freedom of speech within the law that is to be protected, and hate or racist speech is outside the law. Many university administrators seem to be ignorant of the law or have not updated their Codes on visiting speakers for decades.

They need to consider the relevant legislation: the Equality Act, the Protection from Harassment Act, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act are among the many recent laws that limit freedom of speech and exclude the stirring-up of race hatred and violent hate speech. Universities have a special duty to promote race harmony between various groups on campus, which they are tending to ignore. Meetings and known hate speakers can be risk-assessed, banned or stopped in their course if the law is being broken and there is disruption on campus.

Historically, the students’ unions were considered to be outside the equality laws, although they present themselves as defenders of human rights in general. The anomaly by which they were not included in the definition of public institutions has been addressed through their potential loss of exempt charity status and the need for universities to monitor how they conduct themselves and spend their money. The national student union, the NUS has now produced clear guidance on how to handle hate speech on campus, responsibilities under the law and details of best practice. The Commons home affairs select committee recently proposed that government set up a central contact point to assist in the assessment of hate speakers.

My question aims to elicit confirmation of legal responsibilities and to set the record straight so that ‘freedom of speech’, a central tenet of our society, is respected and not abused as a stock defence against action on racism.

The hansard of the question is available here

Hate crimes and incidents come in many different forms. It can be because of hatred on the grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or disability. Sadly there is an increasing problem of hate crime being perpetrated via the internet. True Vision is an online reporting portal for hate crime. The website at www.report-it.org.uk has already had some 56,000 visitors and offers information to victims, downloadable resources and the ability to report crimes online. To date over 1,300 reports have been made to the site with just over 300 of these relating to Internet offences.

The website has had no direct marketing and relies on links to existing websites and on search engines. The online reporting facility has been developed so that hate crimes can be reported online where victims don’t wish to go directly to the police. Crimes can be reported by ‘third-party’ organisations too. The Community Security Trust (CST) are one such organisation in the Jewish community, who are offering to help other communities to follow their example.

Safer Internet Day is marked each year in February to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world. To mark the occasion, the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism hosted the launch of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) scheme.

John Mann MP said: “True Vision represents an important step in the fight against hate crime. I was pleased to lend my support to the project and encourage any constituents who are victims of a hate crime, wherever it occurs to visit www.report-it.org.uk.”

Superintendent Paul Giannasi, Manager of the True Vision programme said: “We are delighted that MPs are supporting the True Vision project. We know that many victims do not report crimes and it is vitally important that constituents are made aware that victims have a range of reporting options. Be it online or in person, we will not tolerate hate crime.”

The poster used for the launch can be downloaded by clicking here.

In other news, the CPS have released their report on hate crime for 2010-11, details are available here.

A total of 586 incidents were reported to CST in 2011, a 9% fall from the 645 antisemitic incidents recorded in 2010. Despite this second successive annual fall, the 2011 total is still the fourth-highest annual total since CST began recording antisemitic incidents in 1984. The last six years have seen the six highest annual totals so far recorded by CST: 598 antisemitic incidents in 2006, 561 in 2007, 546 in 2008, 929 in 2009, 645 in 2010 and now 586 in 2011. The 2009 peak reflected antisemitic reactions to that year’s conflict between Israel and Hamas, illustrating the impact external events can have on British antisemitism.

A further 437 reports of potential incidents were received by CST, but upon investigation were not deemed to be antisemitic and are not included in this total. This makes a total of 1,023 incidents that required some degree of response from CST staff and volunteers throughout the year. Most incidents are reported directly to CST by incident victims or witnesses.

For the first time ever, CST recorded more antisemitic incidents in Greater Manchester than in Greater London. This is mainly the result of improved reporting of incidents by Manchester’s Jewish community to CST and to Greater Manchester Police, and a close working relationship between CST and GMP.

The breakdown of the incident types shows that there were 92 violent antisemitic assaults in 2011, including one classified as ‘Extreme Violence’; 63 incidents of Damage & Desecration of Jewish property; 394 incidents of Abusive Behaviour, including verbal abuse, antisemitic graffiti and one-off cases of hate mail; 29 direct antisemitic threats; and 8 cases of mass-mailed antisemitic leaflets or emails.

You can read more about the type of incidents in 2011, who they affected, who carried them out and where they happened, in the full report available here.

The UN held a memorial event, the Scottish Parliament had its time for reflection and announced renewed funding for school visits to Auschwitz and the UK Parliament held a memorial debate the video for which is below.

Meanwhile, a report has been published by a group of experts in Germany on antisemitism. The group which authored the report was commissioned by the German Parliament to do so, in a model inspired by the UK APPG inquiry model. A story about the report is available from BBC online the report is online here.

1. Readers may have heard by now about an assault on a Jewish student who took issue with a Nazi-themed game being played by LSE students on a ski trip.

John Mann MP said: “It is vital that universities have effective systems in place for dealing with racist incidents like this and I insist that rapid action is taken to deal with this issue”

2. MP Tom Harris has stepped down from his role leading the Labour party’s social media review after he posted a ‘joke video’ of Hitler.

These incidents come just two days before MPs take part in the Holocaust Memorial Day debate in Parliament.