British anti-racist activists recount how they organised against the far right

British anti-racist activists who confronted far-right organising in the 1970s and 1980s have described their experiences in interviews published by the Guardian on 10 October 2026. Their accounts cover community organising in Bradford and the music campaign Rock Against Racism, offering a record of what participants did and how they now understand it. Independent archives document the scale and locations of some of that activity.

The interviews include Tariq Mehmood, who helped found the Bradford Asian Youth Movement, and Red Saunders, who helped launch Rock Against Racism. Their recollections describe responses to racism in different settings: people organising for safety in their neighbourhoods and musicians bringing audiences together at concerts. Those are accounts of past action, rather than evidence that the same approaches would have a particular effect today.

How Tariq Mehmood organised in Bradford

Mehmood told the Guardian he encountered racism soon after arriving in Bradford from Pakistan in 1967. At school, he recalled, he and other children began meeting before walking to class together because they feared attacks on the way. Later, while working in a mill in Otley in the late 1970s, he helped found the Bradford Asian Youth Movement, part of a network seeking equal rights and defending communities against racist attacks.

The movement later split. Mehmood joined the United Black Youth League in 1981 and disputed a police characterisation that its members wanted violence, according to the Guardian. He recalled community patrols amid attacks and fears of further attacks, and said some members made petrol bombs for self-defence. Those details are material to the history he describes; the claim about the group’s purpose is his account of a contested episode.

Mehmood told the Guardian he considers the present far-right atmosphere more vicious and believes community organisations have been lost. Those are his assessments; the cited accounts do not offer a comparative measure of far-right activity across the periods. His memoir, Rebellion: Self-defence and the Story of the Bradford 12, has been published by Daraja Press, and the Guardian says a documentary he co-directed is due to premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 14 and 15 October.

What Rock Against Racism’s archives show

Saunders told the Guardian that an open letter he wrote with others after Eric Clapton’s reported racist remarks in 1976 helped launch Rock Against Racism. He described a campaign that connected music with opposition to racism and fascism. In his account, small local gigs mattered alongside the larger carnival at London’s Victoria Park: organising was spread across venues and communities, not confined to one major gathering.

Autograph’s account of photographer Syd Shelton’s archive dates Rock Against Racism’s activity from 1976 to 1981. It says the movement organised five carnivals and more than 500 gigs, bringing punk and reggae performers onto the same stages. The archive describes the Victoria Park carnival in 1978 as drawing a march of 100,000 young people from Trafalgar Square, with performers including The Clash, Steel Pulse and X-Ray Spex. That attendance figure is Autograph’s historical account.

The movement also reached Manchester. The Manchester Digital Music Archive records a Northern Carnival against the Nazis in Moss Side on 15 July 1978, co-organised by Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. A march went from Strangeways to Alexandra Park, where performers included Buzzcocks and Steel Pulse. The archive estimates 15,000 people joined the march and a further 25,000 attended the music event; those figures are estimates, not verified headcounts.

The Manchester archive says local organisers responded to the earlier London carnival. It also records a letter showing that Rock Against Racism’s London committee had reservations about holding a northern event under its banner. That detail shows the campaign’s expansion involved decisions and disagreements among organisers, even as events brought together musicians and audiences in more than one city.

What the historical accounts can establish

Together, the interviews and archives establish that campaigners organised neighbourhood activity, concerts, marches and carnivals in response to racism and the far right. They also preserve different kinds of evidence: participants explain their choices, while archives record dates, venues, performers and estimated crowds. Neither type of record alone establishes how much the campaigns changed support for far-right groups or whether their methods would produce the same results now.

The distinction matters for readers looking to the past for a response to current politics. Mehmood and Saunders can describe the circumstances they faced and the organising they took part in; the archives show that some campaigns operated across Britain and attracted substantial audiences. Claims about present conditions or the future effectiveness of those methods remain judgments rather than measured conclusions in these sources.