From Searchlight 25 years ago – The company they keep

At the Conservative Party conference in 2000, attendees were greeted by the sight of a Tory shadow minister sharing a platform with a leading far-right antisemite who claimed to speak for for Britain’s small businesses.

In the November 2000 issue of Searchlight, Steve Silver and Nick Lowles revealed what was going on

The Federation of Small Business, which claims to represent the interests of small companies and has taken a leading role in the campaign to reduce fuel prices, is being represented by one of Britain’s leading distributors of antisemitic material.

Don Martin, leader of the British League of Rights and also owner of Bloomfield Books, is Chairman of the FSB Policy Unit, holding one of the most important positions within the organisation.

This news will be a severe embarrassment to David Heathcoat-Amory, the Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, who only last month shared a platform with Martin at a fringe meeting at the Tory Party conference.

Powerful interest group

At the meeting, entitled: “Small Firms – What Future?”, Martin spoke out against the high price of fuel. The FSB, under Martin’s direction, is campaigning for a maximum price of 50p a litre.

With over 150,000 members, the FSB is considered to be one of Britain’s most powerful interest groups. With an annual budget of over £6 million, it is a well funded and professional operation.

It has its own telephone company, and its recent three-day exhibition at London’s Olympia was sponsored by Hewlett Packard, Intel, CobWeb Solutions Ltd and Investors in People.

The FSB is clearly a family affair for the Martin household. Pauline Martin is the Sudbury and Mid Suffolk branch organiser and Jane Martin its secretary. Both give Meadow Lane, Sudbury, as their address, also the home of Don Martin.

Born in Australia, Martin was dispatched to Britain in 1970 by his political guru, Eric Butler, leader of the hardline antisemitic League of Rights and publisher of The International Jew.

This notoriously antisemitic book was subtitled: “The Truth about the Protocols of Zion”, and made the bizarre claim that Hitler had been part of the Jewish conspiracy because his policies had resulted in the dispersal of Jews throughout the world which could now be more easily subverted.

Pseudo-respectable front

On arriving in Britain, Martin immediately launched the British League of Rights as a pseudo-respectable front and it instantly became involved in anti-Common Market campaigning.

The patron of the British League of Rights was Air Vice-Marshall Don Bennett, another notorious racist.

By 1974 Martin’s British League of Rights became the British chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance of nazi collaborators, Far East anti-communists, antisemites and South American death squad leaders, replacing Geoffrey Stewart- Smith’s Foreign Affairs Circle, which left due to WACL’s growing antisemitism.

To mark the League’s accession to WACL, Martin appointed the veteran racist and anti-union campaigner Dowager Lady Jane Birdwood as General Secretary.

In 1985 Searchlight reported how Martin brought many of these leading antisemites together at The Crown Commonwealth League of Rights conference in London.

Alongside Martin, Bennett and Butler were Canadian antisemite Ron Gostick, former Nato Operations Staff Officer Lieutenant-Colonel George Richey and the Middle East “expert” Ken Roden.

Also in attendance, and seen in deep discussions with Martin, were representatives of the US antisemitic journal, Spotlight. The Liberty Lobby publication described Martin as part of the “Great Britain bureau”.

Martin and Butler are strong advocates of Social Credit, the name given to the alternative economic and political system created by Major C H Douglas in the interwar wars, which claimed to identify and remedy the flaws of the capitalist system.

Rabid antisemitism

Initially singling out banks and the lending of money as the fundamental cause of the ills of society and the economy, it was not long before Douglas’s economic theory embraced rabid antisemitism, with Jews accused of being vicious “usurers” who were plotting through financial control to take over the world.

Much of Douglas’s work is available through Martin’s own bookclub, Bloomfield Books. He not only describes it as “recommended reading”, but uses the same Social Credit theory to explain modern economic problems.

Despite attempts to ingratiate himself in more respectable right-wing campaigns, antisemitism was never far from the surface.

Martin gave his supporters a clear insight into his real political beliefs when he reviewed the television series Holocaust in his journal On Target, deriding the programme as “a massive and most costly psychological warfare exercise”, and describing the Holocaust itself as “the Germans’ alleged ‘genocide policy’.”

Antisemitic forgery

However, it was his mail order book business, Bloomfield Books, that most completely revealed Martin’s politics.

Alongside racist publications, such as The Dangerous Myth of Racial Equality by D Watts and The Blue Book of the John Birch Society by Robert Welch, are the infamous antisemitic tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and A K Chesterton’s The Learned Elders and the BBC.

Another book sold through Bloomfield Books was This Worldwide Conspiracy, by Ivor Benson, the South African apartheid apologist and antisemite.

Benson, who went on to become information minister in Ian Smith’s racist administration, was a close friend of Martin, regularly visiting Britain to speak at League of Rights meetings. Martin acted as the UK distributor of Benson’s own magazine, Behind the News.

Hardline racists

His high-profile role within the FSB seems to have little impact on Martin’s political activities. He continues to publish On Target, a fortnightly political bulletin, and run Bloomfield Books.

In 1996 Martin was the guest speaker at the 50th anniversary celebrations of New Times, the publication of the Australian League of Rights. The meeting brought together some of the most hardline racists and antisemites in Australia.

Alongside Martin on the top table were Eric Butler and Graeme Campbell, the former antisemitic Labour MP who later became involved in Australia First, the party led by Pauline Hanson, until she too found him too extreme.

Unable to attend that meeting was David Irving, the Holocaust denier. He did however, send a written message of apology, telling the audience in German “the more your foes the greater your honour”.

‘Jewish influences’

A more recent example of Martin’s subtle antisemitism appeared in the October 1999 edition of On Target. Commenting on the moral decay of western Christian society, Martin attacks the philosophy of “world revolution” for destroying the “Existing Order”.

“Some readers”, Martin pre-empts, “may be struck by references to Jewish or Zionist influences … it is essential to include the predominant role of certain Jewish organizations and their adherents in the unbroken chain of revolution since that in France 1789.”

Secret societies

Singled out for promoting a conspiracy to destroy the “social and moral order” is Karl Marx, together with contributors to the Frankfurt School of social research, many of whom, Martin reminds us, were of “Jewish extraction”.

The work of these Jewish academics leads Martin to the conclusion, “We know … that religious faiths have been handed down through history, and may therefore conclude that so, too, have these secret societies that control the Power of Evil”.

For Martin the entertainment industry, “in which it has long been ‘open season’ in debasing Christianity”, has a “strong and relentless pro-Zionist bias”. The recent announcement of an annual Holocaust Remembrance day is seen as part of the “ratchet like promotion of Zionism”.

Martin is ably supported in his political work by his wife, Jane, who for many years was the administrative secretary for the BLR, a function she now performs for her local FSB branch, and Barry Turner, a former army officer who has extensive Middle Eastern links.

No embarrassment

Questioned by Searchlight, a spokesman for the FSB seemed undisturbed by the information. “I know he’s a publisher of Bloomfield Books”, he said.

“This is not a surprise to me. There was something in The Guardian about eight months ago, about his links to the British Housewives League. I raised it with David Dexter, the Honorary National Secretary of the FSB, and he had a word with Donald Martin who told him that it was all a long time ago.”

Asked whether Martin’s politics would prove an embarrassment to the organisation, the spokesman said “what we get officers to do is to stick to issues relating to the FSB”, adding: “with 155,000 members, we are not a badge-issuing organisation. We do not say that all the carpenters are good.”