It began to produce its own bulletin Redwatch a tatty photocopied sheet listing the names of its opponents

It began to produce its own bulletin, Redwatch, a tatty, photocopied sheet listing the names of its opponents. Battles with left-wing activists are remembered with a sense of tribal pride by many C18 members.”The Reds were going around and they were beating the living daylights out of the right wing. They were kicking in doors, petrol-bombing people and beating old men black and blue with hammers [a reference to an attack by anti-Fascists on a right-wing meeting in Kensington Library during 1992]. Red Action [an extreme left-wing group] were absolutely battering the Right,” recalled Charlie. “We decided we weren’t having that and we thought we’d do something about it.” Which meant? “We fuckin’ battered ‘em wherever we met, until there was no fucker left standing,” he laughed, puffing out his chest. “Now we don’t see them no more.”The relationship between C18 and the larger BNP began to deteriorate during 1993, however, as the latter became increasingly embarrassed by C18’s violent behaviour. The election of Derek Beackon as the BNP’s first- ever local councillor, in Millwall in September 1993, sealed the split between the two organisations.

From then on, the BNP proscribed joint membership (sometimes to little effect, because C18 didn’t have any “official” members as such).As C18 developed a more extreme National Socialist/Nazi position, it attracted a hardcore of 200 or so followers from around the country. Although its numbers would sometimes swell with occasional support from football hooligans and skinheads from the “white power” music scene, this hardcore remained constant.”Race not Nation – we’re not British nationalists, we’re racialists,” Charlie told me 15 months ago. They were happy to show me how to “bosh” someone in the stomach with a knife, as a penalty for failing to pay up on a loan. Similarly, they mocked the Government’s law and order strategy, claiming it was ineffectual and that the prisons were C18’s natural recruiting ground. With their jailbird tattoos, they would casually refer to the police as “scum” By their own admission they were violent people. “We’re thugs who follow an ideology,” boasted Charlie.C18 quickly attracted the street-hooligan elements of the Right, mainly from around London and the Home Counties area. Initially numbering just a few dozen members, the group grew rapidly as it went on the offensive, attacking left-wing bookshops, gay pubs and anti-apartheid activists.

We don’t pretend we’re something we’re not.”Instead, C18 looked for support among ultra-violent football hooligan firms and around the “white power” skinhead music scene. (Despite this, however, few of C18’s supporters were actually skinheads, preferring the designer-casual image of the football hooligans: “Skinheads are basically wankers. The only skinheads are Reds and queers,” laughed Steve Sargent, 32, Charlie’s softer-spoken younger brother, when I asked him about their image.)A number of members also worked (and still do) as cocaine dealers and illegal debt collectors in the criminal underworld. In a departure from previous right-wing ventures, C18 did not attempt to persuade ordinary people to its cause, or to win elections – it just acted. As Charlie Sargent told me when I first met him: “It would be a lie to think we are attractive to most people, because we’re not We are what we are. C18 took its name from the numerical position of Adolf Hitler’s initials in the alphabet – “1″ and “8″ – aiming to terrorise its opponents. The group had originally promised a violent race war against “invading” immigrants and a system which it believed had abandoned working-class “white” people.