Flag Group

The Flag Group was a British political party, formed from one of the two wings of the National Front in the 1980s. Formed in opposition to the Political Soldier wing of the Official National Front it took its name from The Flag, a newspaper the followers of this faction formed after leaving and regrouping outside of the main and diminishing rump of the rest of the party.

During the early 1980s the Political Soldier wing of the NF held sway within the party and was on good terms with chairman Andrew Brons who, although a Strasserite by conviction rather than a disciple of Julius Evola and ruralism, largely supported the young radicals and co-operated with them to remove Martin Webster, the former ally of Brons' predecessor John Tyndall, from the party in 1984. However cracks between the two factions soon began to show and a power struggle ensued. This culminated in 1986 when the two wings of the party split, with around 3000 of the 5000 registered NF members breaking away with Brons to form a new separate group. The immediate actual cause of the split had been the refusal of the Political Soldiers to contest elections and the Brons group made this the issue on which they started their own group, initially called the National Front Support Group before adopting their more usual Flag Group moniker. Activists such as Martin Wingfield, Ian Anderson, Joseph Pearce and Tom Acton emerged as the new leading figures within this group and the Flag Group initially grew at a much faster rate than the Official National Front, although this was in part due to the Political Soldiers closing off membership of their wing.

The Flag Group rejected the mysticism of the Political Soldiers and the ONF's technique of establishing contacts with non-white groups such as Black Power and Islamic fundamentalism activists. Despite these differences with the ONF the Flag Group was not a direct copy of the earlier NF as it was also influenced by 'left-wing' economics ideals of Strasserism, albeit whilst emphasising anti-immigration and anti-Semitism alongside this. As time went on and Brons was sidelined in favour of Wingfield and Anderson the Flag Group began to look more towards the populism of the Front National, which was enjoying comparative success in France at the time, resulting in a return to more basic racist sentiments and less emphasis on economics as opposed to Strasserism. Amongst their more crudely racialist polices the Flag Group stressed the importance of having large families and included ideas about the white race being bred out of existence in their election literature. Steve Brady, formerly a leading figure in the National Party, championed this idea within the Flag Group although his other favoured idea, his opposition to Christianity in particular and religion in general and his desire to see a purely secular basis for Flag Group nationalism, was not taken up. Wingfield's strategy for growth included recruiting new members at football grounds, a tactic that initially paid dividends.

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