School Kids Against the Nazis (SKAN) was an anti-fascist group, supported by the Socialist Workers Party to respond to the violent threat from the National Front (NF) in the late 1970s – specifically, NF attempts to target schools and what fascists called ‘red teachers’.
SKAN was spied on by HN354 Vincent Harvey (‘Vince Miller’) and more substantially by HN126 ‘Paul Gray’ who filed 22 reports on SKAN and other youth activist groups.
The group was named a main target in the 1978 SDS Annual Report. SDS surveillance may have been fuelled, in part, by MI5’s interest in ‘subversion in schools’.
Faced with violence at counter-demonstrations, SKAN organised self-defence classes with Asian, Afro-Caribbean and women’s community groups in areas such as Tower Hamlets.
A piece by Nick Murray in Huck Magazine provides much of the information in this article. Murray interviewed former SKAN members including Rehad Desai, who recalled:
We’d go down there as a bunch of schoolkids, half – if not most of them – girls, and next thing we knew, a bunch of hardened street fighters would come out and you’d be getting chased around the streets. It was a physical time.
Footage from a 1978 Thames Television documentary showed Hackney students marching and chanting, ‘Black or white, join the fight – stop the National Front.’
Brian Capaloff, who took part in that march, said:
[SKAN] and the concert at Victoria Park... were also for the rest of London, to say that we’re not going to take [racism], because Hackney was mostly a place where [racism] wasn’t taken already...There was nowhere for racism to survive in that kind of environment [in Hackney].
SKAN also joined the Anti-Nazi League in opposing the local council’s plan to let the NF use Ealing Town Hall. After collecting a 6,000-signature petition, 20 SKAN members disrupted a council meeting by pelting councillors with ‘eggs, flour and stink bombs’, causing the meeting to be scrapped.
Source: Nic Murray. Huck Magazine: The British school kids who took on the Nazis in the ’70s.