The New Statesman archive

Short talk with a Fascist beast

The Notting Hill race riots, which took place 50 years ago, were the first significant outburst in London against unrestricted black immigration. The American Clancy Sigal, then a young journalist, wrote a revealing account of a casual encounter with a handful of the white youths involved in the attacks. He portrays a group of frustrated young men, the most prominent of whom confesses to being both a Fascist admirer and a fan of the Communist Party.

The Czech crisis and the New Statesman

By Kingsley Martin

Throughout the 1930s, the New Statesman upheld a principled resistance to Nazi Germany. It was therefore all the more dismaying to many readers when, in an August 1938 editorial, Kingsley Martin argued that Czechoslovakia's frontiers might have to be redrawn to enable a German minority to join the Third Reich. Martin admitted that the editorial "pursued" him for many years, even though, the following month, he denounced the betrayal of the Czechs to Hitler

Dubcek's terrible bargain

By Andrew Kopkind

The Warsaw Pact's occupation of Czechoslovakia from 21 August 1968 shocked many in the west who had hoped that the country was developing a more market-oriented socialism acceptable to the Soviet Union. This report from Prague by Kopkind, an American correspondent on the NS, reflected the ambiguities of its aftermath. It took many months before the Kremlin was able to consolidate its rule through a new, hardline communist regime.