Flag Group - Development

Development

Brons had a history of low-level co-operation with the British National Party whilst he and BNP leader John Tyndall went back to the early 1960s when they were both active in the National Socilaist Movement and so not long after the split Brons contacted Stanley Clayton-Garnett, the BNP's Northern leader, with a view to closer co-operation. Tyndall and Brons met formally in Leeds in May 1987 to discuss the formation of a 'Nationalist Alliance' to be organised along the lines of the SDP–Liberal Alliance in existence at the time. A Liaison Committee was set up as a result of this meeting and Brons put the idea to the Flag Group's steering committee that same July. The plan however came to nothing as it was rejected by the steering committee and so disavowed by Brons in October 1987. Within the Flag Group it was widely reported that the rejection had happened because of a fear that Tyndall intended only to swallow up the party and make himself sole leader whilst within the BNP it was suggested that the Flag Group's Strasserism made them incompatible with the party. It has also been argued that Flag editor Martin Wingfield, who published an editorial denouncing notions of merger, sabotaged the move because he bore a grudge against Tyndall and his father-in-law Charles Parker after Wingfiled had attempted, unsuccessfully, to replace the latter as NF organiser in Sussex some years earlier, a struggle that resulted in Wingfield's temporary expulsion from the NF. Nonetheless the parties did continue to co-operate unofficially whilst Tom Acton also managed to win support for the Group from the influential publisher Anthony Hancock who had initially favoured the ONF in the split. As well as their monthly newspaper The Flag the group also published a monthly magazine Vanguard and Lonheart, a quarterly.