Since the last war hundreds - possibly thousands - of political parties have been formed in Britain. Scores - perhaps hundreds - of political parties exist in Britain today. Very few become well known.

How many people have ever heard of the New Britain Party, the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), the True Tory Party, the United Democratic Party, the Fellowship Party or the New Communist Party? "The Silly Party" and the "Very Silly Party" of Monty Python fame would score a higher recognition rating!

Yet the name of our party - the National Front - is known throughout the land. How has this come about?

When the NF was formed in 1967 it started with no greater advantages in terms of money or membership than the likes of the New Communist Party or the New Britain Party. Indeed, the NF started life with unique disadvantages in that its policies ran counter to contemporary political orthodoxy.

What, then, is the special ingredient which enabled the NF to pull itself out of obscurity and become as widely known (if not widely and willingly accepted) as it is?

That ingredient is Activism - the desire to get out and promote the name of the party and its ideas in a dynamic and defiant way. This compels reaction from more radical opponents and creates situations of genuine public interest which the mass media - be it ever so hostile to the NF - is compelled to report. Indeed, by boldly campaigning on the most controversial issues of the day in a flamboyant manner, the NF has made itself an issue of heated public debate.

If the NF had restricted itself to orthodox and 'respectable' political activities such as small meetings, leaflet distribution, pamphlet production, petitions to Parliament and the occasional participation in the electoral fray (just the kind of activities for small parties approved of by the Establishment) then the NF would be no better known today than those other parties.

The NF started its Activism by intruding on the political ground of its opponents. Some long-standing Activists will recall the excitement of the rough and tumble with Red stewards at the big left-wing rallies that used to be held at Central Hall, Westminster. Others will recall the pelting of Arthur Bottomley and Denis Healey with flour and tomatoes in East London.

Best remembered is the Labour meeting held in 1970 at Richmond in honour of David Ennals, then the MP for Dover, who specialised in publicised tours of Asian temples with his shoes off and a handkerchief on his head. Forty NF Activists attended this meeting. The moment race-traitor Ennals stood up Martin Webster, our National Activities Organiser at the time, gave a signal and we all pulled out paper handkerchiefs, placed them on our heads and fixed our gaze on the speaker. He became totally unnerved by this and began jabbering complete nonsense, evoking howls of mirth from us. The meeting was a fiasco for Labour and a huge publicity success for the NF.

The success of these initial operations won us the publicity which helped us to win a big enough membership to hold activities in our own right - especially marches.

Our marches serve two vital purposes. Firstly they display our will to convey our message to the public at large. Secondly, they serve notice both on our own membership and on our enemies that the final battle for the destiny of our nation will boil down to a battle for control of the streets. There will be no genteel options for patriots when the present foundations of society, already decayed, finally collapse. When the crunch comes our marches of yesterday, today and tomorrow will have fixed an awareness in the minds of those who do not wish to rally to the Red Flag (and who feel they have no reason to join us now) that there is another banner around which they can rally in the fight for British national and racial survival.

Another vital aspect of our Activist approach is our party's capacity to think around or side-step attempts by the Establishment to ban our activities - and to win more publicity for itself in so doing than if we had been left alone to do what we wanted to do in the first place.

Perhaps the most famous example of this was the way we coped with the ban on our march in Hyde, in the borough of Tameside, Greater Manchester, in October 1977. We had planned a march through the town to the Town Hall, which we had booked for a rally. The hooligan Reds threatened to riot and take the town apart, so the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Mr. James Anderton, applied to the Home Secretary to ban our march under the terms of the Public Order Act. A ban was duly promulgated.

The reaction of Martin Webster was to announce that he would walk the route through Hyde by himself with a Union Jack and a placard reading "Defend British Free Speech From Red Terrorism." He challenged Mr. Anderton to arrest him for a breach of the ban. This defiance sparked nationwide public attention, and put the unfortunate Mr. Anderton on the spot. While he was pondering what to do, Mr. Webster announced that an NF members' march would also take place in Greater Manchester but in another borough where the ban did not apply. To add to the publicity interest, the venue of the alternative march was kept a secret.

A one-man march in the borough where a march ban applied, plus a "secret" march elsewhere, produced masses of publicity for the NF. The Socialist Workers Party riot organisers went absolutely cuckoo trying to decide where to go and what to do when they got there.

A ban by the London Police on our march in llford in support of our by-election candidate in February 1978 was equally neatly side-stepped. Mr. Webster was summoned to Scotland Yard to be served with the commissioner's banning order. But he used this occasion to announce to the Police and to the Press crowding outside that while the NF would obey the march ban, it would still bring in members into the constituency on the day in question for a "mass canvass." So the Police did not defuse Ilford - they simply provided us with the opportunity to make it a different type of publicity bomb!

Similar nifty footwork was employed in 1980. At Southwark we managed to con the Left into believing that we were to march on 24th February. Once they had publicly committed themselves to a confrontation on that date, we announced that we had already registered with the Police our intention of marching a week later. In Lewisham a march was used to draw nationwide attention to the way in which Lewisham Council denied meeting hall facilities to the NF. Lewisham Council had formally complained to the BBC that it gave the NF "too much publicity" for having the audacity to march through Lewisham again.

Marches are not the only activities we can and must engage in. But whatever we do by way of activity on a local or a national basis we must always remember that it is the spirit of Activism which built the NF. This is the tradition which is unique to the NF. It is the spark which keeps our flame burning in bad times as well as in good. If this vital spark is ever put out by the forgetful, the ungrateful or the small-minded, then the NF will slide into obscurity and death.