Ken Gott isn’t a name I hear everyday now, but I heard it most days over the course of three months as a teenager. It was an assumed name of someone making waves in many different parts of the country.
I heard it because I was looking into a new style of fascism. It began as a Summer project. I had been asked to research local politics for a Council member. It was to help build a picture of local civic engagement.
It was a unique turn of events in a small effort to look into the activities of political parties. It happened because it worried most people, and I thought it was more pressing than any other matters.
A timely meeting
As I learned about the actual man behind the name itself, I grew convinced that there are better things to do in life than to be busy hating on others.
At the other end of my research project, I found out about a meeting he was holding in the same town I lived in. It was a chance to encounter the person that I had heard about only through second-hand information.
I wondered if it would confirm my worst fears, or put to bed those of others. In the event, it made me feel worse about it. His speech was relative to himself only.
He felt “on fire” in his soul, he said to someone else before the meeting started. He soon pulled off to take his stand. It was indicative of his emotions at the time, as well as his outlook on life.
He was more radical than an MP, and more forceful than a Police Officer. I listened to his part of the proceedings, partly because he spoke first but also because it became extremely rowdy in the crowd soon after.
He was impassioned about his supposed “purpose” in life and made it a point of his speech. He was actually in the early years of his sort of radical political activity.
An evil way
Later, the group – now called “Fascist Estate” because it settled on this name only – turned into an asset-taking business as its way of “rebuke” to the English people for allowing a form of politics they couldn’t agree with.
Ironically, the interchange between the Conservatives and the Labour party actually put off the more radical sets among us. They knew it was fair, and open to everyone.
He was very simple in his way and manner of speaking to people. He didn’t care about violence, then, and began to use it later on to insist on his own points.
The group Ken Gott styled around himself became a monolith in the eyes of some, but an enemy in those of others.
It isn’t a feature of everyone’s experience of life here, but old style fascism in its new form has tried to start a storm of controversy in parts here, and may do at some point again.
