I was a fascist boot-boy

When National Front activist Matthew Collins turned informer, it destroyed the entire party. He tells Andrew Orme why he's back in Britain after 10 years on the run from his former friends

Matthew Collins walks into a pub in London and orders the first of three afternoon pints. He is visibly anxious and it takes a while for him to look me in the eye. It's little wonder that his attention is elsewhere. Collins has just returned from 10 years in hiding in Australia and he is still a wanted man. Once the south London chairman of the National Front, and an activist with the far-right terror group Combat 18, Collins became an informer after a particularly brutal incident in which the group stormed an anti-BNP meeting. For two-and-a-half years, he secretly passed information to Searchlight, the anti-fascist organisation. He fled for his life when Special Branch warned him that his cover was blown, and he was going to be shot by far-right extremists.

"I could meet them on the Tube on the way home. I could meet them getting my hair cut. I could walk into a pub and they would be there. I have a healthy respect for their criminality in terms of what they would do to me," says Collins, 31.

Sitting on a leather sofa at the back of the pub away from the crowds, Collins, dressed anonymously in the ubiquitous modern uniform of jeans and a navy sweatshirt, begins to relax. "What a silly boy. What a silly, silly boy," he says of his involvement with the far right. It started as a schoolboy. He describes having "succumbed to the glamour" of British National Party literature being distributed around his council estate in Lewisham. At the age of 15, he joined the National Front.

"When this literature presented itself to me it seemed like a perfect way of expressing myself," says Collins, who speaks with a trace of an Australian accent. "I grew up surrounded by racism. I thought it was a popular expression of people's discontent. And I wanted to be controversial. I was underachieving at school. I had issues about where I fitted in, in terms of my family and society. I was a very angry and generally unhappy child."

The youngest of four boys, he was the only child in primary school to come from a broken family. His parents divorced after his father had an affair with Collins's 16-year-old babysitter. Collins was five at the time. He insists that the fact that the woman was black had nothing to do with his subsequent racism.

The National Front not only welcomed him, but made him feel as though he belonged. "We were all very similar. We were often the youngest in the family, most had suffered some great trauma in their childhood, some had been beaten by a violent parent, most of them were illiterate. They didn't fit in and had no sense of identity. Most of them had been expelled from school at some stage. So I fitted into all that quite nicely."

More articulate than most, at the age of 17 he went to work full-time at the National Front head office (a dirty old back room in east London with broken glass on the floor) and a year later was made chairman of the south London branch. "I didn't have any social life. I spent my entire time with the same group of people doing the same mundane perverted things - leafleting, postering, stickering, sitting in the back room of a pub complaining about blacks, and Jews. There would quite often be these amazing explosions of violence." They involved beating people up and hitting them with chairs, glasses or pool cues. Collins's favoured weapon in a march or rally was a Lucozade bottle "used for smashing against people's heads" which was legal to carry. "You can even stab someone with a highly sharpened pencil. You can use just about anything you want to inflict pain on someone. I would have punched people in the face, stomped in people's faces, kicked people in the head."

A particularly vicious attack by far-right activists on a group of mostly Asian women at a public meeting at Welling Library, London, in 1989, made him question just what he had got involved with. The meeting had been called for people to voice their concerns about the BNP's activities in the area. Forty supporters burst in and 17 members of the public were hospitalised. "I hit a man on the door and when it degenerated I withdrew," says Collins.

The incident prompted his first anonymous call to Searchlight, which publishes a monthly magazine, during which he divulged the names of the people involved in the attack. He continued his political life with the National Front, but gradually began to feel disillusioned with fascism. "The leaders of the National Front and the BNP were invariably Oxbridge educated. Almost all of them tried to make a living off the membership fees of working-class members. I gradually began to realise that I had more in common with my black neighbours than I had with some guy who owns a farm in Wales. I just grew up. I rejected the notions and ideals of fascism, then I dealt with the racism."

Collins, who was also volunteering at the BNP bookshop, started calling Searchlight more regularly with information. He would meet the magazine's publisher, Gerry Gable, in the Science Museum, at a hotel or someone's home and pass him membership lists, hit lists, details of where the National Front and BNP were going to be and the names of members who had been involved in attacks. Gable paid him in book tokens.

"I was in a great amount of danger," says Collins. "When you spend your time with people who would go on to commit murder and plant bombs, who would go on to be convicted of running guns, and who had a history of glassing people in the face - people who had criminal convictions almost entirely for violence - you know without doubt that you are never far from being a victim of that violence yourself. These people know your life inside out. It also wears you down after a while because I was betraying my friends, and they were the only ones I had."

In about 1991, he became involved with Combat 18 - the far-right terror group which began its life as a security wing of the BNP, and which also had links with loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland - in order to leak information to Searchlight.

"I took as little part in their physical activities as possible. But I was obviously witness to their violence, and it was more disturbing than it had ever been before, because it was so much better organised and run. These guys were out every night fire-bombing, setting fire to people's houses, cutting people's brake leads, making and sending bombs, buying guns and mixing in proper criminal circles. I slowly eased myself out when I realised they were quite how dangerous they were."

Collins says the effects of his leaks were devastating. "The National Front was so wrecked by where these rumours and leaks were coming from that it imploded. Whole numbers of branches walked away and joined the BNP mainly. The National Front is now an organisation with about 50 members. I take a lot of responsibility for that. It makes me feel absolutely delighted."

In 1993 he took part in a World In Action documentary to expose Combat 18. Though his words were spoken by an actor, some people in the far right realised it was him. A number had already grown suspicious of him. "They'd questioned me a couple of times before about why I wasn't so active any more. I said I had things going on, I had a girlfriend, I even feigned a religious conversion for a while. I didn't think too clearly about what would happen as a result of taking part in the documentary. I sort of thought it would destroy Combat 18."

Instead, it nearly destroyed him. Two days after the programme was screened, two members of Special Branch turned up at his work place. By that stage, he had resigned from working at the National Front's head office, but he refuses to say what job he was doing for security reasons. The men didn't mince their words: Collins was going to be shot.

Within weeks, he fled to Australia with a working visa obtained by Special Branch. "As soon as I got on that plane all the worries ended." Within a week Collins met a model whom he married two years later. However, the couple divorced after four years. He had a number of jobs including working as a freelance journalist for the Australia/Israel Review, a Zionist pressure group, and as a logistics manager for a fashion company. While he was there he also wrote a submission for the Stephen Lawrence inquiry on his experience of race- hate groups indoctrinating young white children, at the request of Searchlight. Eventually, he admitted his past to those close to him, which they accepted. "I loved Australia. I made some really good friends. Life there was infinitely better than it's ever been here," he says.

Nevertheless, he returned to London last Christmas. Not only was he homesick, but he had been offered the directorship of Operation Wedge, a Searchlight initiative to help prevent young people from getting involved with race-hate groups. He has already co-authored a guide to the signs and symbols, such as emblems and tattoos, associated with far- right groups.

On Thursday night, Collins will appear in another television documentary, Dead Man Walking, which follows his return to the UK. While none of the production staff wanted their names credited at the end of the film for security reasons, Collins's identity is not disguised. "I'm not going to let them control my life. I will show them a healthy and distant respect, but I want to smash them and stop them getting any votes in the June elections," he says. In the meantime, he'll be watching his back very carefully.

Matthew Collins appears in the documentary 'Dead Man Walking' on Thursday at 10.30pm on BBC3