Double podcast about the Angry Brigade, Britain’s first home-grown urban guerrilla group, in the 1960s and 70s, in conversation with John Barker, who was put on trial as part of the group.

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Continuing our recent series of episodes about the UK in the 1970s, this is a re-edited, improved and re-released version of our episodes 2-3. It contains numerous additional audio clips, and written narrative to provide context and more information.

Episodes

  • Part 1: Background, the formation of the group, its politics and its early actions.

E83: Angry Brigade, part 1 – Working Class History

  • Part 2: Later actions, the criminal investigation, the trials, and lessons

E84: Angry Brigade, part 2 – Working Class History

More information

John Barker today.jpg
John Barker, today. Courtesy PM Press

Sources

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.
  • Edited by Tyler Hill
  • Theme tune is ‘Bella Ciao’, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

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Transcript

Part 1

 As unrest intensified in 1970s Britain, a group of young people decided to fight against fascism, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, factory bosses and the Conservative government. Armed with guns, bombs, and a sense of humour, t hey called themselves the Angry Brigade. And their story culminated in what became the longest criminal trial in the UK to date. This is working class history.

[Intro music]

Before we get on with the main episodes, just a reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, our patreon supporters can listen to both parts of this double episode now. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

Long-term listeners may recall that our episodes to 2 to 3 were about the Angry Brigade. However, like all of our earliest episodes, it was basically raw audio from our interview. So the sound quality wasn’t great, and there wasn’t narrative to fill in any gaps, explain context and pull the story together. In addition to working on new episodes, we are also going back over our earliest episodes to re-edit and release them in the new, narrative format we use for all of our later episodes. So we have added a considerable amount of narrative to explain things better and hopefully tell the story in a more cohesive manner. We hope you enjoy it.

We have decided to redo this episode now because we have produced a number of recent episodes about the same time period in the UK. Our episodes 65-66 were about the 1972 builders’ strike, episodes 67-68 were about the Grunwick strike in the 70s, and episode 81 was about miners’ strikes around the same time.

[Clip 1]

This was Stuart Christie, a Scottish anarchist who was arrested and charged with being part of the Angry Brigade. This clip is from a documentary film about the group, courtesy of PM Press, which is available on the link in the show notes. We use a few more clips from this documentary later on in these episodes as well.

Going back a couple of decades, during World War II, Western countries like the UK and US were allied with the Soviet Union in the fight against the Axis powers: principally Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. When the war ended, the Cold War soon began, a period of escalating tensions between the West, and the expanded Soviet bloc. These culminated to the point where there was a very real risk of all out nuclear war. This absurd threat was something which provoked mass protests around the world.

John Barker: When I was 15 or 16, I think like a lot of people, I went on CND marches.

That’s the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I would have been about 15 when the Cuban Missile Crisis occured in 1962 and I remember going to school and we were talking in the school yard and saying, ‘Is this it?’ You look at it in retrospect and you think, ‘Well…’ but it was quite real. So I went on CND marches and then I went to university to be a proper, serious student.

This is John Barker, who was later on trial for being part of the Angry Brigade. My co-host, Matt and I, caught up with him at his flat in London.

I went to Cambridge and I worked quite hard as a student. I’d come from a lower middle-class family but in Cambridge, I ran into the ruling class or the ruling class being reproduced. It was quite a shock because it was in your face. You could see this was what it was. This gaze started to give me a bit of an edge. The other dominant issue that people, who’d been in CND, were involved in was the war in Vietnam. This was another thing I was involved in and I went on various marches.

 I had my first arrest at Grosvenor Square in 1968, I think.

This was in Grosvenor Square. It was a mass demonstration and it was my first experience [laughter] where you found there were people at the back saying, ‘Forward charge!’ [Laughter]. You’d charge forward and you’d find, suddenly, there was nobody behind you [laughter]. That was my first experience and I thought, ‘Let’s wise up a bit.’

We and I’m sure many of our listeners will have also had similar experiences with this kind of situation, with self-declared leaders trying to direct others.

John Barker: The vanguard at the back. It was like the First World War where the officers were in the rear. It ended up as a fine. At university, I met a slightly older group of people who were situationists and situationists are now, unfortunately also a kind of archive commodity. However, the situationists were a very radical group built around a very important text by Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle. This gave them much more of an imaginative edge to politics. There was a kind of slight arrogance to it and they were very dismissive and said, ‘This is all being recuperated. It’s all bourgeois,’ which admittedly a… but there was also a lot of fun.

 The Situationists were a group of revolutionary Marxist artists and intellectuals in France who formed the Situationist International. They were among the first to theorise capitalism in its postwar consumerist phase, arguing that the relative material affluence of the working class was not enough to stop class struggle, but rather just another source of alienation.

John mentions their concept of “recuperation”. This is the process by which capitalism can incorporate elements of resistance back into itself, rendering them harmless and even profitable. A good example of recuperation in culture could be punk music: originally a grassroots protest music, t-shirts of punk bands are now sold in high street chains to sell an image of rebellion.

 Recuperation happens in politics as well: trade unions, for instance, began as illegal fighting organisations of working class people but were eventually incorporated into a legalistic industrial relations framework in which workers’ discontent is more easily managed. And, in places like the UK, unions were even incorporated into the management of the state where they called on members to accept wage restraint, for example during the winter of discontent of 1978-9. This is what Situationists meant by the recuperation of struggle.

Though the Situationist International were always a small group, their ideas became highly influential on radical thinking, particularly during the events of France 1968. We have a number of books about the Situationists in our online shop. Link in the show notes.

The Situationists also organised “situations”, or happenings, aimed at puncturing the monotony of everyday life.

We invaded May Balls.

Balls were the kind of things you had at Cambridge where people went in dinner jackets.

Cambridge has all these colleges and each college would have this May Ball and they’d have lots of bands and champagne. You paid so much and I think you had to go in a dinner jacket. In my last year, we invaded a ball in one of the colleges by climbing over the walls [laughter].

That was that and it was an outlet for the real hatred I’d developed for this world in Cambridge which was then manifested when a group of us decided that we would not take our Finals as a protest. We said that education was an elitist system and that its main function was one of exclusion and that Cambridge was one of the pinnacles of this process of exclusion. At several other universities, something similar happened. People tried to present it as a protest against exams, as if we’d had continuous assessment, which would have been okay which it wasn’t at all. It was the first time I’d been involved in street threatre. Come the day, I think there were seven of us who ripped up our papers and said, ‘Down with elitism! Down with assessment!’ or something like that. Again, I look at this in retrospect and I think, ‘Perhaps this is quixotic.’ Looking at how young people are now, maybe it was a luxury for us that we could do this. You didn’t have this terrible anxiety about getting a job and all that stuff. On the other hand, it’s the one thing I’ve never regretted doing.

Indeed, looking back from 2023 it can be hard to understand where people coming from different points in the past. At this time, mass working class struggles for years had forced significant concessions to improve workers’ living standards, and public services. Free university education, and even getting grants covering your living expenses, sounds like a great deal now that grants are long gone, and fees have been introduced and increased year-on-year.

After university, John moved to the capital.

I went to London and went to Notting Hill which was where there was a group called King Mob Echo. They were the public face of British Situationism. They were quite witty and they did some wonderful graffiti. Although you could get a job, you could also go on the dole and basically, you could survive on the dole. I became involved in the West London Claimants’ Union. One of the things I do regret is that I didn’t continue with that because I think it was a model organisation in which the rule was you either had to be on the dole or to have been on the dole in the last 12 months to avoid any kind of professionalisation of the union. We would have actions in solidarity. We would go to dole offices to defend people because there was a whole big thing, particularly about women on the dole, about whether they’d had a man sleeping with them which meant they would get cut off. You’d go and argue the case en masse in welfare offices. At this time, coincidentally, the Mangrove Restaurant was the crucial focal point of radical politics in that area and you had a very, very heavy, oppressive police presence.

The Mangrove was a Caribbean restaurant run by Frank Critchlow at the centre of the Black power movement in London at that time. It was subjected to repeated police raids, which Home Office documents later revealed were part of a plot to try to disrupt radical Black organising. During a protest against the raids, nine Black Londoners were arrested and charged with conspiracy to incite a riot. Their story is told in the recent Steve McQueen film, Small Axe.

To clarify for non-UK listeners, the dole refers to unemployment benefits.

Subsequently, they also went on trial and it was called the Mangrove Trial which becomes extremely relevant to my own trial. Even though we were long-haired hippies, we got on with them fine. We were involved in various demonstrations against the police.

John and his friends also got involved in other activities, producing a radical newsletter called Strike, and supporting the local community. This was heavily working class at the time – very different to Notting Hill today, where the average property costs over £1.5 million.

There’s one thing where I think, ‘I’m really glad I did this and it stands out,’ and it was very much a local situationist initiative but in some coordination, particularly, with a radical group of mothers looking for a playground. At this time, Powis Square (which is a square just off Portobello Road) was still a private square and you had to have a key to get in the square. We invaded the square and the women immediately followed this up to set up a playground in the square and it’s still there now. It’s still a public space which I’m pleased about.

The movement which John identified with was the libertarian movement. Nowadays, many people associate the word “libertarian” with right wing free-market ideology. But the word was originally coined by a French anarchist communist, Joseph Déjacque, in the mid-19th-century. It is a term which is more broad than just anarchist, which applies generally to the wing of the left which seeks to achieve revolutionary change from below, by workers ourselves, and not through a state by politicians. So it includes anarchists, but also a good number of others including some strains of Marxists and communists, like the Situationists.

The big thing from the libertarian movement was to say that the revolution was not some telos where we said, ‘We’ll get the revolution and it will be…’ The way that you lived and the way that you acted was part of making the revolution. People theorised it as a revolution of everyday life and I think it’s not quite that. There was certainly the notion around how you lived and behaved to each other; around comradeship and the idea of living communally. This was a really big change which started at this time. Of course, this was fuelled by the women’s movement and, of course, by the Black Power movement in which the Leninist use of the word ‘we’ was no longer permissible. Not permissible but it was no longer valid. People said, ‘Who are the ‘we’? Who are you speaking for?’ I think that this was the start where I see now that the libertarian movement is the dominant leftist movement in London anyway. Whereas, it certainly was not the case then.

In his very BBC kind of way, journalist Gordon Carr tries to explain how ideas of living in urban communes spread from the revolutionary counterculture in Germany, to the UK.

Gordon Carr: The commune, in fact, is the fundamental unit of the whole revolutionary, libertarian idea. It’s the commune experience, they say, that’s important. You can’t expect people brought up in the old society to fit into the alternative without some drastic changes. And for that it’s essential first to break down the family unit, to develop nonfamily relationships. But of course, liberated women have children and a great deal of care is put into bringing them up to fit into the world they want. Commune children eat, sleep and play together. Outside the commune, they join in what’s known as kinderlarden. Originally, these groups were set up to allow commune mothers more time to attend political demonstrations. But as system soon began to build itself into the plan, the children were encouraged to develop free from any kind of inhibition, free from any competitive instinct. In Britain, these experiments in revolutionary lifestyle were slower to catch on. But when they did, it was in the Notting Hill area of West London that they first took root.

John Barker: This was the moment when libertarian communism was asserting itself in a lot of ways which coalesced briefly around the 1970 election when we had, I think, the first demonstration that actually went through the finance district of the City of London on election day, saying, ‘Don’t vote. You know it makes sense.’ I think ‘you know it makes sense’ was one of the Labour Party’s slogans.

The 1970 election was the one which was lost by Labour’s Howard Wilson. Former miner Dave Douglass spoke about this in our episode 81, explaining how disillusioned many people were with his government, which was elected with a huge mandate and a huge majority, and a pledge to implement socialism, but did not do much in terms of socialist policies – quite the opposite in fact in many cases.

This same time period had a great deal of industrial unrest, with frequent strikes, which John and his friends intervened in with differing levels of success.

John Barker: I had a funny experience. I wasn’t in a trade union. I was a layabout really [laughter]. We had two completely different experiences. There was a postal strike in 1970, I think, and we went and leafleted postal workers on strike and showing them how they could claim benefits. We got very well received. The same thing happened with the printers’ strike in London. We were doing the same thing and they were saying, ‘Fuck off, you long-haired layabouts! [Laughter] Don’t give us this!’ It was a completely different reaction.

In the early 1970s, it was a lot easier to be a “layabout” than it is today.

There were some times when I had to work and we were also doing cheque fraud because it was much easier in those days.

I should explain. Perhaps people don’t use them at all anymore.

You could steal a cheque book and we became quite adept at creating ID which, again, was much easier. Creating ID now is difficult and really professional work. There was the combination of the dole and cheque fraud.

You could then use the cheques and fake IDs to pay for things you needed, like groceries and clothing. To supplement his income, John occasionally engaged in wage labour as well.

A bit of part-time working and sometimes you could get work on a building site for a couple of months. It was a mix of all these things. Just to say, once again, it was so much easier then at all levels. I mean rents were relative to what you earned and were much cheaper.

As we discuss in our podcast bonus episode, 81.1, while nowadays the 1970s is referred to like it was a grim and nightmarish time, with dead bodies and rubbish piled up in the streets, and no electricity, in reality it was the time period with the lowest economic inequality in British history, and the highest standards of living for working class people. This relative affluence had its origins in World War II.

My mum and dad fought this war for the State.

They fought in World War II. In a way, they had to be rewarded and, us, the kids got the reward. We got free university education and all this.

Without fighting. This was a reward for the children of the parents who fought. I only think about this in retrospect but I’m sure this was the case. At a certain time, around 1975, the ruling class suddenly said, ‘Fuck this! We’ve paid you off now. You’re not having anymore.’ From one point of view, you could say that we took the piss [laughter]. We suddenly had this relatively easy situation and we took the piss. However, this wasn’t just a few dropout layabouts. This was the young working class which was assertive. You could see it culturally at all levels. There was this real self confidence and if you’d been brought up as a kid in the 1950s, this was extraordinary. It wasn’t just hippies. It was actually the voice of authority being seriously undermined. Obviously, the expectation of the ruling class was that you would have a highly educated generation who would now be the white heat of technology. Obviously, a lot of young people did become part of the white heat of technology and a lot of people didn’t and asserted themselves in a lot of ways. You see people writing about this now as if it was a sociological truth; that it was much more creative in those times precisely because you could survive on the dole because rent didn’t strangle you.

Some people on the left seem to think that workers only rebel if their conditions are truly dire, and feel that better-off workers will be content with the status quo. But this attitude isn’t borne out by history. In the early 1970s, in developed countries, as well as massive strikes and protests, there was widespread revolt against work itself.

Absenteeism – so, workers just not bothering to turn up to work – lost far more working days than strikes did. In Italy, Fiat factories had an absentee rate of 18%. Car manufacturers in Sweden had absentee rates of 15-25% a day. In Britain it was generally a bit lower, more like 6%, but at one car factory nearly a third of the workers didn’t turn up each day. One US auto worker was asked what work at his factory was like on Mondays in summer. He said he didn’t know because he had never been in for one. Another was asked why he only turned up to work four days per week. He replied: “because I can’t make enough money in three”.

In addition to the generally rebellious atmosphere, there were a number of other key factors which contributed to some young people starting to think that armed guerrilla activity would be both justified, and beneficial.

It was a combination of things. First of all, it began over the internationalist levels of repression of comrades in Spain and Italy.

Spain at the time was still run by the brutal Franco dictatorship.

Spain was still run by him and comrades were being garroted. In Italy, there was the famous play called Accidental Death of an Anarchist where comrades were being thrown out of high windows and police buildings. In a way, it began as a notion of international solidarity. The other context was, of course, what was going on in Ireland. Again, in retrospect, I think it was becoming deliberately militarised by the British State. Suddenly, political violence was not un-British [laughter]. Irish comrades wouldn’t say this. From my own point of view, it was class hatred. Now I know that class hatred in itself is unsufficient and, as I said before, we also thought it was about how you acted and how you tried to live out a communist way of living with each other rather than looking at the revolutionary as a telos. On the other hand, I do believe and I still believe that without class hatred, nothing actually moves. Class hatred is when you see how much people’s lives are caged in. There’s a kind of meanness to it all the time and obviously, in recent years, this meanness has actually become so manifest. That brief period in which I was lucky enough to be a young person, they were never going to have this again. They were never going to have a confident working class. At this time, I don’t want to think I was clairvoyant or so bloody clever [laughter] but I think there was a moment, as early as 1971, when you could see that there was a shift and that capital was going to go on the offensive. They’d had enough of this. I don’t know enough about the rate of profit but I’m just saying it was instinctive that you felt that they’d had enough of it culturally. They didn’t like this confident working class, both in the United States and here. They didn’t like the labour indiscipline. They really didn’t like it.

To this naked state violence in Spain, Italy and Ireland, some people decided it was time to respond in kind.

Right or wrongly, people I knew thought that there should be some attacks on individual representatives. We read a text by a man called Martin Nicolaus who wrote about why sociology focuses solely on the poor. Why is there no sociology of the rich? He argued this very well and it was quite easy to see [laughter]. They’re quite difficult because they don’t want to be examined and they don’t want to be under a torchlight. I think, amongst various comrades, there was the idea that you couldn’t just say that these were inevitable decisions or that individuals within the elite made decisions which affected the lives of thousands of other people without affecting their own lives. I think this was certainly a motivation.

At the same time, through connections to the underground resistance to Franco, long-haired countercultural dropouts in London had access to weapons, explosives, and bomb-making instructions from people with years of experience of guerrilla warfare.

I think these were very well-known skills from the Spanish Anarchist movement which were passed on by word of mouth. The technique was, in fact, very, very simple and I think had been used for a long time and was fairly reliable in terms of timing and so on.

The First of May Group was an anti-Franco guerrilla group formed by Spanish anarchist exiles. They undertook a number of attacks around Europe.

[Clip 2]

This machine gun attack on the US Embassy was in solidarity with the Vietnamese anti-colonial struggle, with the US Black liberation movement, and with liberation movements in Latin America fighting against US-backed right-wing dictatorships. In 1968 and 1969 they bombed Spanish government and bank buildings in London.

The first action attributed to the Angry Brigade by prosecutors was a bomb which didn’t go off but was planted in the new Paddington police station in May 1971. Part of the police station had been specifically built to house Irish independence fighters.

The political situation in Spain and elsewhere was obviously extremely dangerous and serious . Those who formed the Angry Brigade acknowledged that their situation was very different, and while they wanted to show solidarity with revolutionaries elsewhere, they had a pretty light-hearted approach, which should be clear from their name.

It was a silly name actually.

Yes, I think there was a sense of humour. Again, it’s difficult to say as it was a relatively easy time. We were also in a real drug culture and I took quite a lot of acid. I mean if you look again restrospectively, acid was very good for me actually. I think it opens you up. Particularly in relation to authority, it really made authority just seem ludicrous. There was a lot of grass around and it was very much a hedonistic drug culture and that was part of this class confidence or what I would call working class audacity. It was hedonistic, in a way, which was not so consumerist actually.

After Paddington police station, a string of other attacks followed, which largely went unreported by the press. These included bombings of the home of Metropolitan police commissioner Sir John Waldron and two separate bombings of the home of attorney general Sir Peter Rawlinson. It’s important to point out that all of these acts were planned very deliberately to not injure or kill anyone. While these actions might seem extremely serious, the Angry Brigade didn’t take themselves very seriously at all.

It’s difficult to say that you’re very serious about your politics and, at a certain level, you don’t feel massively serious in yourself. This is maybe a fault. I don’t know. Maybe if you are going to be really serious, you have to be really serious and I’m not saying one thing or another. There was a feeling that we were serious about what we believed and serious about the fact that we were going to act on what you we believed but not serious in the sense that we were going to change the world, take State power and have a programme.

Looking back today, this might seem really strange. Especially, for younger people, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror, and for slightly older people in the UK, after decades of bomb attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). But 1970 was before all that, and the environment was completely different.

That context is obviously crucially important. In 1972, there was the Old Bailey bombing which really changed everything.

This bombing actually happened in 1973. But this was a car bomb placed outside London’s most famous courthouse, the Old Bailey, with another which went off outside the Ministry of Agriculture. This was the first major attack on the British mainland since the start of the Troubles, which killed one and injured over 200 people. After this, terrorism in the UK became a big deal, much like it did in the US after 9/11.

The idea was strictly to damage property and not damage people. Again retrospectively, I can say it was an extension of the kind of street theatre we were doing in the anti-assessment campaign of students but it was theatre with an edge, I suppose. [Laughter]. Obviously now, you would be a) totally counter-revolutionary and b) suicidal to be doing stuff like that.

Another factor worth bearing in mind was that the same thing was happening in other wealthy countries: urban guerrilla groups were forming and carrying out armed actions. Including the Weather Underground in the US, the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and so on.

There was the Red Army Faction, who were Marxist-Leninist, and who instinctively I think we would have felt unsympathetic to with this notion that you could actually take State power. However, the more I understand of post-war German history, the more I can understand where they came from. They knew that large numbers of ex-Nazis were running universities [laughter]. I would have felt very unsympathetic at the time but more recently, I feel more sympathetic to them.

As John mentions, most of these other groups were very different, politically speaking, from the Angry Brigade, as most of them had some form of statist socialist ideology, which saw them wanting to establish socialism or communism through the seizure of state power.

In West Germany, not only were former card-carrying Nazis and war criminals running universities, they were running large parts of the country in all parts of society from government to the legal system to big business. We have some books about the RAF available with more info which we will link to in the show notes. And we will be talking about the Red Brigades and other armed groups in Italy in our forthcoming miniseries on struggles in Italy in the 60s and 70s.

While there were also women involved in these urban guerrilla groups, proportionately there were more in the Angry Brigade.

Yes, it was a gender-balanced group. It was a gender-balanced movement. The women’s movement had a huge impact on the development of a revolutionary politics that was not Leninist. It had a huge impact.

At the time, and still, there was a really crucial text called The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

By Jo Freeman. I think it’s still a really important text. She’s writing at a moment when there’s a transition from women in consciousness-raising groups to women as being politically active and she talks about that transition. In terms of the comrades in the Angry Brigade, it was gender equal.

It was the right thing. She talks about how, if you were then moving to activist politics, you do have to then think about structures. Otherwise, you start to get informal elites.

As part of its fight against patriarchy, the Angry Brigade detonated a bomb under a BBC broadcast lorry in the early hours of the morning outside the Miss World contest on 20 May 1970. Women’s protests also occurred inside and outside the venue later that day, with women pelting the host, comedian Bob Hope, with flour bombs and rotten fruit. While the protests received widespread media coverage, the bombing did not.

Two weeks later, the group machine-gunned the Spanish embassy in solidarity with six Basque nationalists who had been put on trial, in another action which went unreported.

Gordon Carr: And then in December 1970, came the first clue to what was happening. A communique was sent to the International Times claiming the bomb attacks and it was signed Angry Brigade. The first time the words had been used. The communique also claimed a machine gun attack on the Spanish Embassy. Later, the gun, a 38 Barretta, was proved ballistically to be the same gun that was used on the American Embassy three years earlier. So here was direct evidence of a link between the 1 May group and people now calling themselves the Angry Brigade.

Their communiqué claimed that the media blackout was the system trying “to hide the fact of its vulnerability” and stating: “We can make ourselves heard in one way or another.”

Unlike many other revolutionaries who undertook armed actions in the past, the Angry Brigade were at least realistic in what they thought the potential consequences of their actions would be. Especially as in the past, many took such actions hoping that they would spark some sort of mass uprising, which basically never actually happened.

John Barker: I don’t think we were that pretentious to think that this was exemplary stuff that was going to trigger anything. I suppose, in a way, it was a very old-fashioned notion of justice and the idea of making decisions that affect other people without affecting yourself. As I say, I thought there was going to be a capitalist counteroffensive at this time and within that context, I thought this was important.

The effective media blackout of the Angry Brigade would end soon after, following a particularly daring attack.

[Clip 3]

This brought both the attention of the media, and a massive crackdown by the state.

[Outro music]

That’s it for Part 1. Our patreon supporters can listen to Part 2 exclusively now on the link below and it will be available to everyone else in the next couple of weeks. Patrons also get access to an exclusive bonus episode, with more tape from our interview.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

We’ve got a couple of great books about the Angry Brigade, as well as an excellent documentary DVD, available in our online store, link in the show notes. We’ve also got John Barker’s novel, Futures, set in Thatcher’s London. As a listen to this podcast, you can get any of these, and anything in our online store, 10% off using the discount code WCHPODCAST.

As always, we’ve got lots more information on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes. This includes sources, links, transcripts, as well as a Radical London playlist John Barker put together for us, with a curated collection of tracks that were popular in the scene at the time time in London’s clubs and communes.

John has also written other books, like Bend the Bars, and Criminal Justice Acts. These are are all available on his website theharrier.net, link in the show notes.

Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands and Fernando Lopez Ojeda.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Tyler Hill.

Thanks to you for listening, catch you next time.

Part 2

Hi and welcome to part 2 of our double podcast episode about the Angry Brigade, Britain’s first homegrown urban guerrilla group. If you haven’t heard it yet, we would recommend going back and listening to part one first.

[Intro music]

Where we left off last time, the Angry Brigade had bombed the house of Robert Carr, the Conservative Minister of Employment, who was bringing in the Industrial Relations Act, which was aimed at preventing wildcat, unofficial strikes, organised by workers themselves. It would also strengthen control over industrial action to official union leaderships, and tie unions more closely to the state, by mandating unions officially register with the state.

At this point it became clear that the media and authorities could not ignore the Angry Brigade any more.

John Barker: I suppose, because it was new, they took it seriously, given what’s happened subsequently. At the time, they took it seriously and thought this was an attack. They couldn’t pin it down to any known Leninist politics or even to the extent there was a kind of established anarchist movement. They couldn’t quite pin it down. I think they took it seriously for a while.

This is John Barker, who was put on trial for being part of the Angry Brigade. After the Carr bombing, other cabinet ministers got given security guards. And the Angry Brigade threatened to escalate their activities. They sent a communiqué to the Express newspaper, referencing the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, declaring: “THE ANGRY BRIGADE IS AFTER HEATH NOW. WE’RE GETTING CLOSER”.

Police chief superintendent Roy Habershon was in charge of the investigation to find the bombers. From the targets chosen, the language used in the communiqués, and the type of explosives used, Habershon realised that the perpetrators were associated with anti-Franco exiles, and were fans of the Situationists.

Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie immediately came under suspicion. Christie was already well-known to police, having been imprisoned in Spain in 1964 for involvement in a plot to assassinate dictator Francisco Franco. He also lived with two men who were arrested for a bank bombing by the First of May Group, and he worked as an engineer on North Sea gas appliances – the same components that Angry Brigade bombs had been made of.

Christie was put under surveillance. Christie attempted to hide his address book, containing his friends’ contact details, at the house of a friend. Police somehow got hold of this book, Christie alleged through theft, and began investigating everyone in it. There were large numbers of anarchist and libertarian revolutionaries listed, including John Barker.

Raids and arrests began on addresses linked to the libertarian movement and counterculture. These included the offices of Time Out magazine, which is now a huge global media brand, but at the time was a radical, anti-work countercultural journal. And some squats, with young hippies living communally, were raided by police who were often bemused by what they found, as described by journalist Gordon Carr in his documentary, available on the link in the show notes.

Gordon Carr: During one raid on the offices of the magazine Timeout, Special Branch, detectives had the embarrassing experience of having to explain why they were there on film.

Time Out worker: Well, in fact, you’re a member of the Special Branch, aren’t you?

Special Branch officer I’m here as a police officer to do a specific job. There are official channels that you can go through and I’m not one of them. But seriously, I think it’s a bit you can appreciate my position. How can I possibly say anything about it? I don’t know the circumstances and if I did, I wouldn’t discuss them anyway.

Gordon Carr: The police were often shocked by the lifestyle of the people they raided. Some of the communes they went into were far from the standards of hygiene and organization reached in Germany.

John Barker: Obviously, they didn’t like it [laughter]. It was quite clear. I mean it was absolutely alien to their whole psychic way of being. The police would say, ‘God, it’s all this filth we’ve been talking about.’

The office of the International Times, another radical countercultural magazine, in which the Angry Brigade communiqués were published, got raided, as did several other homes in London and Edinburgh. Many on the left claimed that these raids were political persecution, but this was denied by Habershon:


Roy Habershon: This was a popular cry from the people that we were investigating that we were merely harassing them for their left wing views. This was not the case. As I say, I had to get amongst these people because the responsibility for the bombing clearly lay in this area. I had to get amongst them. I had to put my men amongst them. And my view at that time, and I still hold this view, that if people go about preaching violence and revolution and a bombing of this sort occurs in that context, then they must expect to be the object of police attention.

On 19 January 1971, one arrest took place, which would have serious consequences for the group. It wasn’t even related to the bombing.

A guy called Jake Prescott, who I didn’t know, was arrested. And subsequently, it was discovered that they had a fingerprint on the envelope. You could say that it was because this group of people were so, in a way, informal and unstructured. I didn’t know this guy but I thought, ‘Fuckin’ hell! He’s nicked.’

Gordon Carr: Jake Prescott was picked up in Notting Hill on suspicion of being drunk. On him were two checkbooks stolen. It transpired later from students at Oxford University. On remand at Brixton, Prescott began to boast about his knowledge of explosives, his contacts with the Angry Brigade.

Jake Prescott’s fingerprints matched a print found on an envelope containing an Angry Brigade communiqué. Prescott was from Fife in Scotland, whose mum died when he was six, and he grew up in an orphanage. He worked in jobs like mining, and on a farm. He got involved in petty crime as a teenager, like stealing bikes, and was in and out of Borstal (youth prison) for the rest of his youth. As an adult, he got addicted to heroin, and continued to be in and out of prison.

One day, in Albany prison, he met Ian Purdie. Purdie came from a middle-class background, and had been to boarding school. He was active in opposing the Vietnam War, and he got arrested and imprisoned in 1969 for throwing a petrol bomb at the colonial Ulster Office during an Irish civil rights movement protest.

Gordon Carr: Purdy struck up a friendship with Prescott and began to interest him in politics.

Ian Purdie: He realized that one could change from struggling as an individual, which he’s done all his life, struggled against his condition, struggled against things that he’s been subjected to, but as an individual. And he realized, I think, that struggling collectively is more coherent. Struggling collectively has more strength, has more power, and this leads further into struggling with his class, which is basically how he did change, I think, or how his attitude has changed, how he came to realize that there were different forms of struggle.

After getting out of prison, Prescott started living in communes, and got involved in the Angry Brigade.

After Prescott’s arrest, rather than go to ground and lay low, as you might expect, the group decided to step things up.

Again, it was a bit suicidal but you thought, ‘I don’t know this guy. He’s an ex-con and we can’t let him go down and so we must now carry on. If we carry on, then he can argue that it was, in fact, a thing.’ As it turned out, it was a bit suicidal but that’s how it transpired.

Several more attacks took place in the wake of the arrest. Meanwhile, police decided to release Prescott, and put him under surveillance.


Roy Habershon: As the picture emerged, and as our inquiries spread, of course, it became quite evident that responsibility for these bombings clearly lay within the circle of acquaintances that Prescot had. And we discovered that in this same circle lay responsibility for much of the fraud that was going on too. So that this, as it were, underlined our conviction that the people we were after were within Prescott’s circle.

Gordon Carr: With Prescott’s address book, Habershon was able to narrow the field of suspects from virtually the whole of the so called alternative society to some 50 or 60 people. Each one came into the frame as a possible Angry Brigade candidate.

In February, the home where John Barker and his partner, Hilary Creek, were living in Manchester, was raided by police looking for explosives. And Prescott was formally charged with conspiracy to cause explosions – including Carr’s home and the Miss World contest.

Meanwhile, the AB put out a sixth communiqué, criticising the “shoddy alienating culture pushed out by TV films and magazines”, the “ugly sterility of urban life” and the “daily exploitation of our labour”. It drew attention to strikes that week by workers at Ford, the post office, and elsewhere, and violence by British police in Northern Ireland, declaring: “the CS gas and bullets in Belfast will be in Derby and Dagenham tomorrow.” Dagenham being the home of Britain’s biggest Ford plant.

The following month, March, Ian Purdie was charged as well with involvement in two Angry Brigade bombings. But they continued. On 18 March, during a big strike by Ford workers, a bomb exploded at the main Ford office in Ilford, just outside London. The Angry Brigade issued a statement claiming responsibility, and celebrating the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Paris commune.

Over the next couple of months, more attacks took place. Some definitely linked to the AB, including a bomb sent to the right wing Times newspaper which didn’t go off, and a bomb which did go off in the trendy Biba boutique in Kensington. The communiqué issued after the bombing of Biba was a very classic Situationist-style text. It denounced the trendy retro 1940s fashion revival, declaring:

“In fashion as in everything else, capitalism can only go backwards—they’ve got nowhere to go—they’re dead. The future is ours. Life is so boring there’s nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt, or shirt. Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN.”

A few weeks later, a bomb went off at the Metropolitan police computer centre. An Angry Brigade communiqué claimed responsibility, and criticised murders by the police themselves, like that of David Oluwale, a Nigerian British man killed by police in Leeds.

Then, during a dispute at a Ford factory over the dismissal of a union shop steward, John Dillon, the AB bombed the home of William Batty, Ford’s chairman.

Meanwhile, John Barker, Hilary Creek, and two others, Anna Mendelson and Jim Greenfield, moved into a flat together in Stoke Newington, East London, paying around £37 a month in rent. Mendelson and Greenfield had already been arrested for cheque fraud, but had skipped bail and were living underground. This was necessary because of the group’s criminal activity, but it very much went against the politics of what the group wanted to be.

John Barker: There’s obviously a contradiction and, in a way, that’s why we got nicked, never mind failure. Number one, as a group of comrades, the Angry Brigade didn’t have enough criminal nous. We were able to do cheque fraud but not really having the criminal nous that you need. Number two, in a way, clandestinity is completely opposed to what should be libertarian communist politics. There is a contradiction here and, in a way, I don’t believe the comrades of the Angry Brigade ever resolved that contradiction. They were too open and not wanting to be an elite, clandestine group [laughter]. ‘Come and join us and we’ll show you what to do and you can just get on with it.’

While life underground made sense for the urban guerrilla groups like the Red Army Faction which saw themselves as a vanguard which would seize state power on behalf of the working class, it didn’t make sense for the Angry Brigade, who wanted to see themselves as just young people, part of the working class along with everyone else. But this is just not possible when you’re bombing government ministers and capitalists , as anyone could potentially report you to the authorities.

By this point, the police investigation was extremely intense, with multiple ongoing lines of enquiry. There was a specific case against Purdie and Prescott, there was a fraud case, about the cheque fraud, there was a Special Branch investigation into the bombings, and there was a forensic side of the case, looking at the explosives themselves. Facing such a sprawling and complex investigation, the police brought everyone together into a single investigating team of around 40 people, which was dubbed the Bomb Squad.

And the bombs continued. On 15 August, a bomb went off at the Territorial Army Centre in Holloway, North London. An AB communiqué claimed responsibility, in solidarity with the fight against British colonialism in Ireland.

A few days later, on 21 August, the Amhurst Rd flat was raided by police on a warrant about cheque fraud, and Barker, Creek, Mendelson and Greenfield were all arrested. Stuart Christie visited the house while police were there, and was arrested as well, as was Christopher Bott, another libertarian socialist, who was friends with John.

John Barker: A raid is obviously a shock. In Stoke Newington, the top floor is no way to get out as there were a lot of them. We were then taken to Stoke Newington Police Station which was then a Victorian building and not like the hotel frontage they have now.

They were notorious. I got quite seriously knocked about in there. Stoke Newington Police Station has continued, to this day, to be a notorious place for people.

The brutality of officers at Stoke Newington police station was well-known, and there have been instances of suspicious deaths there, perhaps most famously that of Colin Roach, a young Black man who walked into the police station, then died after a single shot gun blast. Police claimed he killed himself, but his friends, family, and the local community all disputed this.

John Barker: Then we got moved to a police station in Albany Street, which was the centre for what was called the Bomb Squad, and got knocked about a bit more.

The police were attempting to force the arrestees to confess, and to implicate each other in the Angry Brigade attacks. They used all the usual kind of police tactics in such cases, from violence to deception, saying things like other arrestees had already confessed and implicated you, and so it would be in your best interests to cooperate.

Yeah, the usual stuff. Even though we didn’t have much criminal nous, we all knew that kind of stuff.

I just said, ‘No comment.’

Certainly in the UK, saying “no comment” is always the best advice if you’re ever arrested, which is what John did. Remarkably, however, the Angry Brigade had never actually discussed what to do if ever they were rounded up.

No. I wish I could say yes and that we were more professional and sophisticated. No.

In the raid, the police claimed to find a cache of guns and explosives in the house. According to John, the police were attempting to frame them, but in his case, they were framing someone who was actually guilty.

Yes, that’s what happened.

While John said nothing for the most part, some of the others did give some information, according to police, like Jim Greenfield, who allegedly admitted to bringing a parcel back from France. But this was later disputed in court by the others. In those days, police interviews weren’t recorded, and so police “verballing”, i.e. making up fake confessions, was a common occurrence. Stuart Christie said nothing and demanded to see his solicitor. Police told him they had found detonators in the boot of his car. Christie denied they were his.

The group were all charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. Because Purdie and Prescott had been imprisoned on remand for so long already, they had to go on trial first, separate from the rest.

The main evidence against Prescott was testimony by two other prisoners, to whom he had supposedly bragged about his involvement in the Angry Brigade, and his handwriting being on three envelopes containing communiqués by the group. The only evidence police had on Purdie, however, was that he had the same political views as Prescott, and he tried to run away when police tried to arrest him.

After a three-week trial, Prescott was convicted of conspiracy, but cleared of conspiracy to cause explosions. And Purdie was cleared of all charges. The judge sentenced Prescott to 15 years in prison, which was labelled as an “exceedingly severe” sentence by the Guardian newspaper.

Two more people were arrested – teacher and lesbian activist Angela Weir and art student Kate McLean – bringing the total number of those facing trial to eight. They were dubbed the Stoke Newington 8, and a mass campaign in their defence began. When the trial eventually started, in early 1972, it lasted over six months and became the longest criminal trial to date in UK history. The primary charge was conspiracy to cause explosions, with 10 others, including possession of explosives.

In my trial, in 1972, we were accused of causing 25 explosions in which nobody was hurt, except one lady who got a scratch on her leg which I regret but nobody was hurt. There was an explosion at the house of the Employment Minister who was introducing the Industrial Relations Act. There was an explosion at the house of the General Manager of Ford Britain during the course of a Ford strike. There was one at the home of the Trade Secretary, amongst various other targets.

We had the Stoke Newington 8 Defence Group which brought together people, like our families along with an incredibly mixed group, who were absolutely brilliant. They were producing bulletins.

As well as the defence group bulletins, the trial was reported in detail each week in counterculture publications, like Time Out. The defendants did everything they could to try to turn the criminal proceedings, into a political trial.

In jury selection. I can say this now that we had an absolutely wonderful solicitor called Michael Seifert who was a long-time member of the Communist Party. He was from a big, communist, East London, Jewish family. He was a fabulous guy and a fabulous solicitor who did incredible things for us. There had been a precedent called the McKenzie ruling where you were allowed to have friends who could work in a kind of supporting legal role.

These “McKenzie helpers” could then aid the defendants, taking notes, giving advice, and being a supportive presence.

The best way the group thought they could draw attention to their politics during the trial, was for some of them at least to defend themselves. Often in criminal trials, this is a terrible idea, but as we saw in our episodes 33-34, about Asian anti-racist youth movements in Bradford, England, with political crimes, having some defendants represent themselves can be extremely powerful.

Yeah, we had been given a precedent for this by the Mangrove Trial in which a very fine man from a Brixton, Darcus Howe. He was one of the defendants in the Mangrove Trial which was a trial of Black activists in and around the Mangrove Restaurant in Notting Hill in some really cheapskate conspiracy trial. He defended himself and nearly everybody got off. So we had this example and, in a way, it was obviously to present both our politics and ourselves to a jury of 12 people with this thought that the jury was the one institution in this country where people had political power. They had real political power.

By defending yourself, I think you have a possibility of directly speaking to the jury. The presumption was that the jury was the crucial thing as they were the people who would make the decision. Obviously, you want to give them confidence in this situation and it’s easier, if you’re defending yourself, not to come across as a cypher by being defended by a professional who tries to get you off.

In the courtroom, the Stoke Newington 8 Defence Group also organised logistical support.

 Wonderful people were doing transcripts so that we could counter their transcripts and certain legal precedents were made in the trial which, unfortunately, have now been all backed off. The first was that we challenged the jury about politics and even about class, I think.

In the jury selection process, the defence challenged potential jury members about their political views and their class background. The defence asked questions including whether the jurors were members of the Conservative party, if they had relatives serving in the British Army in Northern Ireland, whether they would be biased against people with “anarchist” or similar political views. In the end, they were pretty successful. 17 potential jurors said they would be biased, the defence challenged 37 potential jurors, and two by the prosecution. This left 12 jurors who were mostly working-class, and five of whom were unemployed and claiming benefits, like many of the defendants often were.

Yeah. Those precedents were important. The support of our support group was brilliant and they started to articulate their own politics and, in a way, the Stoke Newington 8 Solidarity Campaign was actually more politically right-on than we were.

John was one of those who represented himself in the trial.

I defended myself, yeah.

The basis of the defence was that I had been fitted up.

In addition to the central charge, that the defendants were framed by the police, the defendants also decided to challenge every aspect of the legal procedure. So rather than a conspiracy to cause explosions, they charged that the police, the prosecution, the law, and the court system, was all specifically aligned against them, in a much bigger conspiracy, in the interests of the capitalist class. To support this claim, in court they cited the work of Gen Sir Frank Kitson, a leading military official working for the Ministry of Defence, who wrote a book called Low Intensity Operations, which was a counter-insurgency manual for the government. In it, he wrote that the law, rather than being a neutral arbiter of differing interests, as governments typically claim to be, in fact it:

“should be used as just another weapon in the Government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public.”

 It was like things you see on TV in trials [laughter] where you niggle around until you found contradictions and contradictions did emerge. At the same time, in the way that one asked questions, hopefully, your politics came out. Having defended yourself, you can’t say, ‘I’m not going to go in the witness box. I’m not going to be cross-examined by the prosecutor.’ You go in there and that’s another opportunity because you’re dealing with the prosecutor and he’s an adjunct member of the ruling class, let’s call him. You were dealing with this and, again, you’re trying to show confidence that you don’t have to be a lawyer to stand up. The trial did go on a long time because there was a lot of evidence and a lot of contested evidence. We had a lot of very wonderful comrades, and not even comrades, who came and spoke up for us in various different ways. We then made our speeches in the summing up at the end and I put a lot of work into that [laughter] and I hope we expressed what anti-elitist politics meant. It did mean that we had a hatred for the ruling class but at the same time, this was because of their stinginess in relation to the development of the working-class movement. We tried to give examples what we tried to do and to express, I hope, a libertarian communist politics.

One particular advantage of having some defendants represent themselves meant that defendants like John could essentially give some testimony while questioning witnesses. For example, John got to question the officers who raided his house, and pull apart inconsistencies in different accounts by different officers. These inconsistencies offered the possibility of a period of six or seven minutes in which defendants were walked out of the home, then walked back in and shown the weapons and explosives. The clear inference being that this was plenty of time in which the officers could have planted the evidence.

After months of evidence, and legal wranglings over technicalities about what constituted the conspiracy, it was time for the defendants to take to the stand themselves.

They used the opportunity to spell out their politics in great detail. They didn’t deny being sympathisers with the Angry Brigade, although they did state they disapproved of their methods. For example, Jim Greenfield, who went first, stated that he disapproved of the tactics of the AB, because as far as he could see, they did nothing to advance the cause of the working class.

Probably the most damning piece of evidence against the defendants was that the duplicator which was used to print all of the Angry Brigade communiqués was found at the Stoke Newington flat. Their response to this was that two people connected to the AB had used it in their flat to print the last communiqué, but they wouldn’t name them to police.

One thing which damned the defendants to an extent was the rather unfortunate fact that since they had all been locked up, the Angry Brigade bombings had stopped. In his detailed closing statement, which many professional lawyers were very impressed with, John attempted to address this, arguing that perhaps the AB had come to see bombings as irrelevant, especially given the huge escalation in class struggle, including national strikes of builders which we talk about in our episodes 65-66, and miners which we discuss in episode 81.

Finally, after 109 days, the jury retired to consider their verdict on 4 December. The following day, they told the judge they couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict, so the judge said he would accept a majority verdict instead.

At 5 PM that evening, the jury came back with a verdict.

With a majority of 10 to two, the jury found John, Jim Greenfield, Anna Mendelson and Hilary Creek guilty on the main count of conspiracy. But they unanimously acquitted Stuart Christie, Christopher Bott, Angela Weir and Kate McLean

Greenfield and Mendelson were acquitted of two attempted bombings, but they, John, and Creek, were convicted of possession, meaning that the jury didn’t accept the defence argument that the explosives were planted in the Amhurst Road flat. But the acquittal of Christie meant that they did believe the detonators had been planted in his car.

In a highly unusual move, the jury requested leniency of the judge for the four that were convicted.

At the end of six months, it was quite an extraordinary moment. Obviously, I was disappointed to be going to prison at all but it was an extraordinary moment when the foreman of the jury, very nervously, spoke. They convicted four and gave not guilty sentences to the other four people in the dock. They also then said that they wanted to recommend a level of… they didn’t say leniency but something like that and that saved me five years. I was supposed to get 15 years, which Jack Prescott got in a previous trial, and I got ten years. I’m eternally grateful [laughter] to the jury and I found out afterwards that there was some negotiation amongst the jury. I’m pretty right in saying that the two members of the jury with Black skins held out for us all to be acquitted and it was a compromise. [Laughter]. I’m very grateful to them actually.

Because of the request for leniency, the judge deducted five years from each of the sentences, meaning the four each got 10 years, with additional sentences for other offences like possession, to run concurrently, meaning they didn’t result in a longer sentence.

Yes, I think we got an incredible result. As I said before, I think the strategy was correct but I’m still very grateful, certainly, to some people in the jury who stood up for us. You may think, ‘We should plead guilty and get it out of the way.’ However, I would say to anybody facing any serious political trial that at least one person in one of those kinds of situations should defend themselves.

The sentence reduction for the four also had a knock-on effect for Jake Prescott.

Fortunately for him, because of our jury, his sentence was also cut from 15 years to ten years.

As soon as John went to prison, pretty much straight away he got involved in organising and protests inside. So did other members of the AB, like Jake Prescott, who took part in a major prison uprising in Hull. We talk more about all that in our bonus episode, available for our patreon supporters.

John has said he finds it painful looking back over the things he did, now over 40 years ago, but he has written about it. In a review of a book about the Angry Brigade by Tom Vague, which very much tries to glamorise the group, John wrote that he doesn’t regret what he did, but he is critical and not wholly sympathetic to it.

I don’t disrespect who I was and I don’t disrespect what I did at all but I’m not going to say, ‘This was the best thing to have done.’

He acknowledges some of the cringey, over-the-top rhetoric of the group’s communiqués, and with the benefit of hindsight, he realises how foolhardy they were to continue with their activities, after Purdie and Prescott got arrested, and the rest of their details were available in their address books.

Their activities did also bring a level of oppression down on the libertarian left scene in London, with the raids and arrests, but not everyone was that fussed about it.

It depends who you ask. I mean a lot of people would say, ‘You fucker! You brought down repression on us.’ Stuart Hall would say we caused the collapse of the movement in the ’70s [laughter]. It’s a slight exaggeration of our importance. I mean some people would say, ‘You brought down repression on us,’ but by and large, as I discovered in prison, people thought, ‘Yeah, good!’ [Laughter].

Stuart Hall was a prominent British Jamaican sociologist and activist.

The Angry Brigade actions all took place at a real turning point in British history.

In the month that I was arrested in Stoke Newington, in August 1971, Nixon suspended the dollar from the Gold Standard which was, I think, a crucial building block in the neoliberal, capitalist counteroffensive. It was a building block in this thing. In the same month, internment was introduced which was imprisonment without trial and without any proof of wrongdoing. It was introduced in the North of Ireland which was being asserted as being part of Britain. In Britain, they introduced a system where you could be put in prison without any evidence. These two things happened on a very different scale but they happened in the same month.

And the government was trying to make significant moves to reduce the power of working class people.

One of the Angry Brigade actions was against the Industrial Relations Bill. If you look again in retrospect at the Heath Government, you could say, ‘Heath was a bit of a wuss. He didn’t quite do it.’ However, at the time, this was a serious attempt to start an attack on union rights.

As we discuss in more detail in our episode 81 about the 1970s miners’ strikes, which ended up bringing down Heath’s government, he was unsuccessful. But this was the beginning of a right wing, neoliberal counteroffensive, which in the end would take until the 1980s, and the government of Margaret Thatcher, to actually begin to be implemented successfully.

Looking forwards, from his lifetime of activism, we asked him what he thinks is most important for us to think about today, in terms of trying to organise, as workers, and as a class, to make things better.

Lots, and lots, and lots [laughter]. I think what’s really important now is a real assertion of basic principles, like solidarity, and these basic socialist principles have to be stronger. That’s one thing I would say but also that’s what is so important and impressive about the various strikes by cleaners which have been about looking at where you can win.

Here, John is referring to a wave of successful organising mostly by outsourced, migrant workers employed as cleaners in London over the last decade, which has had a large number of successes.

You don’t go and bash your head against the wall. You look at situations where you think you can win and you think strategically. For example, my stepdaughter is involved in the NHS struggles and Virgin are now going to get a nice slice of the NHS. Are Virgin susceptible to any degree of shame? You then think about the big campaigns with Sainsbury’s and Sainsbury’s are slightly susceptible to shame.

The rank-and-file unions mostly involved in these efforts, the United Voices of the World and the Independent Workers of Great Britain, have been organising at very ruthless private sector outsourcing firms. But where they have been engaged by parent employers with an ethical or luxury façade such as liberal universities, or supposedly ethical retailers like John Lewis.

The weak points. For the moment, that assertion of principles and trying to live a socialist life to the extent that you can within the parameters that we have to live in.

John also thinks that there has been a significant shift to the left among certain sections of the public, which we can take advantage of. Part of which was indicated by the amount of support shown for Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of the Labour Party, who announced he would be stepping down in late 2019. But at the time we spoke to John, Corbyn was still in his post. And while he has gone, his supporters are still very much around.

I knew Jeremy Corbyn, the new Labour Leader and Big Flame was a libertarian, communist organisation in the ’70s and ’80s. They had this notion about the creation of political space and I do think Corbyn has created a political space. You can’t say, ‘That’s reformist,’ or ‘That’s this or the other.’ Comrades have to then use that space and I think, at this moment, that’s really crucial. Unfortunately, he backslid the other day about Palestine and Israel but there is still a space in which you can talk about things. Trident, as an example, is complete lunacy. I mean you can say this now and you’re not some marginalised person.

Trident is a replacement for the UK’s current nuclear weapons system. Despite the fact that the current nuclear weapons system has never been used, the government is proceeding with bringing in a replacement, with an estimated cost of £205 billion.

Everybody knows it’s completely pointless.

I think there is a space and one has to use it, particularly on housing. I’ve been a council tenant for 30 years or so and, relatively speaking, I’m privileged to have a council tenancy. There’s a load of groups, like ACORN, that seem to be non-sectarian now pushing for rights in the private rental market. I think these things are important.

ACORN is a self-organised direct action group for private renters which has affiliates in various cities around the UK, as well as other countries like Canada and elsewhere.

I think Labour will have all kinds of contradictions about housing. They want to keep up property values as they all do but there is the space to push them.

While the Labour Party aren’t in government at the moment, Labour councils do run most inner-city areas, and it is they who are carrying out policies of social cleansing, forcing out, poor, working class residents and spearheading their gentrification.

I was peripherally involved in the Broadway Market squat when Hackney Council really showed their social cleansing colours.

This was a months-long campaign in East London, where local residents occupied a café which was due to be demolished and converted into luxury flats, in an area which was at the frontline of gentrification in Hackney at that time.

Perhaps ironically, this sort of community organising and activity, which John is involved in and supports now, was the same as he and his friends engaged in before forming the Angry Brigade. Like the Claimants’ Unions which fought and won real victories for unemployed people and tenants, and the community campaigns which took back private land, like Powis Square, whose park and playground are still publicly accessible today. These were, ultimately, more revolutionary than the actions with guns and bombs.

[Outro music]

This brings us to the end of our main episodes about the Angry Brigade. We’ve got an exclusive bonus episode for our patreon supporters, where John talks about his time in prison, involvement in prison protests, attempted escape, and his involvement in the Winter of Discontent strike wave after he got out. Our patrons can listen to that now, and get loads of other exclusive content and benefits at https://patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

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We’ve got a couple of great books about the Angry Brigade, as well as an excellent documentary DVD, available in our online store, link in the show notes. We’ve also got John Barker’s novel, Futures, set in Thatcher’s London. As a listen to this podcast, you can get any of these, and anything in our online store, 10% off using the discount code WCHPODCAST.

John has also written other books, like Bend the Bars, and Criminal Justice Acts. These are are all available on his website theharrier.net, link in the show notes.

As always, we’ve got lots more information on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes. This includes sources, links, transcripts, as well as a Radical London playlist John Barker put together for us, with a curated collection of tracks that were popular in the scene at the time in London’s clubs and communes.

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Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Tyler Hill.

Thanks to you for listening, catch you next time.

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Published by Working Class History

History isn't made by kings or politicians, it is made by us: billions of ordinary people.

3 thoughts on “E83-84: Angry Brigade”

  1. Pingback: John Barker talking about The Angry Brigade on Working Class History - PM Press

  2. Fascinating. I was in Grosvenor Square in 68 and Paris. I met one of the pople in this group at uni. It reminds me of the idealistic confusion of youth and our failure to bring about significant change. The people at the back shouting ‘forward’ made me smile. It led to a circulatary movement in any demo. When those from the back came up against the police truncheons, they circled back, with sore heads. I wore a crash helmit and was enveloped by the police lines and roughed up. For reasons I never fully understood, I was thrown back, ‘This one’s had enough.’ If I had been arrested, I could have been set on a downward spiral. The confusion of different motives and splinters on the left was clear from the interview. The working class credentials of the likes of prominent speakers like David Triesman and Tariq Ali, both of whom made interesting subsequent careers, are questionable. Student activists are rarely working class. La lutte continue! My novel, Revolution, written as aaron aalborg, was partly inspired by memories of these days.

  3. Pingback: Episode 3: The Angry Brigade, part 2 – Working Class History

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