http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/features/Book-Review-The-Angry-Brigade.6573763.jp
12 October 2010
By GAVIN BOWD
THE ANGRY BRIGADE
Gordon Carr
PM Press, £17.99
IT IS said there are three things that the British do worse than
their continental cousins: railways, fascism and porn.
To the list could be added terrorism. This re-edition of Gordon
Carr's history of the Angry Brigade, Britain's first urban guerilla
group, plunges us back into a time when a group of middle-class
drop-outs thought that bullets and sticks of dynamite could rouse the
western working class from its slumber.
Between 1970 and 1972, the "Angries" targeted government ministers,
police stations and army barracks, embassies of 'oppressive' regimes,
a Biba boutique and the Miss World contest. Only one person was hurt,
and sometimes the damage was so minimal that, in the case of the
London embassy of Franco's Spain, the alert was only raised by a
cleaning lady some days later. The ambition of this home-grown group
was, however, melodramatic and megalomaniacal. In one of their
communiqués, they declared: "We have sat quietly and suffered the
violence of the system for too long. We are being attacked daily."
This campaign was masterminded by former members of the Kim Philby
Dining Club at Cambridge University, who graduated to squatting and
stealing students' cheque books.
The "Stoke Newington 8" were soon arrested. But despite their hatred
of "the system'" they hid behind claims of innocence, exploited legal
technicalities and, thanks to the very British leniency of the judge,
turned the longest criminal trial in this country's history into a
political circus where they could throw insulting remarks at the
"pigs". It is the latter who emerge as the real heroes of this story,
as Carr describes in detail the painstaking way in which they
prepared and obtained convictions. Indeed, the only positive
contribution made by the Angry Brigade was the creation of the Bomb
Squad, which would be of great use against the infinitely more deadly
threat of Irish republicanism.
Britain's urban guerillas never enjoyed the doomed chic of the Baader
Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, who attracted genuine sympathy for
their struggle against a state machinery still steeped in fascism.
Unlike some of their continental counterparts, they did not go on to
make an impact in mainstream politics. Under an adopted name, Anna
Mendelson has received considerable acclaim for her poetry, but her
cultural impact cannot rival that of another Kim Philby diner, one
Tony Wilson, late owner of Situationist-inspired night club, the Haçienda.
In a self-serving addendum, Stuart Christie remarks that at least he
and his comrades were not "Bolshevik psychos". But on Clydeside in
1972, Jimmy Reid and his fellow "psychos" had the gumption and guts
to achieve something more lasting than anything that emerged from a
dope and dole-dependent hippie commune in London.
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