A quick one.
Mention in a previous post of Iain Banks political gesture of burning his passport in protest at the actions of Her Majestys Government, reminded me of the following anecdote, cut and pasted below, that appeared in Jim Higgins uproariously funny political memoir, More Years of the Locust.
The background to the anecdote recounted was the arrest of ex-IS member turned Anarchist, Stuart Christie, in 1964, whilst trying to cross the French-Spanish border with a rucksack full of explosives and a plan to assassinate Franco. Arrested, and apparently as part of the last of the thirty attempted assassination attempts on Franco's life, the eighteen year old Christie could have been executed by garroting, but was instead sentenced to twenty years and, following international protest and campaigning, was released in 1967.
It says something for the shallow roots that Anarchism has in British political life and public consciousness that forty years after the above episode and thirty years after the juvenile antics of the Angry Brigade, Stuart Christie still qualifies as the best known Anarchist in Britain. (Chumbawumba's 'Tubthumping' always playing on the pub jukebox doesn't really count.)
A grisly episode, but if it is good enough for the late Jim Higgins to write about, then who am I to pass up the opportunity to cut and paste a funny anecdote to gratuitously fill up my blog? Take it away Jim:
"In Glasgow, the IS comrades organised a protest at his sentence outside the Spanish consulate. Ian Mooney prevailed on his mother to run up a fair replica of a Spanish flag that could be symbolically burned outside the consulate. As the man who provided the flag, Ian insisted on being allowed to set it alight. To ensure a merry blaze he first soaked it with lighter fuel. Unfortunately he was extremely shortsighted and, while he successfully soaked and lit the flag, he also soaked and lit his own boots. Thus what might have been an easily forgotten protest has danced – along with Ian Mooney’s flaming boots – into the annals of Glasgow socialist folklore."
10 comments:
To answer your question: cos they were shite after John Foxx left!
Good story, nevertheless - it makes me want to buy the book.
best known anarchist in Britain? Mark Thomas, surely.
Aye, back in the late 70s I had my first shag to Ultravox!'s "The Wild, The Beautiful and the Damned" Well, the first two verses of it anyway. John Foxx kicked Midge Ure's ass any day.
This means nothing to me.
To John:
I'm not sure that Mark Thomas has ever described himself as an Anarchist. I was under the impression that he had been a member of the International Marxist Group quite a few years back.
BTW - The Ex and Good Soldier Schweijk (wrong spelling, no doubt). Fine taste sir.
To Martin:
I'm a bit slow on the uptake but the new line is - falsetto at the ready - 'Oh Vienna'. I better stop there before I do a punning Ultravox singles post, and that really would lead people reading this to 'Lament'. Oh Christ - it's started already.
Fernicketty sectarian point ahoy: didn't think Christie was ever an IS member, though he was in Glasgow Young Socialists with Paul Foot and Lord "Gus" McDonald. (And he voted Respect, too... but I'll leave that aside.) Or do you know better?
Thanks for the comment on my taste!
I vaguely recall Mark Thomas joking about how he was going to explain to his fellow anarchists the description of himself as a Trot in his Special Branch file. That was all I had to go on.
Hello James,
the mention of Christie being an ex-member of the IS comes from his autobiography a few years back called 'The Christie Files'. I've only glanced through his updated autobiography 'My Granny Made Me An Anarchist' so I'm not sure if he mentions in there also that he was a member of the IS.
Jim Higgins himself, in his book 'More Years For The Locust' mentions that Christie was an ex-member of the IS before becoming an anarchist.
It is difficult to imagine now how eclectic and broad the Socialist Review Group and its successor the International Socialists was in the late fifties and early sixties before Cliff decided to bastardise, sorry bolshevise, the organisation in the late sixties. The Socialist Review Group of the late fifties, though small, had members within its ranks who were Shachtmanites and De Leonists. And I'm sure you know the old story - recounted by Higgins in his book but also mentioned elsewhere - of how the first edition of Tony Cliff's book on Rosa Luxemburg in the Socialist Review Group days gave the nod to Luxemburg over Lenin on matters of political organisation and other matters, but by the time the book was republished/reprinted in the post '68 phase those passages were excised or rewritten with no acknowledgement of this fact in the reprint. It's not a big deal but it is one of those left trainspotting type facts that I have also found amusing.
With reference to Gus - now Lord - MacDonald, and his time in the Glasgow Young Socialists and the IS, a comrade mentioned to me just the other week that he had been chatting to a longstanding member of Glasgow Branch of the SPGB (over a pint in the pub naturally) who had been very good friends with both Foot and MacDonald in the Young Socialists in Glasgow in the early sixties, and this comrade was pretty cynical about MacDonald. By all accounts, MacDonald was a very charismatic and gift of the gab sort of guy but he wasn't as well versed on the *cough* classics as he sometimes made out. The comrade from Glasgow recounted one Young Socialist educational meeting Lord Gus done whilst an IS'er in Glasgow, where he was speaking on the Russian Revolution and it turns out that he had never heard of the New Economic Policy. He bluffed his way through it anyway, and some would say he has bluffed his way through to the House of Lords these forty years later.
Christ, and my first memory of Gus MacDonald was watching him present Right to Reply on Channel Four in the eighties on a Saturday afternoon.
Nice reference to 'More Years for the Locust'. BTW, while it's currently available to read at the Marxism Archive, reading books online is shit, and the book definitely needs a broader readership. Any idea whether anyone's up for (re)publishing the thing?
Aye - political differences aside - Jim HIggins was one of my favourite reads when scouring the left wing press. A real wit, with an eye for the good anecdote, which always enlivened his articles when he was crossing polemical fountain pens with members of that small pond otherwise known as the left in Britain. I still remember laughing out loud when reading one of his articles where he referred to the de facto leader of the AWL as 'Sean Maxshachtmana', when debating with him on the subject of Israel-Palestine question.
I agree that reading texts on a screen is a pain in the arse. I've been trying to read some autonomist marxist articles on the John Gray website (see sidebar), and some fuckwit thought it would be a good idea to have a brick like background to the page with the text superimposed over it, resulting in me coming away with a bad headache - and that's before me even trying to tackle the obscure footnotes - from trying to read a text through a mottled like effect on the page.
Who might publish it?
I guess the best bet would be Porcupine Press or even the Revolutionary History offshot, Socialist Platform. To paraphrase an old title from Ian Birchall, the 'Ex-Members of the Smallest Mass Party in the World' is fast becoming the largest group on the left with its hyper activism,lurches into populism and revolving door policy of freshers week membership, resulting in the fast declining fortunes of the SWP and, therefore, a potential readership out there that would ensure a fresh print run sold out faster than you can say: 'What do Gus MacDonald, Roger Rosewall, Gary Bushell and Jim Fitzpatrick have in common?'
PS Whilst they are it, any future publisher could also get their arse in gear and publish the collected cartoons of Phil Evans (illustrator of Jim Higgins book). The bloke is one of the best, and more people should know about him.
PPS As it's request time, they could also reprint Brian Behan's 'With Breast Expanded'. One of the funniest books about politics and life that I have ever read.
Post a Comment