The days are getting longer and the weather is getting milder. Spring is with us. So, in search of a new jumper and some obscure German music, I took a stroll to Brick Lane on Sunday and it’s not just the flowers that are bursting out. There was a bumper harvest of political ideas emerging from their winter dormancy.
First up outside Tesco was the Communist League catering for the shopper who wanted a bit of Thomas Sankara or Fidel Castro to read over their Sunday roast. It’s one of the smaller Tesco branches and only sells papers and magazines so they’ve spotted an obvious gap in the market. Once again the League is contesting the Bethnal Green seat and while superficial thinkers sneer at the thirty five votes they got last time I think that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what the figure represents for a group demanding a workers’ and farmers’ government. A rough reckoning suggests that they must have got almost 100% of the votes of the staff of the three city farms in or near the constituency. That’s the real headline number.
In Brick Lane itself your first political contact is with a group with a fairly similar world view to the Communist League, and even if they are really different I’m not remotely interested in finding out what the dividing lines are. Fight Racism Fight Imperialism were asking the hung-over locals and curious tourists to sign a petition “to help the people of Haiti”. A few hundred yards away the same audience was asked to sign a petition to “stop the BNP”. How’s this supposed to work? Do the petitions get delivered to Nick Griffin or Ban Ki-moon who then says “gosh, I didn’t realise so many Spanish tourists felt so strongly about things. It’s time for a radical change of direction”?
Outside the fur shop was a very muted group of animal rights protesters keeping the sort of distance from the premises which makes you think they’ve been served with an injunction. Just beside them was a sizeable bunch from the Whitechapel Anarchist Group giving away their highly entertaining free paper. The last time I saw the anarchists the cops were all over them taking photos of all their members as well as passers by who asked for a copy of the paper. You’d have thought that they’d just returned from a two week training course with Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau. In common with most taxpayers my thoughts on seeing this were “leave those radicals alone. There are dozens of bastard bicycle thieves in this street you should be tormenting.”
I’m no lawyer but one interpretation of the cover of the free newspaper they were handing out could be that it’s inciting readers to go postal as their contribution to the electoral frenzy and the text inside the target area saying “enemies of the people” does support that opinion. It’s combined with a slight encouragement to arson. What you don’t see from the image is that carefully taped to the front of each copy is a match, the idea being that you use it to burn your ballot paper, assuming you’ve not already been arrested for taking pot shots at Nick Clegg.
On the back page is an advert for an event on election day at which there will be music, fun, food and a mass ballot paper burning. Unlike their Catalan sisters and brothers the British anarchists are obliged to include the rider “weather permitting”. And people accuse them of being unrealistic.
My hunch is that after the election we are likely to see a growth in anarchist influenced currents. The content of the paper rages against all the things it’s right to be angry about and, even if they are a bit short of solutions other than setting fire to things and revolution tomorrow, they are expressing a deeply held contempt for the political classes and a growing distance from bourgeois democracy among large numbers of young people. The French election results remind us of that.
Liam redux 
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