THE ANGRY BRIGADE THE ANGRY BRIGADE A History of Britain’s First Urban Guerilla Group Gordon Carr PM Press | 2010 The Angry Brigade: A History of Britain’s First Urban Guerilla Group Gordon Carr ISBN: 978-1-60486-049-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009901393 Copyright © 2010 Gordon Carr This edition copyright © 2010 PM Press All Rights Reserved PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Cover Design by Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org Layout by Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org Printed in the USA on recycled paper. THE ANGRY BRIGADE Table of Contents Preface: John Barker and Stuart Christie i Introduction: The Carr bombs 1 One: Political motivation…The influence of Debord, Vaneigem… The Strasbourg scandal…Nanterre, the May events 5 Two: Essex, Cambridge…The “disappointments” of Grosvenor Square, October 1968…The campaign against Assessment 25 Three: Notting Hill…The squatting movement…The Claimants’ Union and “real” politics 34 Four: The influence of the First of May Group… The decision to bomb… The deal… The joint campaign begins 45 Five: Habershon’s enquiry gets under way… Suspects… Christie and Purdie… The Prescott lead… The Grosvenor Avenue commune 64 Six: The first arrests… The protests grow… Angry Brigade bombs and communiqués 76 Seven: Barker, Greenfield, Mendelson and Creek at Amhurst Road 91 Eight: The tip-off… The raid… The arrests 100 Nine: The trial of Prescott and Purdie… The committals… The conspiracy indictments 117 Ten: The Court drama begins… Jury Selection… The “McKenzie” helpers… The Prosecution opening 128 Eleven: Forensic evidence… Cross examinations… Conspiracy arguments 141 Twelve: Defence… Closing speeches… Summing up 159 Conclusion: The jury compromise… Verdict and sentences… Special Branch worries 174 Postscripts: John Barker and Sergeant Roy Cremer 180 Chronology: The Angry Decade 194 Communiqués: 237 Index: 250 THE ANGRY BRIGADE i Preface John Barker writes ’VE ALREADY WRITTEN once about the distant past, a review of a characteristi- cally sloppy and romanticised book from AK Press—purveyors of anarchist Ichic—about the Angry Brigade and have no desire to look at my younger self again, trapped as it is in yellowed news clippings (see postscripts). The present is far more interesting, and I do feel a sense of continu- ity with a tougher and more imaginative generation of the “anti-capitalist movement.” The recent action at BP’s Annual General Meeting in which bogus company reports were produced and had shareholders both believ- ing and celebrating what it said, that Mid-East wars were, happily, making greater profits for the company, was a case in point. A more sophisticated version of what we did years ago in 1970 at an auction of publicly owned property in a fashionable location by Kensington and Chelsea Council. A few of us dressed in suits bid the properties up to even crazier prices than is usually the norm and saw the rage of the serious dealers when they tumbled it. A gesture of course; the auction was abandoned and then re-held a month later under tight security, but gestures have their own worth if they are part of a wider movement or articulate a more general feeling of injustice. On the morning of 11th September 2001, and on into the after- noon, I was at a peaceful, witty protest, with good music and exotic cos- tumes against the world’s arms dealers who were then having an Arms Fair replete with very glossy tank and bomber pornography at the Excel Centre in colonised East London. The local residents of Canning Town, them- selves mugged off for as long as I can remember when it came to housing and facilities, were in full support. The inhuman spectacular that was to hit New York that day made our protest irrelevant, dangerously naïve and so on in the eyes of the media. The mostly young people there, however, are getting tough and wised-up while keeping their imagination. They are well aware of the parasitic nature of those Bolshevik groups whose real interest is in their own replication; the routine misrepresentation of protest by high-earning media folk; and the accusation of trendiness from sour old leftists. Since then they’ve been confronted with tear gas, helicopters and bullets in Genoa; knee-jerk condemnation from the Christian Bolsheviks of New Labour; and illegal raids and hooliganism directed against them. ii GORDON CARR On that day they achieved what I thought I was doing all those years ago, that is they made some arms dealers uncomfortable in person. Escorted by masses of police from arms fair to hotel, those dealers hated it, being told in person just what immoral scumbags they are. The great thing is that the protesters, and me too, had the nous to do it without the melodrama of dynamite. Stuart Christie writes ITHOUT GOING TOO deeply into a philosophical discussion of ends and means, it is common sense that one’s actions should match one’s W aims. And such was the case with the Angry Brigade. In spite of the rhetoric and theatricality of the Angry Brigade communiqués, its aims did not include the conquest of power, or of triggering revolution in Britain. The bombs were not intended to kill or injure—nor did they. In my view, the Angry Brigade’s attacks on symbolic targets were gestures intended to up the ante, to punctuate the social and political unrest that characterised Britain and the industrialised democracies at the time. As Bob Dylan sang, ‘Revolution’s in the air.’ The Angry Brigade also had to do with underscoring accountability for public and private actions; to make the political and business worlds realize that there was a cost to their deci- sions, and that every act has consequences far beyond what is predictable. Not one of us, including politicians and public officials, can es- cape responsibility for the deaths, injuries, grief and terror we contribute to—directly or indirectly—by pleading that we acted under orders, or for ‘reasons of state,’ or for the ‘greater’ or ‘higher’ good.’ Be they anarchists, nationalists, Marxists, Muslim fundamentalists, psychopaths with home- made devices or air force pilots dropping Massive Ordnance AirBurst (MOAB) or cluster bombs in built-up areas, or weapons systems special- ists firing off cruise missiles, their superior officers, the Cabinet ministers who give the orders and, lastly, the politicians and those of us who accede to actions which lead to ‘collateral damage’ among the innocent victims of war. We each bear responsibility for our actions, and for those things that are done in our name. Fortunately, neither death nor serious injury was a consequence of any of the Angry Brigade bombings. In January 1971 two bombs exploded outside the home of Robert Carr, then Secretary of State for Employment in the government of Prime Minister Edward Heath. They constituted the eighteenth of 25 small-scale, high-profile bombings claimed by a group occasionally call- ing itself—among other tongue-in-cheek names such as ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’— the Angry Brigade. (I am told they considered THE ANGRY BRIGADE iii calling themselves ‘The Red Rankers’ in deference to the ‘rhotic defect’ from which the then Home Secretary, ‘Woy’ Jenkins, suffered). Scotland Yard, under pressure from the Cabinet Office, launched a far-reaching po- lice investigation—and a great deal of harassment and intimidation of the extraparliamentary left and hippie lotus-eaters—which ultimately led to three young men and two young women receiving heavy jail sentences while five others, myself included, were acquitted. Gordon Carr’s book, republished here for the first time since 1975, is still the most compre- hensive account of the complex police investigation and court case that followed. So, thirty years on, what was the relevance of the Angry Brigade? Not a lot in the great cosmic scheme of things, but their actions during those turbulent times of strikes and street protests had considerable reso- nance. The trial of Prescott and Purdie and the ‘Stoke Newington Eight,’ as we were known collectively—particularly the arguments mounted by the three defendants who chose to defend themselves from the dock at Number One Court at the Old Bailey (Anna Mendelson, John Barker and Hilary Creek)—raised important issues relating to the nature of class politics and justice in British society: about homelessness, unemployment, class-biased legislation, pensioners dying of cold in substandard housing, internment in Northern Ireland and even down to the number of people injured and dying every week from industrial accidents and malpractice. The Old Bailey jury—who could not agree a unanimous verdict— was sympathetic (two of the jurors maintained resolutely throughout that all eight of us should be acquitted) and made an unprecedented plea to the judge for clemency for the four they eventually convicted. One reason for this, possibly, was that the Angry Brigade were seen by some as a resistance movement; they personified a latter-day David Vs. Goliath, who took on a state that was aggressively anti-organised working class, and committed to a strategy of institutionalised social conquest. The Angry Brigade could only do this outside of any legal or parliamentary framework that was acceptable to the Metropolitan Police, the newspaper owners and the Establishment. Polite persuasion is permitted in Britain, but only on terms that render it ineffective for the broad mass of people, other than once every three and a bit years. Most people find ways of rebelling discreetly. Millions of silent, anonymous, or unpublicised acts of disobedience or sabotage take place throughout the world each day, no doubt. But occasionally there are times and places when it feels appropriate, necessary even, to make more high- profile gestures in defence of what you believe to be right.