Welcome to another anarchism research group video. In this episode we speak to arg member and Loughborough PhD student Jon Bigger
about the anarchist group Class War standing in 2015 UK general election
Don't forget to click subscribe and like and share this video. Well, my research is about the
british anarchist group Class War who stood candidates in the 2015 general election and really what I'm trying to do is
explain the story of the 2015 general election through a different lens
The 2015 general election in the UK was seen as a really boring election and yet here was this radical group doing some really interesting
and different things and also obviously there were debates about whether anarchists should even be in those spaces
doing the things that that they do. The interesting thing about Class War is that
obviously it was quite prominent in the 1980s, or very prominent in the 1980s,
but there's very little scholarly material about it, so hopefully my research will kind of
bridge that gap. So Class War started in the early 1980s,
co-founded by a guy called Ian Bone who
was in Swansea and getting a little bit frustrated about anarchists politics
and specifically interested in the fact that
pacifism was such a key feature of anarchism at the time
and he wanted to disrupt that and he started to get together with people in London
with the idea of getting people together to kind of have a more combative style of
anarchist politics on the street and
eventually, they started to produce this newspaper. The newspaper was produced which they hit upon the the name Class War. And essentially what they
wanted to do was put
working-class anger back into the anarchist movement and the idea of revolution, the idea of a violent,
violent overthrowing of the state, and crucially what they also wanted to do was shock. It's a group that's
rarely out of the news for something or other that is going on
and that is because they have a reputation now
amongst the press for what they did in the 1980s and beyond
Perhaps most particularly the poll tax riots in 1990 where they were actually blamed for for the poll tax riots,
but they were also the only group to come out and say well actually no, we like the poll tax riots, we agreed with
them, we want we want this kind of thing to be going on, and they were willing to actually put themselves onto television
and say that. So you had
action on the streets with Class War but you also had a newspaper that was backing that up with often
kind of
sensational front pages which were designed to shock but also to be funny, if you've got that sense of humor.
So the newspaper famously contained a
hospitalized police officer, hospitalized copper, on page three to kind of mirror the
page three girls that we see in the, that we still see unbelievably in the in the right-wing press
This is where I come in because I I saw that class war were were standing candidates and
and I thought that looks like a laugh and I just just lost my job,
I thought well, you spent 13 years being a civil servant, why don't you stand for election with Class War? It seems like the
logical thing to do, right?
So but I think what was going on prior to that was a discussion
within Class War which was a very small group of people at the time
were thinking what what do we do now? You know, we've reached the stage where,
and and it's different now compared to
back in the back in 2013 when they were having this discussion,
it's different now because
the Labour Party has moved to the left and we forget how much politics has changed in the last few years,
but back in 2013 there was this belief
widespread on the left that the Labour Party could not be turned and that
politics was basically a battle between two very similar
parties. So the question arose, what can we do that's different?
Why not stand candidates? And the argument then
came through well, what are the arguments against standing candidates?
Well, the arguments are that you shouldn't engage in official politics
but really is class war standing a few candidates actually engaging in
official politics to the extent that
it reinforces the system? And the decision was taken that no, it doesn't. It's a publicity thing. It's a way of getting
radical ideas into places where radical ideas are not normally present.
So husting events being a being a classic example. So hustings back in the Victorian era for example
when not
everybody had the vote but people used to turn up to hustings anyway, just to hurl abuse
they were seen as real tests of the politicians
The politicians were expected to take the abuse and handle with pride and with with some kind of dignity and that proved their worth
We've now gone to a stage in politics where
the people asking the questions are normally the people on the top table and heckling is something that is
discouraged, but we brought heckling back to hustings in a big way
The hustings event where I stood in Croydon South, every time the Conservative
stood up he was being shouted out for being a murderer and
for backing policies that would kill people and harm the disabled
the UKIP was shouted out for being a racist and it was just a completely different
environment from what the assembled audience in Croydon South, which is a very conservative
constituency, were expecting. We did things that were really different and unusual. That hustings event took place on
International Workers Memorial Day and I knew that I would be asked to give an opening statement and a closing statement and I knew what
my opening statement was going to be, I'd written it out, and I knew that I was going to link my
answers to the questions that came up to the fact that Tory austerity is harmful to to people
but I didn't know what I was going to do for
my closing statement. I thought well, everyone's just gonna really repeat what they do. That's what politicians do
I'm not a politician. I'm standing in an election, but I'm not a politician. What will I do that's different?
So I thought okay, right, I'm going to do something different here.
And I basically for my closing statement stood up and invited everybody, the Tory candidate,
the conservative audience in front of me, to join me in a minute silence to remember the dead of capitalism on
International Workers Memorial Day and because they told us to to be quiet all the way through they they had to sit and observe that whole minute
of silence and I didn't look behind me to see what the Tory candidate was doing
but I'm told that he was really really
uncomfortable throughout it and it was a wonderful piece of theater and that kind of thing was going on
up and down the country
in places where anarchists would normally just avoid it. And okay
maybe that doesn't have a huge maybe that doesn't get onto the news.
Actually one thing did get onto the news in the hustings and that was
in the constituency of Litchfield
the Tory candidate Michael Fabricant
didn't turn up and he wasn't empty chaired
he was, he was, there wasn't empty chair for him but Class War in that constituency got a stick
with a wig on the top because he famously wears a hairpiece
and he was just replaced by that, and it's just that that image of making somebody look a little bit ridiculous was also another
another theme that came out in the election.
So the anarchist movement as a whole I think was largely bemused and a little bit hostile to
Class War's
idea. I remember before the election I
was at a protest in Whitehall in London and
an anarchist was giving out leaflets all about the election and
their group's approach to the election and I remember taking a browse through it and
I said "I'm disappointed
you've not mentioned Class War and the fact that they're standing in the election"
and the person just turned to me and said "I don't consider class war to be anarchist" and
I think that that says a lot. So first of all, they might not have ever thought the Class War were anarchists, but also
maybe the fact that class war standing in an election proved that person that they weren't
anarchists. So that's the debate, that's the debate we have to have: are we anarchists just by declaring ourselves anarchists
or are we a kiss by by how we behave and what we do?
There's lots of anarchists that vote
they might not talk about it and they might not say how they vote, or they might turn up to the ballot booth and they might
they might spoil their paper. They might write some obscenity on it or draw draw a rude picture or whatever. Actually
this idea of not voting doesn't change anything
What are we going to do instead? Class War showed that you can do something instead. It didn't support the system
It didn't reinforce the system. The system hasn't become any more entrenched because of what Class War did, it's still there, it's exactly the same.
So, you know, but what we did do is we highlight it that you can do something unusual,
you can do something different and you can get away with it. You know, we had candidates that were on national television.
You know our candidate Adam Clifford
who study in the cities of London and Westminster was on the daily politics show,
quizzed by Andrew Neil sat next to Boris Johnson's dad in full drag wearing wearing an outfit
that was inspired by
the girls he knew from school, and he wanted to kind of copy to copy their image.  And and he wanted to
explain his involvement in politics in in in in that way
and wanted to express it in that way. And I think the other thing about class war is that it allows it,
it allows the people who involved to express themselves in quite a free way.
You know, I've been involved with a number of anarchist organizations and a number of organizations that run to anarchist rules.
I've never been given the amount of freedom
in any other group. I remember very very early on that, we did, at that first meeting in 2014,
we decided that candidates would be given
as much autonomy as as they needed to do the campaign in the way that they wanted and
some people just chose that to be obnoxious and abusive to the other candidates and to use,
and to use it that way, other people like myself, I tried to explain my views
in a wider kind of anarchism, so I managed to get
get articles into the local media on
my vision of anarchism and you know wanting to wanting to widen
democracy. I think anarchism and democracy like, you know
they go hand in hand. I want to see democracy to be more more direct.
I want democracy to kind of like, you know, a pure form of democracy to rule the way that we
behave with each other and so I talked about our personal relationships and getting getting decisions made at a more local level.
I think we need to be careful as researchers not to kind of say "oh
I've done this research on you or even with you and here's my findings and now aren't you blessed"
because it's not my role and also Class War would just reject that if I took that approach and quite rightly because that's just like a
hierarchical thing anyway and it's an elitist thing to think that we're in a privileged position to help the anarchist movement
decide what direction it takes, right? So
what I what I do for a Class War is I pass back what,
what they have been saying
because you know this has been, my research has been, it's been done through their eyes
So a lot of the stories are mine of what I went through during the election
but they're backed up with information
from the other research participants which include other candidates and also their supporters of people who were involved at the time
But I think the other thing that I wanted my thesis too to include is
is a list of kind of
not do's and don'ts but a list of things that
radicals can learn
for an election time if they decided ever to stand candidates. I'm using radicals as have more broader
word rather than anarchists, because I think this could be of interest of all sorts of groups.
So make it interesting, you know,
that's one of one of the things if you're gonna do something
unusual and you're doing it just for the sake of it, you're doing it for a bit of fun,
have a bit of fun with politics. People keep saying politics is boring
Well, I don't agree with that incidentally because I don't think we're living through boring political times.
So what I found from my research participants is there are, there is a widespread of views and disagreements
amongst the people who were involved in Class War at the time about the campaign that they
conducted. So some people said we should have had more policies.
Some people said it's a mistake to have any policies at all,
you should just stand on a ticket of we do not have any policies. We do not want you to vote for us.
If Adam cliff had gone on to the Andrew Neil show and said
"we're encouraging people not to vote for any of us any of our candidates, ee don't want any votes.
please don't go for us", as a consistent message, that would have been really really interesting
Really What I wanted to do was just provide
some, some kind of
guide to elections if radicals stand
The main amount of press interest is going to come from the local press
so you have to think about what messages you want to get out into the local
press. They're they're the only people who are going to care and they will always
send a photographer
who wants to make you look like the story that they're telling and the story that they're telling is an anarchist is standing in an
election, so when they came to my house, I said "look, I don't really want you to film at my house,
to take pictures at my house. Can we go somewhere else? There's a part down the road." and
the photographer took me down to this park and and I just stood there and I said, "okay, can you take my picture then?"
And he said, "yeah,
yeah, but I just I just want you to look more like an anarchist" and I said "well
what does an anarchist look like?" and he said "ah, I don't know lean against that tree."
We all talk about it as the general election of
2015 as if it's gone in the past and the truth of the matter is it stays with you
Indirectly today even, I mean we're recording this in 2019 and
I've been mentioned in a national newspaper today because of something that happened during that election campaign in 2015 and
so it's a living thing.
It hasn't gone away. It doesn't end and that's that's something that needs to be borne in mind,
so what you do as a candidate stays with you forever. It will forever
unfortunately for me, it will forever be the 2015 general election. It will never. Yeah, I love it.
