Bash the Rich

The Independent December 24 2006 four out of five stars Bash the Rich: True-life confessions of an anarchist in the UK, by Ian Bone (TANGENT BOOKS GBP9.99) Labelled “the most dangerous man in Britain” by the Sunday People in 1984, Class War founder Ian Bone has now produced a book about his days putting the boot into the ruling classes. It isn’t subtle, and it isn’t any kind of blueprint on how to successfully start a revolution, but it is very funny. People of all kinds of different political persuasion may find this a problem: violent activism reduced to the level of a comic book. On the right, there are still many who’ll remember the cover of the Class War newspaper with a picture of Thatcher being brained by a meat cleaver; on the left there have always been humourless “realists” - the kind who’ve subsequently taken over the Labour Party and weeded out the socialism. But from the first page, where Bone’s mother and father are described hurling cow-pats at a Tory MP (“…my dad had scooped the fly-blown dry-crusted cowpat expertly on to his newspaper, raced across the road and squelched it deep into Sir Tufton Bufton’s Knight of the Shire patrician grin”), to the lyrics quoted from the song “Tory Funerals” by his band, the Living Legends (“I couldn’t care less, I couldn’t give a toss / At the sudden death of a factory boss / The ruling class are really hated / All I want… is them cremated”), it’s clear that, while Bone may be dangerous, he also knows how to entertain. Did any of it make any difference? Who knows where Britain would be without irritants like Class War picking at the boundaries of state control. Their bigger aim may never be achieved, but some small battles can still be won.

Ian Bone is the leading militant anarchist in the UK. He was born the son of a socialist butler in 1947 and formed a deep hatred of ‘the rich’ as a result of his family experiences ‘in service’. While studying at Swansea University in the 1960s, Bone honed his raw instincts into a an anarchic political philosophy which dismissed all forms of control whether they were enforced by the ruling class elite or the Trotskyist Left. Bone’s political agenda worked at street and council estate level in Swansea and he gained notoriety when he founded the Alarm scandal sheet which exposed the ‘Swansea Mafia’ and led to the convictions of several local councillors for corruption. Alarm became the scandal sheet that the whole of Swansea talked about, but by the early 80s Bone felt the need to take the model to national level. Before he left Swansea for London Bone and Jimmy Grimes produced the first issue of Class War, a paper which advocated violence as the only means of bringing about revolutionary social change. Throughout the turmoil of the miners’ strike, Bone and his comrades worked to open up a second front of rioting in the inner cities in order to draw police resources away from the mining strongholds. Their aim was not just to bring down the Thatcher government but to be at the vanguard of a social and political revolution that would overthrow the established order.