Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ The Angry Brigade.’

      Hunting down the Angries suddenly became the top priority for the police and security services. Scotland Yard seconded thirty officers from Special Branch and the Flying Squad into a new unit known as the Bomb Squad. The Daily Mirror offered a £10,000 reward for information which led to an arrest. The Times warned that the Angry Brigade ‘cannot now be dismissed as a group of cranks. Some senior officers credit the group with a degree of professional skill that has seldom been experienced.’ All most flattering for a handful of dropouts whose technical expertise was limited to lighting a fuse on a stick of gelignite, and who used a child’s John Bull printing set to typeset their communiqués. Naturally, the Angries basked in the flattery, issuing ever more extravagant bulletins about the might of their invisible regiments. ‘We have started the fight back, and the war will be won by the working class with bombs … Our attack is violent – our attack is organised. The question is not whether the revolution will be violent. Organised militant struggle and organised terrorism go side by side. These are the tactics of the revolutionary class movement … The Angry Brigade is the man or woman sitting next to you. They have guns in their pockets and hatred in their minds. We are getting closer.’

      Did they expect British workers to find this threat seductive? Probably not. Some terror groups that emerged in the 1970s had clear and specific objectives – the PLO fought for a Palestinian homeland, the IRA for a united Ireland – even if their violence sometimes seemed to become an end in itself rather than a means. But what did the Angry Brigade want? Like other, more ruthless gangs in the developed world – the Italian Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Japanese Red Army – they roared defiance at the existing order but had nothing to propose by way of an alternative. The slogan that ended every communiqué from the Symbionese Liberation Army, ‘Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people’, could have served as a complete and sufficient manifesto for them all. Nihilist hyperbole and exaggerated fury filled the analytical void. It wouldn’t do to admit that they were suffering from little more than existential angst, bourgeois guilt and a nagging discontent at the soullessness and shallowness of consumerist society. ‘As the only working-class member, I was not surprised to be the first in and last out of prison,’ says Jake Prescott, who was arrested and convicted a year before his compadres. ‘When I look back on it, I was the one who was angry and the people I met were more like the Slightly Cross Brigade.’ They were, in short, very English revolutionaries, closer to Monty Python than Che Guevara. The clinching proof is surely the John Bull printing set, a cherished possession of any middle-class child of that generation. (I had one myself, with which I typeset news-sheets in my bedroom, imagining myself a Fleet Street editor.) A dead giveaway: they might as well have used Meccano to build a bomb-holder, or ended each communiqué with a whinge about the weather.

      One Friday afternoon in August 1971, following a tip-off, the Bomb Squad raided an upstairs flat at 359 Amhurst Road in East London. There, according to the police, they found sixty rounds of ammunition, a Browning revolver, a sten gun, thirty-three sticks of gelignite, detonators, a knife and a John Bull printing set. Eight people stood trial at the Old Bailey, in a case that lasted from May to December in 1972; four were jailed for ‘conspiring to cause explosions likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property’; the other four were acquitted. What excited the tabloids was the revelation that two of the defendants were young women. A story in the Sun, headlined ‘Sex Orgies at the Cottage of Blood’, alleged that these degenerates had ritually sacrificed a turkey while enjoying ‘bizarre sexual activities’ and ‘anarchist-type meetings’. Although defence lawyers claimed that the evidence had been planted by police officers, it was noticeable that after the trial there were no more stunts by the Angry Brigade.

      By then, however, the Bomb Squad was grappling with a far more serious and lethal guerrilla army, one to which the self-aggrandising hype of the Angry Brigade – ‘We are getting closer’ – seemed genuinely applicable. On 22 February 1972 a car bomb exploded outside the officers’ mess at the Parachute Regiment base in Aldershot, Hampshire, killing seven people. The IRA’s ‘publicity bureau’ in Dublin immediately admitted responsibility, describing the explosion as justified revenge for the Paras’ slaughter of Catholic civilians in Derry the previous month, on Bloody Sunday. It also claimed that the victims were all senior officers; in fact they were a Catholic priest, a gardener and five women who worked in the kitchens.

      Until the republicans extended their war to the British mainland in 1972, the English paid remarkably little attention to what was going on in that other island just across the Irish Sea. Of course they had seen the news footage: violent attacks on Catholic republicans in Derry by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Special Constabulary (better known as the B Specials) in August 1969, which led to the hasty dispatch of British troops, initially welcomed as protectors by many beleaguered Catholics and greeted with tea and sandwiches. They were also aware that the honeymoon hadn’t lasted long, because army commanders soon identified republicans rather than unionists as the real enemy – an attitude that hardened in January 1970 with the formation of the Provisional IRA, which regarded the troops as ‘forces of occupation’. From their armchairs in Godalming or Gloucester, the English had watched the swelling strife, known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’, with its riots and curfews, gun battles and barricades. But they observed all this with a curious detachment, as if it were a faraway conflict in a land of which they knew little rather than a civil war in the United Kingdom. ‘Ulster is not just another country. It is another planet,’ a Sun columnist wrote, echoing Reginald Maudling’s exasperated verdict: what a bloody awful country!

      The republicans, to English eyes, were stereotypical thick Micks and Paddies with sawdust for brains and an insatiable appetite for milk stout: three ‘official Irish joke books’ published in England during the mid-1970s sold 485,000 copies in two years. Reviewing them for New Society, the anthropologist Edmund Leach found that the prototype Irishman who emerged ‘is not so much a figure of fun as an object of contempt merging into deep hostility. He is a drink-addicted moron, reared in the bog, who wears his rubber boots at all times, cannot read or write, and constantly reverses the logic of ordinary common sense.’ His female counterpart had much the same qualities, except that she was sexually promiscuous rather than perpetually drunk.

      As for the unionists, despite their protestations of loyalty to Queen and country they seemed just as alien, with their bowler hats and Orange Lodges and Apprentice Boys’ marches. Gun-waving, balaclava-wearing Protestant paramilitaries from groups such as the UDA looked much like the IRA, and every bit as bloodthirsty. Their language, too, was from another planet – demotic and demagogic, with no trace of English understatement. In the pulpit of his Martyrs’ Memorial Church, the Rev. Ian Paisley occasionally interrupted his thunderous tirades against ‘the Antichrist’ (the Pope) and ‘the devil’s buttermilk’ (alcohol) to proclaim the virtues of the circumcised – ‘pronouncing each syllable,’ a visitor noted, ‘with a measured and sibilant relish, shircumshished, while his women worshippers shuddered beneath their hats and silently groaned at his repeated references to the male organ’.

      If Ulster Protestants and Catholics wished to pursue their ancient grievances by killing one another, why worry? Let them fight it out, while the uncomprehending English contented themselves with watching the edited highlights – youths throwing petrol bombs, troops firing rubber bullets – on the evening news. Few of them knew, or wished to find out, what might have caused these pyrotechnics; and the authorities were happy for them to remain in ignorance. When the Sunday Times reported that British soldiers had tortured republican internees, in October 1971, ministers advised broadcasters to leave the story alone. The Independent Television Authority banned a World in Action documentary a couple of weeks later on the grounds that it was ‘aiding and abetting the enemy’. If the torture victims were IRA members, their voices should not be heard. ‘The soldier or the policeman who never knows where the next shot will come from deserves support in a hazardous and desperately difficult task,’ the Daily Express commented. ‘The snide remark which undermines his morale is almost as bad as the sniper’s bullet.’ Even if the snide remark exposes illegal СКАЧАТЬ