Comrades at War
I was a teenage Marxist.
Okay, maybe not a theoretical Marxist, but I certainly claimed a deep belief in far-left politics.
It’s not hard to see why. I grew up in a former mining village in East Durham and was a teenager during the miners' strike.
It’s difficult for anyone who didn’t live through that era to truly understand its impact—even those just a few miles away. These photos from No Redemption by Northern Echo photographer Keith Patterson were all taken within a few miles of where I grew up and capture the atmosphere of the time.
I had a Vespa scooter and commuted to school on it. Each morning, I would pass Black Marias—police vans more commonly associated with the conflict in Northern Ireland - taking phalanxes of Police into neighbouring towns and villages. The whole force of the state was used to defeat the strikers.
I saw the forces of labour and capital fight each other in the streets over control of the means of production. Hard to unsee that kind of thing.
University and the Clash of Ideologies
When I got to university, I threw myself enthusiastically into the alphabet soup of left-wing politics.
My first year was spent at Warwick University, home to one of the country’s best economics departments. Sadly, it was also wholly committed to the full spectrum of neoliberal economic theory—Laffer curves, trickle-down economics, and the efficient market hypothesis. These extreme theoretical positions weren’t just acts of faith; they were presented as mathematically indisputable. Graphs and whiteboards filled with figures were used to prove these ideas as absolute facts.
This, from Ferris Bueller's Day Off captures it better than I can. Anyone? Anyone?
It made no sense to me. Two plus three didn’t equal four. Or five. Or even a recognisable number. We weren’t comparing apples to bananas; we were comparing apples to Bananarama.
Admittedly, I retreated into sulking, weird music, and smoking dope. But it wasn’t until the credit crunch decades later that it all made sense. The hypothetical economic theories taught at Warwick had become the basis of global economic systems. It was only when the banks started closing that the size of the holes in the maths became obvious to everyone else.
I loved the people I met at Warwick, I value those I am still in touch with, and I regret losing touch with so many. But intellectually it was fucked up.
Mixing Pop and Politics
Warwick’s campus had both radical Right and Left-wing factions.
All the left-wing groups had ties to pop music. Labour had Billy Bragg, Jimmy Summerville and Paul Weller, who toured Britain to try and encourage young people to vote Labour in the 1987 General Election
It didn't work, but it did give us one of the greatest ever moments on Top Of The Pops:
Somerville had been part of the legendary Pits and Perverts alliance between the gay community and striking miners. George Michael co-headlined Miners Benefit gigs at the Royal Albert Hall with Paul Weller.
On the left, three groups stood to the left of mainstream Labour:
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Socialist Organiser (Soggy Oggy): An entryist group evolving from Militant Tendency. When Militant was expelled from Labour, it split—its working-class faction became Liverpool-based property developers who made lots of money, while its middle-class wing became Soggy Oggy, attention-seeking fringe ideologues.
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Socialist Workers Party (SWP): A long-established far-left Trotsyite party known for recruiting heavily on campus. Most famous for selling their inky mess Socialist Worker outside tube stations and university student unions.
If Labour had Billy Bragg the SWP had The Redskins, a militant left-wing skinhead soul band led by former NME journalist X. Moore. They split and vanished after one album, Neither Washington nor Moscow, named after the SWP’s newspaper slogan, but the one album they left behind was fantastic:
And then there was the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)—the most arcane and weird of them all.
Predictably, I aligned with the RCP.
Unlike other leftist groups, which raised funds by selling awful newspapers, the RCP had Living Marxism—a glossy periodical sold in WH Smiths. I attended a couple of their summer schools, suspiciously well-funded events that included pro-IRA seminars mixed with media skills workshops led by Melvyn Bragg. Some suspected the RCP had MI5 or similar intelligence agency backing.
At the time it seemed daft that security forces were embedded within Left wing groups, and I felt a bit embarrassed suggesting it.
But after we discovered the Metropolitan Police had dozens of "Spy Cops" inside left wing movements in this era it became a lot more believable. Some of Met Officers slept with female left wing activists, formed relationships, and had children while under cover
The local RCP was an odd bunch—more cult than party. Eventually, I started pretending not to be home when they came knocking. I overheard too many conversations about targeting attractive recruits to draw in others.
The RCP's musical protégés were an indie band called Easterhouse, whose Derek Jarman-produced video for their single 1969 was a standout, even if the sound quality is a bit wonky.
They had close ties with The Smiths, and regularly supported them on tour. Craig Gannon from Easterhouse even played with The Smiths live. This is him with them on The Tube:
The Smiths played miners strike benefits alongside Billy Bragg, Jimmy Summerville and The Redskins.
When Johnny Marr left The Smiths Ivor Perry from Easterhouse was recruited as his replacement, however despite recording demos the project never went anywhere. Bengali in Platforms was originally recorded as part of these sessions, later to emerge as a Morrissey solo track. We will come back to Morrissey later.
The Tories had their own pop music supporters in the 80s, but they don't like to talk about them any more:
The Tragic Downfall of the SWP
The SWP was the biggest campus left-wing group, often linking themselves to more mainstream movements through campaigns and rallies. Many on the left unknowingly marched under SWP placards.
Men think of misogyny as a right wing phenomena: Trump giving asylum to the Tate brothers to court the manosphere for example. But there are problems with misogyny on the the left which go back a very long way.
This is Maureen Colquhoun, Labour MP, and Britain’s first openly Lesbian Member of Parliament. Her constituency Labour Party was dominated by a male hard left faction, who deselected her in favour of a straight man.
The SWP Senior leadership was almost exclusively male, and over the years, young female members came forward with accusations of rape and sexual assault against party leaders. When women spoke up, they were pressured to avoid the police and instead let the party handle matters internally—predictably exonerating the powerful men.
The scandal broke in the New Statesman, and the SWP became pariahs. London University Union banned the SWP as an “rape-apologist organisation which prides itself in creating an unsafe space for young women”, other Universities followed suit.
Yet, this wasn’t the end.
“Comrade Delta,” the central figure in the scandal, was discreetly helped into a position at Liverpool Hope University. It is indicative of the scale of the misogyny on the Left than there were people who thought that this was both safe and appropriate.
This wasn't the first time a British far left party had imploded this way. In 1985 the Workers Revolutionary Party disbanded after identical allegations were made against their own leadership.
The SWP didn’t vanish. Its members and their apologists were later rehabilitated through front organisations like Stop The War Coalition, Stand Up To Racism, and Unite Against Fascism. When Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, he was happy to share platforms with them, no matter how questionable their past. This prompted public criticism from groups like Southall Black Sisters:
Today, the last sad remnants of the SWP still linger under different names and logos, clinging to the middle class radical left.
The parting on the left, becomes a parting on the right
While the SWP collapsed under scandal, my former comrades in the RCP took an even stranger path.
Like many on the far left, they sided with Slobodan Milošević and Serbian forces during the Yugoslav Civil War. Because Milošević had been a Communist and the Serbs were fighting NATO, many supported them. But the RCP went further. They published articles denying the genocide in Bosnia, calling it a hoax fabricated by Western imperialists. One piece even claimed that Channel 4 used bogus footage in a documentary exposing Serbian concentration camps.
Channel 4 sued Living Marxism for libel, bankrupting both the magazine and the party.
But the RCP didn’t disappear—they rebranded as Spiked! Online, this time as right-wing culture warriors championing “free speech” and libertarianism. Their brand of libertarianism, of course, meant the rich could do what they liked, while the rest of us could do what we were told. Unsurprisingly, they drew funding from the American far-right, including the Koch Brothers.
Some Spiked!/ Living Marxism figures went on to join the Brexit Party. Claire Fox became a Brexit Party MEP alongside Nigel Farage, and was made Baroness Fox, by Boris Johnson. Munira Mirza from Living Marxism served as a special political advisor to Boris as Mayor of London and PM.
Morrissey went on his own journey to the right, ending up a sad, fat right wing mess.
Lots of people claimed to be shocked by Morrissey's sharp turn to the right, but he had flirted with similar ideas as far back as Bengali in Platforms.
This is Asian led indie band Cornershop burning posters of Morrissey outside his record label in 1992 in protest.
None of this of course stopped David Cameron giving Barack Obama a set of Smiths CDs as a present, in one of the weirder moments of Transatlantic diplomacy. Jumping on the bandwagon a decade after everyone else.
Of course Morrissey wasn't the only person in that era with an unfortunate flirtation with skinhead culture, although I was never tempted by the politics:
An Appeal To The Young
These are some of my own mementoes of my time among the radicals:
Petty Bourgeois Revolutionism is sometimes given a longer title translated from the original Russian: Bourgeois Ultra-Leftism, An Infantile Disorder. This latter title sums up a lot of my experiences; middle class kids playing at being radical leftists, the ideological struggles often little more than childish tantrums.
It's a cliche that we all get more right wing as we get older, which makes Conservatism sound like incontinence or erectile dysfunction.
Personally I don’t think it is inevitable that everyone becomes more Right wing, it is more about assets than age. As we acquire more and more assets like houses and pensions, we vote for parties who will protect those assets. Mostly this means Right wing parties with their origins in inherited wealth. As we get older our store of assets increases, which is why older generations swing Conservative.
In the UK younger generations haven’t been accumulating assets as quickly as my generation, or my parent’s generation. The generational shift towards Conservatism is breaking down. For many this leads to support for Left wing parties, but others are drawn to rejection of “mainstream” politics, including for some embracing the misogynistic far Right.
That might change as the older generation dies, and hands down the largest store of unearned wealth in history. This might save mainstream Conservativism from dying out, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
But it is not just disaffected young people embracing fringe and far Right politics. I also see lots of middle aged, middle class friends of mine who were lefties in the 80s who have been radicalised on-line into a new viral far Right politics post Covid. Trans rights, in particular is being used as a wedge issue to draw people away from the Left, and into the embrace of far Right authoritarianism.
Even the bourgeois snob bolsheviks of Novara Media are positioning themselves for a pivot to the Right on culture war issues, just as the RCP did a generation earlier.
And me? I am still left wing, but as I got older I left the dogma behind. The socialism of North East mining communities was practical and pragmatic, suspicious of ideology and shaped more by non-conformist religion than Marx and Engels.
Still quite fancy another Vespa mind.