Anarchy in the UK? (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Anarchy in the UK?

10:42am Monday 19th February 2007

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Driving home along Westgate and White Abbey Road I’ve noticed in the last few days a proliferation of iconic graffiti on a subject I’d thought long confined to the glory days of the Eighties.

It’s not CND and it’s not, thank God, NF. But it is Class War , the circles around those central As in the two words giving me a frisson of nostalgia.

To a young man growing up in the working class North in the early Eighties, Class War was one of those slightly scary yet somehow fascinating things. Scary because anyone connected to it seemed to be a gaunt, steel-eyed punk with tattoos and scars who was always talking about putting rich people’s heads on spikes. Fascinating because, well, pretty much for the same reasons.

The graffiti used to be everywhere when I was a kid. More than likely some of it was put up by vandals who didn’t know what else to write, but most of it must have been perpetrated by real Class Warriors.

Class War had it that the vast majority of British people were exploited by the ruling classes, and advocated, as their name suggests, all out war with the toffs and land-owners who kept the working classes down.

It was - and still is, to some extent - a romantically attractive stance for anyone who grew up working class. The problem was, there wasn’t a huge amount of evidence of anything other than a bit of graffiti here and there, and a couple of protest singles (one, memorably, for Prince Andrew’s wedding to Fergie).

Class War fizzled out, or perhaps my interest in it did. Maybe the working class that the Class War people were so keen to champion shrunk somewhat - Class War always claimed that 75 per cent of the country was working class. But with the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, there also seem to be more people who count themselves as middle class, so perhaps Class War’s natural audience has naturally diminished.

What this resurgence of Class War graffiti, and in an area with a high Asian population, actually means, who knows? Maybe the gulf between rich and poor has become so great that the poverty-struck are becoming politicised. Perhaps people are as disillusioned with the Labour Party as they were 30 years ago, which in turn ushers in a new age of Conservatism. Maybe, just maybe, it means there’s trouble ahead.