With the decline of the revolutionary socialist Left the Right has turned to the anarchists for a law-and-order bogeyman – and a stick to beat the Left with. One journalist involved is Jamie Dettmer. Having worked for Tribune for a while, Dettmer migrated to the Sunday Telegraph (for whom his first article was an ‘expose’ of the lefties in the Labour Party) where he has produced ‘anarchist threat’ material. Last year a pamphlet called Written in Flames was published by Hooligan Press from a box-number address, ‘BM Hurricane’. Subtitled ‘Naming the British ruling class’, the pamphlet gives names, addresses and directorships from public sources. Dettmer portrayed Written in Flames as a long incitement to violent attacks on the individuals named, and speculated about the mysterious ‘Hurricane group’. (The Guardian wrote of the ‘Hurricane punk anarchist group’s activities’, December 29 1987.) There is no Hurricane group, and the pamphlet contains precisely one sentence which could be read as an incitement to violence.
Dettmer did it again with The Scum, an anti-union pamphlet in the form of a Tintin cartoon in support of the print-workers. Tintin goes to Wapping to help the unions in the fight against Rupert Murdoch, only to learn that the stewards are helping police control the pickets and the leaders are selling out the strike. Moral: pickets must become self-organising, unions are not to be trusted. Dettmer quoted one line, a sick joke about the murdered PC Blakelock, completely irrelevant to the pamphlet as a whole. The point of his article was the allegation (since denied) that the pamphlet was available in Reading Matters, the Haringay bookshop which has been targeted by the local Tories, the Campaign for a Free Britain and the Moonies. And Reading Matters had received a grant from a Labour council. (Variations on a theme of ‘commie perverts on the rates’).
The new ‘anarchist threat’ has its own (slight) intellectual support unit, the Research Foundation for the Study of Terrorism. RFST’s trustees are Paul Wilkinson, Michael Ivens of Aims, Norris McWhirter of the Freedom Association and John Newton Scott. Its address is 40 Doughty Street, the address of Aims. Their first contribution came out at the end of 1987: Anarchist group Class War are systematically harassing London docklands residents; there are ‘Bash the Rich’ marches, a pamphlet, Written in Flames, telling you who to bash; and Without A Trace on evading arrest apres-bash. Also involved are the Direct Action Movement (DAM) and groups named Hurricane and Flamethrower – oh, and the Animal Liberation Front. So there you are: they’re all in it together. Battle stations!
RFST aren’t even close (and probably didn’t try to be). Class War have never been at the centre of anything and provoke the same mixture of disdain and suspicion among anarchists as Militant do from socialists. The ‘Bash the rich’ marches were indeed Class War’s idea; but the last one was in 1985. The campaign of yuppie-harassment never amounted to much more than aerosols, noise and bent aerials. Without A Trace is a forensics manual. Neither it nor Written in Flames has any connection with Class War. The Animal Liberation Front is supported by a wide variety of people, including anarchists, Christians and a character in the TV soap, Brookside. In any case all ALF actions are local and uncoordinated.
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The use of the minor media for psy ops purposes is not new. The now defunct ‘underground’ paper, International Times was used in 1980 to run obvious state psy ops material. The issues of Jan./Feb. and Summer contained long smear stories about the late Lord Mountbatten and the Reverend Ian Paisley respectively. And the National Front’s Spearhead (July 1975) carried an extraordinary article, written by someone with access to Information Policy’s files in Northern Ireland, running the ‘Communists in the UDA’ line.
How much of this disinformation/psy ops actually goes on is impossible to evaluate. This year (1988) three examples of note have appeared, all purporting to show a violent ‘revolutionary’ threat growing in our midst. On February 1st the Guardian reported that the ‘Angry Brigade’ was claiming responsibility for setting fire to a magistrate’s court in Epping. The Angry Brigade? That ‘Angry Brigade’? In May the Daily Mail ran a story about a fictitious ‘Gay Rights Action Movement’ which was threatening members of the House of Lords. (reported in Tribune 13 May 1988) But the most interesting, and the most promising from the Right’s point of view, has been the creation of the ‘Black Liberation Front’ threat.
This seems to have first reached the national media in April when someone put an incendiary device (which failed to go off) under the car of the Assistant Chief Constable of the West Midlands and the ‘Black Liberation Front’ claimed responsibility. The Independent (8th April) reported that ‘BLF’ were responsible for a series of violent actions going back to March 1987. The paper also reported that black leaders in Wolverhampton, where these events are said to have taken place, believed the ‘BLF’ to be a neo-Nazi provocation. Meanwhile, another ‘Black Liberation Front’, apparently based in London, and apparently an off-shoot of the Black Panthers (sic), disowned the Wolverhampton version. (Sunday Times 31 July 1988) The final important link was made in the August edition of Special Forces which told of an IRA ‘alliance with the London based Black Liberation Front.‘ (p22) (Special Forces is edited by a former British Army officer, Peter Harclerode.)
The themes of insidious conspiracy and subversion within have always been a part of the British Right’s ideological package, but in the past few years they have become much more explicit. At one level it looks fairly straightforward. The British military/ intelligence complex has been preparing for years for the time when the ‘Soviet threat’ ceases to guarantee their budgets. And that might be soon. Georgi(?) Arbatov, one of the Soviet Union’s prominent spokesmen in ‘the West’ (West of where?), recently told an American audience: We are going to do something terrible to you. We are going to take away your enemy.
The ‘terrorist threat’ in general, and this recent anarchist sub-theme, is being presented as a free-floating entity independent of Moscow Gold or control. The KGB line is close to being abandoned. The 1970s in Northern Ireland were really the last time our secret state seriously tried to market the Moscow connection, without notable success. The Moscow line conspicuously failed in this country in 1983/4 when it was half-heartedly run by the Tories and the secret state against CND. At another level it is as if, in tune with most of Mrs. Thatcher’s brain, we had returned to the 1920s, the hey-day of British right-wing paranoia.
Perhaps the richest example of the recent crop of Right conspiracy theories surfaced in 1985. Peter Shipley worked in the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit up to 1985 then joined Tory Party Central Office where he was last sighted during the general election of 1987. Shipley inhabits that grey area between the pseudoacademic/academic front and the intelligence services. He is probably a spook but there isn’t any evidence. After the rioting in Handsworth in Birmingham, Shipley explained to the readers of the Daily Telegraph (12/9/85) that members of the Revolutionary Communist Party
‘were present in Birmingham in the days preceding the outbreak of this week’s rioting, ostensibly to hold meetings – some on the streets – about South Africa.’
(For non UK readers, the RCP has – who knows? – 600 members? It’s minute.)
Shipley’s is a model example of its kind. The ‘enemy within’ with white revolutionary Marxist violence added to the images of black urban rioting; and the reassuring, racist message that our blacks aren’t capable of getting uppity themselves, they only do it when white lefties get them all cranked up.
Three years later the revolutionary socialist ‘agitator’ has been replaced by the authentic terrorist. The attempt to link the ‘Black Liberation Front’ (sic) with the IRA is a logical step forward. A ‘black IRA’ has enormous psy-ops potential in our society – if it can be made to stick without getting exposed.
The bogus group is just an adaptation of the counter or pseudo gang used in Northern Ireland. It raises one of the unresolved questions in this area; having created the ‘terrorism industry’, how far is the British state prepared to go to produce some ‘terrorism’? What will the British secret state do if the Northern Irish thing ever gets resolved? How will the IRA be replaced as source of the ‘evidence’ of a British component in international terrorism?