The Angry Brigade was an autonomous anarchist group – or ‘libertarian militants’ as they also called themselves – responsible for a series of armed actions against the British state between 1967 and 1972, although in 1983 and 1984 two further explosive devices were claimed by this group. Half a century later, at a point where the British government now labels even the most minimal acts of criminal damage as ‘terrorism’, it is important to assess the activity and relevance of this political trend.
Due to the decentralised nature of the Brigade, there is little documentation on its formation or concrete political positions. The first communiqué from the Brigade followed its third operation, the machine-gunning of the Spanish Embassy in London in solidarity with Basque struggle against the Francoist regime in Spain.
News of that attack was suppressed by the British media. Operating at a pre-internet time, when the dominant role of bourgeois media was even stronger than today, breaking through the media blackout became a key objective for the Brigade.
The Brigade was acutely aware of the Irish national struggle and the economic crisis of the period, the unemployment and rising inflation, and believed that its actions would stimulate and complement political and economic struggles. The Angry Brigade was active during the same period as groups such as the Red Army Faction in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, Action Directe in France and the Weather Underground in the US, who carried out attacks on government and commercial targets. This is often referred to as ‘propaganda of the deed’, referencing the idea that the commission of such high-profile individual acts can create the conditions for a revolutionary situation to develop.
Historically, this method has not been successful. Unlike the use of armed actions as part of the strategy of an active national liberation movement, where political consciousness has already been developed and there is a committed mass movement, these acts have often isolated the group from the working class. Although the Brigade bravely asserted: ‘We believe in the autonomous working class. We are part of it. And we are ready to give our lives for our liberation’, (Communiqué 7, 18 March 1971), it never addressed how, beyond the taking of specific actions, it envisaged a movement against capita-lism and imperialism developing. The emphasis on breaking through the media blackout suggests that its view was that if the wider working class heard about what they were doing, this would be sufficient to spur further action and be the catalyst for a movement to develop.
The Angry Brigade’s targets
The Brigade was responsible for over 160 armed actions between 1970 and 1972. It targeted property rather than people, arguing that destroying capital was more threatening to the ruling class than taking individual capitalist lives, and writing that ‘fascists and government agents are the only ones who attack the public’. Each bomb was accompanied by a communiqué containing the Brigade’s justification of that target, all of which reflected common political frustrations of the time.
The Angry Brigade’s targets included
• 8 September 1970 – the home of Sir John Waldron, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and an advocate for the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), an undercover unit that infiltrated protest groups sharing intel with MI5. The SDS would later steal the identities of dead children, deceive young women into having relationships and even children with them, and then disappear.
• 30 October 1970 – the home of Sir Peter Rawlinson, an Irish Guard in the British Army, later Attorney General of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Rawlinson imprisoned members of the Irish Republican movement and those protesting against apartheid South Africa.
• 20 November 1970 – a BBC van reporting on a Miss World competition, aimed both at the BBC, and also consumer society as a whole, ‘which insults women… and makes a profit from it’.
• 12 January 1971 – the home of Robert Carr, Secretary of State, a few days after also bombing the Department of Employment and Productivity. On 12 January, thousands of people were on the streets protesting Carr’s Industrial Relations Bill that aimed to eradicate increasingly militant strike action and limit ‘wage inflation’ to retain profitability throughout the capitalist crisis. The Brigade wrote that the Bill worked to make class struggle in Britain a ‘one-sided war’, advertising that ‘we have started to fight back and the war will be won by the organised working class, with bombs’.
• 20 October 1971 – the home of Chris Bryant, owner of the largest private housebuilder in the Midlands. Bryant’s employees were two weeks into a strike where the company repeatedly used scab labour to avoid paying its workers more than £1 per hour. Bryant Homes was responsible for pricing thousands of working class people in Birmingham out of their homes by buying up and building on cheap ‘slums’ that residents couldn’t afford to rebuild after the blitz, all while reporting a 25% increase in profits that year.
The state response
In January 1971, the Metropolitan Police formed the Bomb Squad to track down both the Brigade, and members of the Irish Republican Army. It became known as the Anti-Terrorist Branch, which merged with the Special Branch (formed as the Special Irish Branch, to counter the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1883) to become the Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) in 2006.
The police raided ten homes in the two weeks following the Carr bombing, consistently violating the terms of their warrants by seizing unlisted items such as diaries, address books and paper articles, with the usual purpose of gathering inf-ormation that could be used against the left as a whole.
On 6 February Jake Prescott was the first to be arrested. He was held for questioning and refused access to a lawyer for two days before being charged with causing three of the bombings. Two months later, Ian Purdie was arrested and charged alongside Prescott. They were kept as Category A prisoners in Brixton prison, locked up for 23 hours a day. The Angry Brigade’s bombings and communiqués continued. When their lawyers requested evidence providing grounds for their arrest, they were told it would need to be approved by the Attorney General, whose home had been bombed by the Brigade months earlier. Meanwhile, the police continued raiding homes, illegally seizing any material related to Purdie and Prescott’s defence campaign.
At their trial, Purdie was found not guilty, and Prescott guilty of only some bombings and conspiracy charges on the sole basis that his handwriting was on three envelopes. Prescott was sentenced to 15 years in prison by Justice Melford Stevenson, who had received a bomb threat from the Brigade earlier that year in a clear conflict of interest. This was later reduced to ten years on appeal.
The Stoke Newington 8 (SN8)
On 21 August 1971, eight people were arrested at 359 Amhurst Road. They were taken to the new Bomb Squad HQ where two were beaten to force confessions. All faced the same conspiracy charge, alongside charges of possessing weapons and explosives.
That day, the Met Police publicly announced that it had caught all the Brigade’s members, however while the SN8 were held on remand, the Albany Street Army Barracks, less than five minutes from Bomb Squad HQ, was bombed and this was claimed by the Brigade. They wrote that, ‘the Stoke Newington 8 [and] the political prisoners in Northern Ireland are all prisoners of the class war.’
The SN8 trial began in March 1972, and became the longest trial in the history of the British legal system. The prosecution evidence was mainly articles written by the defendants rather than evidence of explosives, and in the course of the trial several police officers admitted to criminal behaviour designed to secure a conviction.
After 52 hours’ jury deliberation, four of the eight were convicted on conspiracy charges. John Barker, Anna Mendelssohn, Jim Greenfield and Hilary Creek were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. The other four were acquitted.
The defence campaign and the opportunist left
The SN8 Defence Group released publications updating on the trial and advocated for supporting all political prisoners internationally2. The Defence Group was more successful than the Brigade in attracting a wider base of support.
The Defence Group organised prisoner solidarity, including protests outside prisons and other actions. From inside, Jake Prescott continued to be politically active during his time in prison, taking part in the Hull prison uprising in 19763.
Solidarity from the British left was limited, however. The Communist Party and the ‘radical left’ in Britain were the first to categorise the group as ‘terrorists’ before the state had. The Brigade understood this on class terms, outlining that the left, particularly the trade union movement, restricted class struggle to the confines laid out by the state. These so-called leftists deliberately remained non-threatening and co-operated with the ruling class, ‘channelling dissent into a manageable form of quantitative mediation with the bosses’, in order to eventually sell out the workers’ demands.
The Brigade rejected the label of ‘terrorist’, stating that a non-violent approach denied the everyday violence of capitalism, and delegitimised the right of oppressed people to armed resistance in the face of that violence. It argued that the left’s ‘non-violent’ approach allowed it to justify condemning active liberation struggles in oppressed nations.
Throughout the trial, the sympathy of the opportunist left was entirely conditional. They would only support the eight if they were not guilty, or would refuse on the grounds that they were isolated from the trade union movement. In response, the Defence Group wrote that:
‘Revolutionary solidarity should embrace all those on the left who become victims of state persecution, whether innocent or guilty, whether bombers or not. The state assault on the Stoke Newington Eight is part of a general campaign of legal repression… If the state can effectively silence our eight then not a single revolutionary can escape the blame. What is really on trial is the state’s ability to railroad who it likes, when it likes, no matter what the evidence… They are up for trial because they resisted.’
This conditionality remains a characteristic of the opportunist left. Today, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign refuses to defend those outside of its own leadership who are criminalised for solidarity actions. ‘Left’ groups repeatedly criticise armed resistance in the Middle East. Trade unions reluctantly strike for wages and conditions, but refuse point blank to do so in order to prevent bombs being sent to Israel or even defend their own members against racist immigration laws. What they have in common is their refusal to break ties with imperialism.
Lessons for today
The Angry Brigade carefully identified its targets to ensure no loss of life. Nevertheless, it not only faced state attack but also the condemnation of the opportunist ‘left’. Emphasising that it was ‘no vanguard’ and that it did not ‘represent anyone other than ourselves’, and therefore caught within the contradiction of how to move towards the ‘self-managed society’ it advocated, the Brigade lacked the structure, organisation and analysis to withstand the repression and did not survive past the early 1980s.
The key lesson from the history of the Angry Brigade is the unending and fundamental need to fight for socialist revolution through mutual engagement with the working class, especially within the most oppressed sections. Our tasks as communists in Britain today are to challenge political opportunism, defend all political pris-oners and stand in solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles, through active public organisation, with the aim of building a mass working class move-ment capable of withstanding state repression and overthrowing the imperialist ruling class.
- The Angry Brigade (1970) First communiqué. All communiqués can be found in Jane Weir’s The Angry Brigade: Documents and Chronology (1985).
- Stoke Newington 8 Defence Group and the Angry Brigade
wordpress.com/tag/stoke-newington-eight/ - An account of the Hull prison riot, 1976 – Jake Prescott
libcom.org/article/account-hull-prison-riot-1976-jake-prescott
