The Angry Brigade - John Barker
A review of 'Anarchy in the UK: The Angry Brigade' by Tom Vague, published by AK Press Edinburgh in its English Psychogeographic Series, 1997
It's a grisly business being given a book about your own past: there's this vaguely iconic photo of one's younger self and the feeling that you're trapped in a sheaf of yellowing news clippings or, as in this book, some imagined golden age of the years of 68, an age of enviable commitment, mass struggles and unlimited horizons. Personally I've found it painful thinking about this past, doing it for the first time in a very long time. I don't regret what I did, as I said to the only person who ever asked me, a screw soon after my conviction, but the 'me' of then seems very distant and, though I respect what I did, I have felt critical and not wholly sympathetic. Some of the rhetoric and righteousness of AB communiqu�s now makes me cringe. Unfortunately it's exactly the most over-the-top rhetoric this book is keen on. Other things I was involved in writing, like the 'Daily Grind' supplement of 'International Times' or 'Strike' newspaper, stand up much better.
In 1971-2 I was convicted in the Angry Brigade trial and spent 7 years in jail. MORE ON...
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7672/barker.html
