Toast

Ian Bone is a funny guy. The founder of Class War, an “anarchist group”, says his Shoreditch Fuck Parade event in Shoreditch, was a hit.

The Guardian:

Bone defended those who attacked the Cereal Killer Cafe with paint bombs and graffiti because they had helped publicise the movement across the globe. “Everyone on that march, who are so pissed off with the lot they’ve got in life, was fighting back. I totally understand and support it,” said Bone, who founded Class War in 1982.

So you hit the Honey Monster’s pals? You attack people who set up a legal business? Is the Cereal Cafe the epitome of the rich’s taunt to the poor? The huddled masses have been so very quiet as the government reduces their paltry incomes to a pittance. But is larking about in central London, rather than Sunderland, Blackpool or Knowsley, about class war or adolescent priapism. Look at the demo’s name. Surely it should be the ‘Fucked Parade’, but what cool kids keen to run about with their genitals flapping around would come to a mobile Glastonbury come down?

The Guardian adds:

He promised the movement, which has so far organised three Fuck Parade protests in London, would seek to expand. He said: “They’re going to take place all around Britain. I’m going up to Scotland now to talk to some people in Glasgow and Edinburgh about possible ones there.”

Bone was asked about attacking independent businesses. He replied:

“We’d be mad to go for Pret a Manger and Foxtons. A broken window at Foxtons isn’t going to get any publicity at all, whereas we’ve seen what happens with independent shops. We’d be stupid not to.”

So much for ideology, vision and anarchy. It only matters if the Fourth Estate take notice. This is class war with a black hoddie doffed to middle-class stability and nostalgia.

Bone’s Parade had been protesting against 1 Commercial Street, a new block of luxury flats:

“We were campaigning outside 1 Commercial Street for 10 months last year, which is quite funny when people are now saying we should concentrate on property developers.  There’s was lots of stuff going on there – arrests, burning effigies – and not a peep in the press. Then someone throws a couple of bags of paint at a cereal cafe and it’s in the newspapers from Italy to New Zealand.”

The Cereal Killer Cafe… You attacked a cafe selling cereal. Was that planned?

 “No, it’s just what happened. The way the Fuck Parade works, people are there and then they wander off. It’s 1,000 or so anarchists and other people – it’s very hard to tell them to do anything. We just happened to be going past it. Anyway, I must have been one amongst many people astounded to see a cafe flogging cereal open at nine o’clock at night. If I’d have put money on us going for anything it would have been Foxtons, and it wasn’t.”

No. You picked the softest target you could find.

“Everyone keeps saying: ‘Wrong target, you should have done the City, you should have done parliament, you should have done Pret a Manger, Foxtons.’ It doesn’t work. You don’t get any publicity. We had a riot virtually every night outside 1 Commercial Street, and it doesn’t get a dicky bird.”

But it wasn’t a riot, was it. It was drums, whistles and shouting at bricks and glass.

“We wouldn’t have got any publicity if it hadn’t been for the cereal cafe. But I give those two brothers their credit. They’ve milked this brilliantly. They’ve run a masterful campaign. I salute them for that.”

Milked it? Is that a joke? Is that the intentionally funny bit?

Police and miners at a demonstration at Orgreave Colliery, South Yorkshire, during the miners’ strike, 2nd June 1984. (Photo by Steve Eason/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

If you want a class war, you need to look back at the minsters’ strike, when the State smashed the organised working class.

Mick Hume: