Crass, Conway Hall & Mr. Lux

“The scene was set for the battle to move the Crass anarcho-punks away from pacifism to violent street rioting.” (Bash The Rich extract).

While trawling the Kill Your Pet Puppy website I came across archive images of the Crass statement denouncing the anti-fascist violence against bullying right wing skinheads in Conway Hall 1979 which is mentioned as a pivotal occurrence of the London punk/ anarchist scene by Ian in Bash The Rich. It has been a great joy writing this scene and I have been relying heavily on the book “Anti-Fascist” by Martin Lux in portraying the event.

Penny Rimbaud denounced the anarchist confrontation against the British Movement skinheads as fascist: “It is not the National Front or the British Movement that represents the right-wing threat.” (Last Of The Hippies extract) whereas Martin Lux saw it very differently: “I suppose in my heart of hearts the reaction following the Conway Hall bloodbath didn’t really surprise me, although I was taken aback for a while. After years of abuse, insults and cold shouldering from many in the anarcho scene, it came as no great shock. Even so, it infuriated me. The group Crass and their support band The Poison Girls, issued weighty statements. There were shock horror reports of the carnage in the Guardian and Time Out. The BM Nazis were treated as sacrificial lambs, despite them outnumbering us over two to one. We and our friends from the left were ‘Red Fascists’, a ‘Football Gang’, ‘their leaders appeared to be Scots’, even in the supposedly liberal press of the day a by-word for ‘nutter’. Such parochialism – even the Nazis would blush. The odium was heaped on me and others, but I withstood it with the usual fortitude, a couple of minor outbursts aside. After all, my critics would soon disappear into the halls of academia, respectability, the Labour Party, the media and property-owning classes. Fuck ‘em.” (Anti-Fascist extract).

George Berger’s “The Story Of Crass” also offers an alternative to the Crass view on pacifism and violence during the changing period of Thatchers late seventies into the early eighties: “The punk squatters saw the reaction of Crass to the Conway Hall incident as a clear case of Crass being out in Epping and out of touch with their everyday lives in London. Some I’ve spoken to are incensed that Crass could even think this, given how heavy the violence was at the time. An example – ‘Penny Rimbaud… what a wanker. He probably thinks broomsticks shoved into unwilling anal cavities are wizard pranks much like what he use to get up to in public school, whato’”. (The Story Of Crass extract).