My life as a revolutionary protester

I’ve never been much of an active protester, but I did once join a political march. It was during my first year at Cambridge, in the early 1970s.

I can’t remember exactly what we were protesting about.  I have an idea it was to do with government moves to prevent local student unions forwarding public funds to homicidal Third World gangsters masquerading as Freedom Fighters. Preposterously, the Conservative government felt the money would be better spent, as intended, on students in the UK.Fascists!

As I can’t even remotely have agreed with the aims of the march, I must have gone along for a jolly outing with friends, many of whom were members of the University Labour Society. So was I for a while, but only so I could take part in the wholesale election-rigging that constituted the bulk of the infighting between Labour’s right, centre left, left, extreme left, and shrieking, deranged, loony left wings. My friends tended to belong to the first two categories. 

Many an amusing hour was spent concocting and distributing fake newsletters from enemy candidates pledging to fight tirelessly for gay or gypsy rights, or both (we weren’t sure where, or indeed if,  gypsies stood on homosexuals). 

I seem to remember one circular suggesting that, if the candidate were to be elected, every Society member would be expected to provide hospitality for a gypsy family in their home during the summer holidays.

No one receiving these missives ever questioned their genuineness (except, of course, for the candidates whose name was appended to them – though I suspect a few might have wondered if they’d composed them in a moment of forgetfulness).

As for the Tories, this was when that ghastly tosser Edward Heath was in charge, and when the University’s Conservative Association (or whatever it was called at the time) seemed to consist mainly of amiable Tim Nice-But-Dims; a bulky right-wing Scots-Norwegian without a suit or a DJ to his name simply wouldn’t have fitted in – no matter how thick. The Tory Party was awash with thinkers a few years later, but they weren’t much in evidence amongst undergraduates at that stage. These chaps (they were all chaps) were out in force on the day of our march, braying deserved but unattractively gleeful abuse. 

Everyone had a lovely time, which was all that really mattered, but it would have been so much more entertaining if we had been allowed to dress up in combat fatigues and sunglasses and to carry Kalashnikovs as a homage to the murderers and rapists we were so keen to aid.

I remember once – and only once - having to go out on strike while at the BBC. For reasons I can no longer fathom – maybe a simple wish to belong – I had joined the clownish but malevolent National Union of Journalists, and they had probably decided that our employment conditions were an obscene affront to human dignity (this was at a time when production staff on the flagship Nine O’Clock News worked three days a week and no one ever got fired or made redundant – now that’s exploitation!). 

Or maybe we were taking a stance over the Thatcherite junta’s attempts to interfere with the stream of pro-IRA propaganda we seemed to be pumping out at the time. 

My favourite piece of union lunacy, though, was the demand that part-time workers who only worked pre-defined hours on pre-defined days should be given the same payment for being available for work at any time of the day or night as those of us who actually were available at all times: I was definitely “The Man in the Bateman Cartoon” at the chapel meeting where I suggested that this wasn’t the most rigorously logical proposition we had ever been asked to vote on. Naturally, it was passed.

I was reminded of all this recently when BA’s handsomely remunerated staff voted to strike. While BBC News staff eventually cottoned on to the fact that the world had moved on a bit since the dying, strike-infected days of the Callaghan government, it’s good to know that some parts of our unionized industrial base still haven’t got it. This puts them firmly in the same camp as Bankers and MPs, which is probably where they deserve to be.

The other prompt for these reminiscences was a morning spent reading 1980s parliamentary sketches by Frank Johnson, the funniest writer ever to work in Fleet Street. More on his genius anon.