The British socialist writer Dave Widgery played a key role in Rock Against Racism, a mass movement that brought culture and politics together. With the far right on the rise again, Widgery’s ideas and example are now strikingly relevant.
The crowd at a Rock Against Racism concert at Alexandra Palace in London, April 14, 1979. (Virginia Turbett / Redferns via Getty Images)
The journalist Dave Widgery was to British socialists what Hunter S. Thompson was to US radicals. His writing expressed, with greater brilliance than any of his contemporaries, the sense of hope that millions felt in the epoch of the Beatles, Bernadette Devlin, and the Miss World protests.
Too few people remember Widgery today — in part because he died desperately young in 1992 following a freak accident at home; in part because the causes to which he dedicated his life are ones that contradict the fashions of our moment. Widgery was for the workers always, for socialist revolution without conditions or excuses.
Intimate Contradictions
Born in 1947 to a Quaker family, Widgery contracted polio at the age of nine. For months, he was trapped in hospital without friends of family, the children crying themselves to sleep, the nurses in tears “at their inability to comfort us.” He had a wheelchair, afterward calipers, then thrilled to his “first pair of shop-bought shoes.”
For the rest of his life, Widgery walked always in difficulty and often in pain, even at the hundreds of demonstrations that he joined. He acquired a lasting belief in the virtues of socialized health care.
Dave Widgery was to British socialists what Hunter S. Thompson was to US radicals.
Widgery was a teenage supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and a fan of Charlie Parker’s music and the novels of Jack Kerouac. To read the latter, he recalled,
when you were 15, scrabbling through the Ks of Slough Public Library, was a coded message of discontent; the sudden realization of an utter subversiveness and licence. He legitimized all the papery efforts of a child writer, dream books, pretend novellas, invented games.
At eighteen, Widgery spent four months traveling across the United States. He was in Watts for the uprising of 1965 and met Allen Ginsberg and the activists of Students for a Democratic Society.
The first editor to truly trust Widgery was Richard Neville, the Australian-born founder of London’s Oz magazine. Neville was trying to summon into being a cultural mass movement to hurl against the rich and the state, composed of radical women, black activists, dope smokers, and opponents of bourgeois morality. One of Widgery’s early pieces, “When Harrods Was Looted,” urged readers of Oz to make the shift from student to socialist politics.
His writing appeared in violet ink, printed on a green background, beside a complicated diagram presenting the affinity of William Morris’s art with Rosa Luxemburg’s socialism. He said that there existed an “invisible international . . . the beginning of a recovery of the tradition of European revolutionary socialism and the activist heart of Marxism within it.”
Widgery and Neville became friends, with the latter relying on Widgery for assistance in court when he was charged in 1971 with bringing out an indecent publication. The magazine did publish soft-core pornography, Widgery acknowledged, but it did so as part of an attempt to destroy the lies and hypocrisy about sex. In an article for Socialist Worker, Widgery defended the magazine as an expression of the desire for revolutionary change:
Socialist puritans are in danger of ignoring one of the most intimate of capitalism’s contradictions. Engels was right when he pointed out “that with every great revolutionary movement, the question of free love comes to the foreground.”
After the trial had ended in the acquittal of the defendants on appeal, Widgery was not afraid of pointing out the flaws of his allies. When the Oz founder brought out a book titled Playpower, Widgery told Neville — and the wider movement behind him — that it was time to confront the sexism that was an unmistakable part of the male hippie dream: “Neville’s view of the sexual transaction is not so much advanced as insulting.”
Widgery later wrote Oz’s obituary for the magazine’s final issue:
Whether Oz is dead, of suicide or sexual excess, or whether Oz is alive and operating under a series of new names is unclear at the moment. What is clear is that Oz bizarrely and for a short period expressed the energy of a lot of us. We regret his passing.
Knowing the Real Enemy
Leaving Oz as the magazine folded, Widgery criticized the underground press for failing to win enough workers over to their cultural radicalism: “At the core of the shabby myths and collective dishonesties of the underground was the belief that the class struggle had had it, that the workers had been hopelessly bribed, bamboozled and betrayed.” Yet, he insisted, middle-class radicals were impotent without the support of workers.
By now, Widgery had completed his studies to become a doctor. He worked for the rest of his life as a GP in east London, meaning that his writing was restricted to evenings and weekends. Yet he kept up a steady supply of articles — not news articles, nor exactly opinion pieces — but essays that were usually around two thousand words in length, making sense of the world around him, interviewing prominent radicals, explaining the thinking behind rising causes.
Between 1968 and 1972, Widgery was collecting socialist ephemera for publication in an anthology, The Left in Britain. That volume includes verbatim notes of student meetings, leaflets handed out at workers’ picket lines, and a selection of essays documenting the slow replacement of the pro-Soviet left by the dissidents of the younger generation.
At the end of the 1970s, Widgery had the greatest opportunity of his life to influence a mass movement of hundreds of thousands of people.
Not that all the latter were to be celebrated. Here, for example, is Widgery writing about the journal New Left Review. He documented that publication’s successive enthusiasms for non-communist mass movements of the Left, for milquetoast social democracy, for Maoism, and then for red bases of university students: “Underlying the apparent sophistication of the analyses was the extraordinarily arrogant belief that it is the role of the intellectuals to make the theory, the job of the workers to make the revolution and that what is wrong in Britain is that the latter are too backward to understand the former’s instruction.”
At the end of the 1970s, Widgery had the greatest opportunity of his life to influence a mass movement of hundreds of thousands of people. This chance came about in response to what was, initially, an advance by the Right. A party founded by dedicated fascists, the National Front, secured a high level of support in a series of elections: 15,340 votes in Leicester in 1976, 200,000 votes in local elections the following year. The far right won backing among football supporters, the young unemployed, and even in some workplaces where the union might have been expected to operate as a barrier to its growth.
With the National Front rising, several well-known musicians gave statements that seemed to endorse its politics of fascism and anti-immigrant hatred, including David Bowie (“You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up”) and Eric Clapton (“This is England; this is a white country and we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here”).
Widgery wrote a series of articles for the magazine of Rock Against Racism (RAR), Temporary Hoarding, defining the nascent anti-fascist left. His editorial in the first issue became RAR’s manifesto: “We want Rebel music, street music. Music that breaks down people’s fear of one another. Crisis music. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is.”
Contrary to the usual practice of the British left, which was to treat anti-fascism and anti-racism as two separate causes, Widgery argued for their unification:
When the state backs up racialism, it’s different. Outwardly respectable but inside fired with the same mentality and the same fears, the bigger danger is the racist magistrates with their cold sneering authority, the immigration men who mock an Asian mother as she gives birth to a dead child on their office floor, policemen for whom answering back is a crime.
Post-Electronic Leninism
RAR was a giant movement with a very small leadership, the core of which was a group of friends who shared Widgery’s commitment to both revolutionary politics and the culture of reggae, dub, and soul:
Black music was our catechism, not just something we listened to in our spare time. It was the culture which woke us up, had shaped us and kept us up all night, blocked in the Wardour Street mod clubs, fanatical on the Thames Valley R & B circuit, queuing all down Gerrard Street to see Roland Kirk in Ronnie Scott’s old basement. It was how we worked out our geography, learnt our sexuality, and taught ourselves history.
Widgery wrote about the music as well as the politics of John Lennon — his support for the people massacred at Attica State Prison, for Angela Davis, for the victims of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry. He gave grudging credit to Yoko Ono for having prevented him from making “the traditional rock star exit as either a bloated drug-raddled corpse or a bloated Tory.”
Widgery wrote about the music as well as the politics of John Lennon — his support for the people massacred at Attica, for Angela Davis, for the victims of Bloody Sunday.
Fears of exiting badly were a recurring theme of Widgery’s writing; he often wondered what might have happened to him if he hadn’t chosen the far left: “silliness,” he feared, or “sell outs,” children in public school, a university career. The decision to keep on keeping on, he said, had been “the most fruitful and rewarding of [his] adult life.”
Widgery’s book Beating Time, published a decade after the launch of RAR, became the unofficial history of what was one of the biggest street movements the country had ever seen, with between half a million and a million people attending marches, joining anti-racist festivals, painting out fascist graffiti, and making racism briefly and wonderfully unfashionable. “RAR’s philosophy of militant entertainment,” he wrote, “did a lot to show that the funky political mix — the appeal to head, hands and feet — could work.”
Midway through the RAR campaign, Widgery was asked to review the third volume of Tony Cliff’s biography of Vladimir Lenin for Socialist Review. The magazine was the property of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group to which Widgery had belonged since 1968, when it was still known as the International Socialists.
In response to that commission, Widgery wrote one of the most enjoyable book reviews I have ever read, joyful because its defense of a libertarian “Leninism” was strikingly at odds with the worthy, unexciting book it was commending. So much so that you feel at times Widgery was reviewing another book — one made up of pure imagination rather than the dull, party-building manual in front of him.
Widgery was scathing about the Marxist sects:
The problem is that the species of Leninism which entered the vacuum on the European and North American left after the collapse of the mass movements of the 1960s and early 1970s was too often of 1903 not 1917 variety. The leaders of these largely self-appointed “vanguards” are really twentieth-century Kautskys, well-read, confident that they possess all the necessary socialist knowledge if only the damn workers would read their articles. . . . The “discipline” demanded of members of such groups is the obedience of automatons.
And yet he was effusive about Lenin himself and the Russian thinker’s contribution to the science of revolution:
We need a post-electronic Leninism whose politics can move with astonishing ease from the details of a strike to the problems of childrearing, which has the centralized striking power to win street battles but the imagination to create inspiring carnivals, which is seeking not Euro-Reforms but a new way of life, love and government.
The Spirit of Solidarity
The last great cause of Widgery’s life was the National Health Service (NHS). The first piece he wrote about his life as a doctor began with the number of times he was required to act in a typical twelve-hour day:
Forty-three consultations, 430 decisions, 4000 or 5000 nuances, eye muscle alterations and mutual misunderstandings have left me emotionally drained. . . . But don’t pity me. I get paid quite well, by my patients’ standards. Pity the patients instead.
The patients were again the theme of a series of articles which Widgery wrote from the mid-1980s for the British Medical Journal. He used this platform to condemn the privatization of psychiatric care and to criticize the nation’s psychiatrists for listening in silence to a dull homily from Prince Charles (now, of course, the king). Three of Widgery’s books — Health in Danger, The National Health: A Radical Perspective, and Some Lives — were dedicated to the struggle to save the NHS from the privatizers, the neoliberals, and the businesses that sought to leech off it.
The last great cause of Widgery’s life was the NHS.
In Widgery’s last book, Some Lives, he describes the noisy kids, the cancer victims, the newsagents with strike collection boxes on their counters, the drunk night cleaners and feuding neighbors to whom he gave his time. He was describing a working class that he was glad to serve — even in the absence of collective protest. They were still better than the bourgeoisie:
What always strikes me about those condescending documentaries about the poor East Enders, ignorant, ill and probably racist into the bargain, is exactly the reverse: how well the modern Cockneys do in circumstances which their “betters” would find impossible. How much better they would do if their material conditions were hoisted a few notches up the class system. And yet how much more common decency, respect for humanity, honour and humour they possess than so many of the middle and upper classes who despite lip service to collective interests in fact approach life in a spirit of naked self-interest.
One of the joys of Some Lives is the book’s fascination with bodies. A typical passage is devoted to the wonder of human birth:
“Delivered” through the biggest door that is ever opened in life. Such joy and physical creativity after the vomiting, piles and stretched pains of pregnancy, the dreadful force of labour and the blood and shit and waters of birth. To the final shock and delight of suckling the immaculate, slippery, vernix-coated living being: the proof that bodies aren’t just wonderful ideas but they work.
In Widgery’s writing, blood and shit are creative forces that enable the body to thrive. The resulting vitality serves as a reminder that people can defeat all the obstacles that class society puts in front of them.
Widgery was not merely a doctor but also a patient — sometimes the partner or parent of patients. They included his daughter Molly, who died in NHS care within months of her birth:
Molly was born and so nearly lived only because of a chain of organized and unselfish human beings which stretched from the unknown blood donors whose gift sustained her in the womb to the nurses who got Molly and us through so many nights and still spared a thought to tuck a white carnation in her death wraps. In the 1980s, politically dominated by the philosophy of possessive individualism, the NHS still allows a different set of values to flourish. And it makes manifest the spirit of human solidarity which is at the core of socialism, and which our present rulers are so concerned to eradicate. While Molly’s death is a tragedy, her life was something brave and marvellous.
David Widgery died at home in 1992. He was forty-five years old. In his final photographs, he stares at the camera, his head at an angle, his arm in plaster after an attack he suffered while at work. For years, he had waged a restless war against his own body, and the limitations placed upon it by polio and by a society that gave so little help to disabled people.
Sometimes it can feel as if Widgery belongs to a distant past — he was always calling for the Left to adapt and accept the future in which propaganda would be made by music and moving images, and yet he himself was a creature of words. He wrote journalism; he wrote books. He sought to use those media to impress into the minds of the poor and the workers that they too had power.
At other times — amid the protests in support of Palestine — it can feel as the world he was writing for is just waiting to be born. One day, the workers will rise and sweep away this brutal society. When they do, there will be people like Dave Widgery among them, writing with all their strength for a future worth living in.