Bash the Rich

In 1984, "The People" branded Ian Bone 'the most dangerous man in Britain'. They weren't far wrong. From the inner city riots of 1981 to the miners' strike and beyond the butler's son and founder of Class War was indeed a greater thorn in Margaret Thatcher's side than the useless blatherings of the Official Opposition. Class War were the real opposition! It was Ian Bone who linked the inner city rioters of Brixton and Handsworth with the striking miners. It was Bone who "The People" spotted rioting with miners in Mansfield, attacking laboratories with the Animal Liberation Front and being fingered by the "Guardian" as the man behind the 1985 Brixton Riot. But that was only the half of it...from 1965 to 1985, from Swansea to Cardiff and London the mayhem spread countrywide. In "Bash The Rich", Ian Bone tells it like it was. From The Angry Brigade to The Free Wales Army, from the 1967 Summer of Love to 1977 anarcho-punk, from Grosvenor Square to the Battle of the Beanfield from the Stop the City riots to Bashing the Rich at the Henley Regatta, Ian Bone breaks his silence. In the 1980s, Ian Bone was 'The Anarchist In The UK' with a half brick in one hand and an incendiary pen in the other. How did the child who lived in a fabulous English mansion and saluted the AA man from a Rolls Royce come to be the man who famously promised to Bash the Rich and leave Hampstead a smouldering ruin? Where do David Niven, Keith Allen, Rik Wakeman, Douglas Fairbanks Junior, Cynthia Payne, George Melly, Flanagan and Allan, Yoko Ono Pope John Paul and Lofty from Eastenders fit into the story. Why did Gregory Peck send Ian Bone a Get well card? This is no dry tome destined to gather dust in leftie bookshops. Against a background of all the major outbreaks of disorder of the time it's a startlingly honest, funny, warts n' all scream of rage from a gutter level anarchist prepared to fight "by any means necessary". That "the most dangerous man in Britain" is at liberty to write books rather than serving a life sentence for sedition or being hung for treason will be the first question on every MP's lips as this smouldering anarchist bomb hits the bookshelves.