History of Modern Britain (9780330513296) by Marr Andrew

Author:Marr, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Pub Ltd

A Dream Disintegrates

On the afternoon of May Day 1971 John Evans, the manager of the hugely popular Kensington boutique Biba, walked nervously downstairs into the basement. There had been a series of outlandish phone warnings about some kind of bomb, which to start with had simply been ignored by the girl on the till. Outside on the street were some 500 women and children who had by now been hurriedly evacuated. When Evans pushed open the door of the stock-room, there was an almighty bang, a flash of flame and a billow of smoke. The Angry Brigade, middle Britain’s very own terror group, had struck again. In their communiqué explaining the attack, they misquoted Bob Dylan – ‘if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy buying’ – and went on: ‘All the sales girls in all the flash boutiques are made to dress the same and have the same make-up . . . Life is so boring there’s nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt, or shirt. Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? . . . The only thing you can do with modern slavehouses – called boutiques – is WRECK THEM.’47 What they did not seem to realize was that its customers found Biba not oppressive but liberating.

There are hundreds of dates and events you could pick to date the end of the sixties dream, but the Biba bombing has a piquancy all of its own. Two of the main forces behind the flowering of youth culture were at war. On the one side is the fantasy of revolution, anarchist or Leninist according to taste, the world of Che Guevara on the wall and obscure leftist handbooks by the bed promising a world in which Starbucks would never have got started. On the other side is the fantasy of benign, hippy business as part of the consumer culture, the world of eyeliner, cool clothes and gentle people making money. The two organizations, Biba and the Angries, sum up much of the underlying argument of sixties youth culture.

The small group of university dropouts who made up the grandly titled Angry Brigade would go to prison for ten years after 123 attacks and are little remembered now. But they were the nearest Britain came to an anarchist threat. They took their philosophy from two counter-culture theorists, the Frenchman Guy Debord and the Belgian poet and teacher, Raoul Vaneigem, who argued that capitalism and Soviet Communism were equally repressive. All organizations were eventually taken over by capitalism which turned everything into a commodity for sale. Even attacks on capitalism could be marketed and sold – witness all those commercially produced Che Guevara badges and posters of Mao. Debord in particular extended his attack from old-style Communists, Western politics, the media and other familiar targets, to the drug-taking hippy culture, modern architecture, even tourism. Once people had so many things they were bored of

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