Tom Bower

Dangerous Hero


Скачать книгу

="ub9a7ac17-0676-5620-adac-e07addaa972f">

      

       227353.jpg

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

      Copyright © Tom Bower 2019

      Cover image © Getty Images

      Tom Bower asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

       The publishers have made every effort to credit the copyright holders of the material used in this book. If we have incorrectly credited your copyright material please contact us for correction in future editions.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008299576

      Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008299590

      Version: 2019-03-18

       Dedication

      To Veronica

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Preface

       Islington, Late 1996

       1 Rebel With a Cause

       2 The First Rung

       6 The Harmless Extremist

       7 Circle of Fear

       8 Lame Ducks

       9 Party Games

       10 The Takeover

       11 The Purge

       12 The Jew-Haters

       13 Stuck in the Bunker

       14 Squashing the Opposition

       15 The Coming of St Jeremy

       16 Game-Changer

       17 Resurrection

       Picture Section

       Acknowledgements

       Index

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       Preface

      The genesis of this book started exactly fifty years ago.

      At the end of January 1969, a group of Marxist and Trotskyist students at the London School of Economics led a stormy protest against the school’s director, an authoritarian from Southern Rhodesia. He had ordered the staff to close a series of gates inside the building in Aldwych to prevent a students’ meeting in the school’s Old Theatre. In the mêlée, at about 5 p.m., a caretaker guarding the gates died from a heart attack and the students instantly started a month-long occupation, igniting similar sit-ins across Britain’s universities.

      Throughout that first night of occupation, hundreds of LSE students crowded into the Old Theatre to debate the prospects of a Marxist revolution in Britain. Led by American graduates from Berkeley, California, where the student revolt against the Vietnam War had started five years before, and with speeches from French and German students, battle-scarred from 1968 street fights in Paris and Berlin, LSE’s Marxists and Trotskyists (there were many) told us we were the vanguard of a worldwide revolution – which would begin with the students, and the workers would follow. We believed it.

      Aged twenty-three and from a conservative background, I had completed my law degree at the LSE (the country’s best law faculty at the time), and while studying for the Bar exams was employed on legal research projects at the college. Long before that dramatic night I had concluded that English law protected property rights at the expense of the rights of individuals and real democracy. Surrounded by articulate Marxists studying sociology and government, and going to lectures by Ralph Miliband and other Marxist teachers, I became attracted to their analysis of society. In that era, for anyone interested in politics that was not surprising.

      In