You are tuned in to the Islington pirate rou broadesting around 230 metres medium wereband, at 10 o'clock every night until the North Istington by-election. We are broadcasting illeg ally to show our contempt for the politics of parliamentary elections. More and more, what really concerns people is happening outside parliamentary action and debate. Parliament and people are on different wave-lengths. The real politict is where people toke their owns af/sim into their own hands. (Recorded in a pub): Well, I'm just an immigrant worker, and in some ways all these political parties, both Labour, Tory, Liberal and Communist-they 're no bleedin' good, because they don't support, they don't do anything for the working man. I mean you take that Harold Wilson. He's been in power for five years! And what do we have? Incomes policy, wage freeze, high interest rates. I mean, prices keep going up, my rents keep going up ... It's all no good.
The North Islington by-election was one of five snap elections which took place last October. A local Labour Party, corrupt even by LP standards, produced a nondescript Irish candidate gerrymandered through selection and sucked into the Palace of Westminster by the sheer massive indifference of Islington people (only 34% actually making it to the ballot box.)
The only political challenge came from the local branch of the Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign. They had hoped to field a candidate, but had to settle for active intervention by marches, public meetings, skilled heckling, and by a poster and leaflet campaign about the relevance to the Islington working class of the uprising in Ireland.
At the same time, a group of islington revolutionary socialists hastily got together the organisation and apparatus for a less conventional attack on people's boredom with politics. With the struggle in Derry and Belfast in mind, they transmitted within the election boundaries an hour-long pirate radio programme every night in the week before polling. We draw a veil over the participants-except that IS members want a mention to show they're not such tuddy MIST dies after all, and anarchists to show they're quite capable of complex political orga Political pirate radio, as opposed to varieties of pop music, has operated in two sorts of situation. A Committee of 100 group published their single issue through a clandestine operation on TV wavebands, and radios operated behind the Belfast and Derry In Islington, we thought it would be worth putting over a straight-forward disenchantment with Parliament, and the positive idea of working people doing things for themselves. As we said in our anonymous press release to local press and national agency tapes, the programme consists of interviews with people in social groups whose problems cannot be solved-and are not even expressed-through ballot box politics. The voices were: a tenant, an Irish worker, a housewife, a schoolboy, a black organiser, and an unofficial striker. The interviews varied from just talking casually about one's life, to tection, they were not identified in any way and recording took place without their knowing how we were to use the tape. This and other elements of conspiracy in the operation-especially when it came to secrecy about transmission sites-seemed paradoxical when our message wa was democracy; but we argued that field practice with the apparatus would help prepare for that other situation, where pirate radio could be used with full popular support.
Our other tactic-using the official media to relay the pirate message- -came unstuck: we noticed a press story only in the Daily Telegraph! which kindly gave our editorial and transmission sion details. But we were also aiming at a direct audience: the transmission was close to the ordinary Radio One programme, and was advertised in the receiving area by thousands of stickers. We cannot know, and cannot be too optimistic about, the numbers whom we reached in this way, or happened to bump into us on the
The Black Dwarf 16th January 1970 Page 4 Factory occupations, lockouts, guerthese. In short, the combativity shown in
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the more prepared and collective statements of political interest groups. For the speakers' pro-
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