Mutualism, massive and the city to come: Jungle Pirate Radio in 1990s London

One icy Friday in December 1991 Londoners woke up to find themselves breathing in a throwback from the city's past. Overnight, a thick toxic smog had wrapped itself around the city, covering the streets and reaching out into the countryside, where it was held in by the chalk hills that edge the capital's sprawl.

The smog had arrived at an unrelentingly grim time for London. The demonic energy of the 1980s had run dry, leaving a town mired in the depths of recession. Alongside daily reports of lay-offs and corruption, national news obsessively gazed backwards, cycling through highlights of the Second World War as each reached its fiftieth anniversary.

Meanwhile, what felt like - but was never called - a war, dragged on, as Irish Republicans attempted to bomb the British out of their centuries-long occupation of Ireland. By the time the smog had cleared on the following Monday, there had been three more IRA attacks on the capital, bringing that year's total in the city to seventeen. London seemed unable to escape its past: exhausted patriotic mythology clashing with the reality of a post-industrial city living though the fag end of a colonial war.

But that weekend, creeping through the empty spaces of London and the surrounding countryside, were radio waves carrying fragments of the future. Anyone

A city with no vision for the future: © Tom Cordell

flicking across their FM dial could hear it in the gaps between the BBC and commercial stations - the Friday-to-Sunday broadcasts of a new kind of music, illegally beamed across the city from improvised studios in empty flats, via aerials on tower block rooftops. A unique sound - breakbeats, live spoken vocals, and bass lines. Jungle!

Hertfordshire massive, Dulwich massive, wicked reception in that part of town; Stratford massive, Ilford massive, picking it up good over the east region. Bigging up Antony and Amy, bigging up Nicky, not forgetting Danny … This one goes out to the Capital.

DJs Remarc and Flirt, on Weekend Rush, 104.3FM, 1993

From the ruins of social democracy

All of the youth shall witness the day that Babylon shall fall

Sampled in Splash-Babylon, 1994 (from the film Rockers, 1978)

If the London of jungle music was riven with decay, then the origins of that rot were political. Over a decade, Thatcherite politics had eroded the institutions of post-WW2 social democracy, promoting in its place a new economic model based on large scale privatisation of state-owned industries, deregulation of business and finance, reduced state expenditure, all alongside tax cuts for the rich. Skilled industrial jobs were replaced with non-unionised low paid, low-skill service-sector work concentrated in the south east of England. Many of these policies were learnt from Enoch Powell, an ambitious sometime Tory politician who, from the 1960s, had promoted them under the banner of 'free market economics', today better known as neoliberalism.

Powell's economic vision - shaped by his membership of the neoliberal incubator group the Mont Pelerin Society - was a hard sell in the social democracy of the post-WW2 era. It after all threatened to destroy the security and affluence of large numbers of voters. But Powell's ideas gained traction, tapping into national melancholia, and appealing to white England's anxieties around the loss of Britannia and the reversal of imperial rule. Placing himself in the role of a prophet, Powell insisted that the inner cities were the breeding grounds for a forthcoming catastrophe, when black migrants from the Caribbean and south Asia would rise up and overthrow the 'white man'.¹

Margaret Thatcher continued Powell's legacy. She invoked the racist terror myth of the inner-city to excite the bigotries of her largely suburban and market town electors, and appealed to law, order and hostility against outsiders and disrupters to win support for a set of policies which would accentuate inequality in British society.²

Organised working-class power presented a barrier to this vision, and to overcome...