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than the single I think and perhaps more effective,” said Peel, for some reason or other. The final song was ‘Bomb’.Where a Peel session would be an important career mark for most bands, it was essentially a non-event for Crass. “Well that was Crass – I bet you thought I’d gone home in the middle of that,” Peel quipped, referring to the weird gap. “Hope lies in the proles” – George Orwell,‘1984’ “I’ve met the man in the street, and he’s a cunt” – Sid Vicious, 1977 Though few foresaw it at the time, the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister signalled a new phase in the class war that had been simmering in Britain throughout the seventies. One of the flashpoints lit up when teacher Blair Peach was killed at a demonstration in Southall where the Special Patrol Group were called in. The SPG, as they were known, was the most feared elite corps of London’s Metropolitan Police, and if the ‘Met’ were out of control, the SPG were their Gestapo. Thatcher responded with pay rises for them and an increasingly politicisation of the role of the British police as time wore on. The Government also announced it had agreed to host American unmanned Cruise missiles in the UK, starting off at Greenham Common airbase near Newbury.This effectively entertained the possibility of a ‘limited’ nuclear war between the superpowers using Europe as its chessboard and obliterating its population as a side-issue. The age of ‘beer and sandwiches at No 10’ – referring to regular meetings between Labour Prime Ministers and Union leaders in the seventies – was more than over. In its place came a woman who was not only hostile to Unions, but hostile to the concept of society and to the very rights of the working man and woman that Unions had been set up to protect. Though Thatcher is popularly portrayed as a bastion of the middle classes, it was the interests of the ruling class that she championed.The class war in Britain was as alive as ever, but now the tide had turned in favour of the bad guys. It was a war that would explode in largely unprecedented ways over the next decade. Class, of course, was one of the sticks that Crass was beaten with increasingly regularly by both the press and certain punks. Crass was not
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