BBC Profile on Stuart Christie [1981]

Note: The below is from a copy of the 1 in 12 Club’s magazine Knee Deep in Shit Number 5, 1981. At the present time (19/3/2026) the BBC online archive copies of Radio 4’s Profile programme don’t go back to 1981.

PROFILE on Stuart Christie

Excerpts from the BBC programme “Profile” presented by Ted Harrison:

“…ONCE AGAIN THE DAY IS CLEARLY COMING 
WHEN THEY WILL BRAND REFUSERS ON THE CHEST 
AND NAIL UP LISTS OF NAMES ON PEOPLES DOORS. 
LEARN HOW TO GO UNKNOWN? LEARN MORE THAN ME: 
TO CHANGE YOUR FACE, YOUR DOCUMENTS, YOUR COUNTRY. 
BECOME ADEPT AT EVERY PETTY TREASON…”

HARRISON: Lines from a disturbingly beautiful poem by the German anarchist Hans Magnus Enzenburger. They were chosen by Stuart Christie to preface a book published by his Orkney based publishing house; a book about guerrilla warfare. Not, I should add, an academic study of guerrilla tactics, but a handbook, a do-it-yourself guide on how to derail a train, build a roadblock, set up a sniper position and generally harass a government [1].

But to portray an anarchist as just a wrecker is, according to Christie, very misleading. First of all an anarchist is an idealist.

CHRISTIE:  An anarchist is someone who believes in the principle that no-one has the right to be another’s master, is prepared to resist all attempts to subordinate him or herself to the arbitrary authority of power politics, and whose powers and aspirations are for a free and self-managed society as the only possible basis on which to build a more just and equitable world.

I think if you ask most people they would oppose “undemocratic” government or dictatorship, but anarchists take that idea one step further and oppose so-called representative democracy, because REAL power doesn’t lie with their elected representative, but with the machinery of state – the civil service. Genuine democracy is only possible when everyone is involved in the decision making processes. Anarchism is not lack of organisation; anarchism is probably the highest expression of order – it requires a great deal of social organisation based on self-discipline. Communities are self-regulating and always have been, and they will create their own methods of, where necessary, policing for example. Here in Orkney we have no police force, and maybe that’s the reason we have no crime.

HARRISON: Sanday is a flat, windswept and treeless spot, one of the remoter Orkney northern isles. Stuart Christie has lived there for nearly 5 years. He’s become integrated into the community and seems a settled man. He works in an office converted from a cowshed, at a desk rescued from an old bank. One picture of him which sticks in my mind is that of him on Orkney mainland, just setting off with his 2½ year old daughter on a Christmas shopping expedition, chatting to a friend – a local Customs and Excise official. Was this really Britain’s “top” anarchist?

CHRISTIE:  The whole idea of there being a top anarchist is a contradiction in terms. I’m probably Britain’s best known anarchist, but this is purely and simply because the British press, with the connivance of Scotland Yard [and the] security services, and some of the knock-about comedians in the “law and order” lobby in Parliament – they’re the ones who’ve appointed me to that very questionable position. This monster they’ve created, which they’re so eager to present to the public at every possible opportunity, is a product of their own paranoid obsession with conspiratorial politics, probably because this is how they themselves operate. But it’s got nothing to do with the real me, and this is one of the reasons I agreed to write my autobiography in the first place; to try to redress that balance somewhat [2]. If I were as evil and villainous as they make me out to be, I’d be a social pariah, without a snowball[’s] hope in hell of getting my ideas across to anyone.

To many people the word “anarchist” conjures up the vision of the sinister madman dressed in a black cape and hat, with a bomb or demijohn of Anthrax bacillus to poison the population of London, but that image is the result of emotive conditioning people receive from early childhood. Not only is it unthinkable, but it’s also dangerous in its consequences for an anarchist presented in any light other than that of wrecker, terrorist, or harmless eccentric. To portray an anarchist as someone resisting injustice and promoting the ideas of self-management, with people’s control over their own affairs – that is to subvert the authority of the state, and make the whole concept of political leadership redundant. That’s the REAL reason why anarchists and libertarians are portrayed the way they are by the media. We’re anathema to authoritarians of every shade and hue; from so-called laissez faire capitalists to social democrats, fascists, and Marxist state-capitalists.

HARRISON: So, you protest, if you like, your innocence from this image of the violent man, yet your record is such that you started off in anarchism by taking a bundle of explosives into Spain to blow up Franco

CHRISTIE:  I was obviously guilty of carrying explosives to Spain and being involved in an assassination attempt on Franco, because at that point in time there was no alternative course of action open to me. International protest to Franco was like water off a snake’s back, so in that respect I was guilty and paid the consequences; I was fully aware of what I was doing. 

HARRISON: Stuart Christie was sentenced to 20 years in a Spanish jail, but after 3½ years of international pressure he was released. He returned to Britain, as determined as ever, and, a person of some notoriety. But within 3 years he was again in prison, this time Brixton in London, on remand as one of the accused in the “Angry Brigade” trial. The charges in the trial included causing explosions or attempting to do so on 25 different occasions. Stuart Christie was found “not guilty” after 16 months in prison.

CHRISTIE:  I certainly wasn’t involved in any of the actions of the Angry Brigade, nor was I a member of the group, if “membership” is the correct term; but I was sufficiently close to one or two of the people who were charged with involvement in the Angry Brigade case, which allowed the police the opportunity to try and frame me by planting detonators in my car. Fortunately the plan was a very ham-fisted one which didn’t convince the jury, and the evidence was thrown out of court. But, what the police were counting on was my previous involvement in an attempt on the life of Franco and my well-known anarchist beliefs, my international connections and my friendship with the other accused, to lend weight to the catch-all conspiracy charge. Their reasoning was based on the old Nazi concept of “a-priori culpability”, the “he may not have done it, but he’s the sort of character that would have done it given half the chance, and he should be convicted”. But what they didn’t count on was us having a jury which judged on the facts of the case and not on the biased police interpretation of my politics and reputation.

HARRISON: Ever since his return from Spain, Stuart Christie’s mentor has been the “éminence grise” of British anarchism, Albert Meltzer. In developing from active revolutionary to publisher and family man, had Albert noticed Stuart compromising on his ideals?

MELTZER: Obviously one’s got to compromise; I mean you have to drive on one side of the road, you can’t decide on what side of the road you’re going to drive on. Obviously you’ve got to compromise. I mean anarchism isn’t about “no compromise”, it’s about “no government”.

HARRISON: But Stuart seems to compromise with certain things of government – such as not making a fuss by refusing to fill out his tax forms and so-on. Now, do you see that as “going soft” in any way?

MELTZER: I don’t see how that’s going soft. Perhaps it’s going soft to fill out your tax forms accurately, but I don’t see it’s really going soft just to fill out the forms.

HARRISON: Is he an anarchist who also enjoys the “good life”?

MELTZER: Well, don’t we all? It’s a question of “what is the good life?”? I mean, he doesn’t zoom off to the Bahamas, he just likes a drop of whiskey now and then.

HARRISON: Stuart Christie has spent 30% of his adult life behind bars. Does Albert Meltzer feel this has formed or harmed his character?

MELTZER: When he went into prison in Spain, he was quite raw – he didn’t know very much about anarchism – he didn’t know very much about politics. There were a lot of things he didn’t understand. For instance, he didn’t realise that the people who put him in the hands of Franco were the British police. In fact, he had this attitude,… it’s like Spaniards have, it seemed automatically that the British police would be anti-fascists, and of course in that context they aren’t at all. And it was whilst he was in Spain, and with the cream of the revolutionary movement, the cream of the anarchist movement, and a widespread section of practically every spectrum of political opinion, that he really got an extraordinary grasp of international affairs; of anarchism; of the International Solidarity movement and so on.

HARRISON: As a student of revolutionary movements, does Stuart Christie consider we’re on the brink of revolution in Britain? To answer the question he goes back to 1968 and the street action in Paris which shook the French government:

CHRISTIE: Certainly what happened in ’68 gave a hell of a fright to the British government. They suddenly realised just how delicately and insecurely were the forces holding together modern Western society. They took it so seriously that they ordered national security manoeuvres against the backdrop of the October anti-Vietnam war demonstration. I don’t know if you remember, but they actually had paratroopers on guard at Buckingham Palace.  This was followed up with a really feverish growth in the powers of the police and security services. There were attempts to control the organised labour movement through legislation; the use of the army in a “policing” role in Northern Ireland; talk of setting up private armies by David Stirling; the rise to prominence of Frank Kitson within the Ministry of Defence [3], and so on. All these things only to confirm people’s worst suspicions regarding the breakdown of consensus. This led inevitably to the politics of open confrontation of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, such as the Angry Brigade – and the way things are going at the moment I can see history repeating itself in the ‘80s.

I think the lesson of ‘68 is that no matter what the circumstances, we are always just one hair’s-breadth away from revolution. And the authorities in this country took that lesson very much to heart when they saw how insecure the French government was when faced with confrontation from a hitherto conservative, with a small ‘c’, public. 

HARRISON: Admittedly a small a small group of militants can cause havoc, but for a popular revolution to take place on the lines Stuart Christie envisages, the anarchist movement has to be substantial in size. Just how big is the movement in Britain today?

CHRISTIE: Over the past 20 years or so, you can see a definite movement towards self-help type organisations and attitudes in almost every walk of life you care to mention, and although these in themselves may not be anarchists, they are areas in which anarchists can be and are most effective in getting their ideas across. My own opinion is that it’s useless to talk in terms of national party-type structures, if you have no base in the community in which you live and work. Getting new ideas over to people is really a slow and a hard slog and there’s no easy way around it. Some people believe that all they have to do is get small groups of like-minded people up and down the country to form a national organisation and this, somehow, will speed up the process of social progress. It won’t – all it will succeed in doing is divorce still further those groups from the very people they hope to influence. Basically, the only thing a revolutionary can do, and the most important thing, is to make his or her influence felt wherever they can, you know, particularly in the fields where they exert some influence, – extending anarchist ideas amongst their friends, neighbours, and workmates, and demonstrating in whatever way they can that there is actually a workable alternative to the authoritarian structure of society [4].

Notes from 2026 

The notes below are from the transcriber:

[1] The book about guerrilla warfare Ted Harrison refers to was Towards a Citizen’s Militia : anarchist alternatives to NATO & the Warsaw Pact (published by Cienfuegos Press in 1980). The book raised the reasonable question on what should liberty-loving Brits do if the UK was invaded by Communists or if a cabal of army officers launched a coup? If this last point seems unlikely today remember that army takeovers occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, both in Europe (Greece 1967) and Latin America (Chile 1973). During the Labour government of 1974-76, under Harold Wilson, sections of the army and secret service allegedly plotted a coup. Obviously the army and secret services denied any such conspiracy ever existed, but they would. In the end the British ruling class didn’t need an army coup – Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher achieved much the same aims, using a more thought out approach of divide and rule, gradual changes to the law, mass unemployment, and targeted police violence against strikers.

[2] The autobiography Stuart Christie is referring to was The Christie File (published in 1980 by Cienfuegos Press). Stuart Christie published his autobiography a couple of times before his death in 2020 – the second time in three books, and the final time unified into a single book – Granny Made Me An Anarchist: General Franco, the Angry Brigade and Me (published by Scribner in 2004)

[3] Frank Kitson was the author of Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (Faber and Faber, 1971). He brought his experience of fighting guerrillas in Malaya to the war in Northern Ireland. It seemed likely at the time that his ideas on countering ‘subversion’ had a wider use than just the IRA and could be used against the British labour movement. This also tied in with the coup allegations during Harold Wilson’s Labour government mentioned above. Some of the militarised policing tactics honed in Northern Ireland were brought to the British mainland and used against strikers from the 1980s onwards. 

[4] Much of the above radio Profile is historical. These last points by Stuart Christie are relevant any time and place. They’re something that every anarchist, I think, should consider. 

[We’d like to thank the comrade who transcribed and footnoted this piece from Knee Deep in Shit. Minor editorial work by KSL.]