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11 June 2013

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Iain Banks RIP: Award-winning novelist and anti-fascist

Lewisham, 1977: Mounted police charge anti-fascists

IainBanks

IAIN BANKS – the award-winning writer of The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road, Complicity and The Quarry, who died on Sunday 9 June at the age of 59, two months after announcing that he had terminal gall bladder cancer – was described in a Guardian obituary thus:

“In 2010, Banks publicly joined the cultural boycott of Israel, refusing to allow his novels to be sold in the country. He was a frequent signatory of letters of protest to the Guardian and a name recruited to causes of which he approved, from secular humanism to the legalising of assisted suicide to the preservation of public libraries.

“Banks himself was a self-declared 'evangelical atheist' and a man of decided political views, often expressed with humorous exasperation and sometimes requiring ripe language.

“He relished his public status as no-nonsense voice of a common-sense socialism that had an increasingly nationalistic tint.”

This next piece from the south-east London blogzine Transpontine (found via Cedar Lounge Revolution, the Irish political blog, and written before Banks’s death) caught my eye because I was with other Irish activists at ‘The Battle of Lewisham’ in London in 1977 when anti-fascists and local communities clashed with a racist National Front march from New Cross to Lewisham.

Iain Banks was with us amongst the anti-fascists.

LewishamCrowd

Iain Banks and The Battle of Lewisham

Sad to hear that the Scottish writer Iain Banks is very seriously ill with gall bladder cancer. Banks has written some great books, including The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road, the Culture series of science fiction novels (published under the name Iain M Banks) and a fine appreciation of whisky: Raw Spirit – In search of the Perfect Dram.

When we were doing the Lewisham ’77 event in 2007 I corresponded with Banks’s friend, the Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, who mentions ‘The Battle of Lewisham” in his novel The Cassini Division. Ken confirmed that he and Banks had taken part in that famous anti-National Front demonstration in New Cross in August 1977.

Ken recalled:

“I went to Lewisham in the back of a big van rented for the day by the local branch of the Left group I was in at the time. That group had decided to send one lot of members to Clifton Rise and the other to the march, with the intention of encouraging as many marchers as possible to go to Clifton Rise after the march officially ended – which they did. Our little squad went to Clifton Rise. Not all of us were in the Left group but we all knew each other very well and had a good natural leader, an experienced bloke called Joe.

“When we got there I was surprised by the size of the crowd. There was a fair while of standing around, and then the fascist march came up the road, the sticks and stones started flying, and the police rode horses into the crowd. I remember quite vividly the fury and fear and the sense that it was a case of fight or be trampled.

“After that I remember a sort of running battle, pushing up against lines of police, and seeing the fascists cowering under the pelting. After we had them on the run I urged people around me not to go chasing after them and getting into fights with the police. A belated salute to Joe, who managed to keep us together all through the riot and got us safely home . . .

“I remember Iain Banks turning up at the place where I lived with a bunch of other Lefties in Hayes, Middlesex. He’d come down specifically for the demo and went there with us in a big van.”

Ken also got in touch with Iain Banks and passed on this short message from him:

“I was there, though all I can recall is the general feeling of prevailing unexpectedly, the sight of the fascists squeezed into a corridor going round a street corridor with half-bricks and bits of car exhausts raining down on them and the cops protecting them and the motorbike on fire.”

Anyway, Iain, thanks for doing your bit that day, and all that you have done since. I will raise a glass of Lagavulin to you tonight.

(Update: Sunday 9 June 2013 – Iain Banks died today)

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