Here's an account
of a short-lived radical radio intervention in North London. The Islington
pirate radio station broadcast on 230 metres medium wave at the time of the
North Islington by-election in October 1969. Those involved were inspired by
the Irish civil rights pirate radio operating in Belfast and Derry, and by
pirate broadcasts earlier in the 1960s by the anti-nuclear weapons Committee of
100.
The article
'Political Pirate Radio' was published in radical paper Black
Dwarf, 16 January 1970, explaining that 'a group of Islington revolutionary
socialists 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 [International Socialists] members want a mention
to show they're not such fuddy-duddies after all, and anarchists to show they're
quite capable of complex political organisation'.
The programmmes
consisted '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 strike'.
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