Last week, Ian Bone asked me if I could get him a poster printed of a 1985 Class War front cover, The Working Class Strikes Back. He wanted to put it up in his room at his Nursing Home alongside his anarchist flag. Fair enough, I thought. The image has always been one of CW’s favourites, taken during the Handsworth Riots of the same year and numerous copies over the decades have been printed out to strike fear in the hearts of quivering posh twats and annoy the fuck out of them.

During the search for a suitable copy of the image to print, one of our eagle eyed Class Warriors came across a rich bastard Bayswater based company called Bridgeman Images – “Oi Jane, you fucking seen this?!”. These Bridgeman wankers had only gone and pilfered the image and were charging for its usage – £140, no less for the larger image. Fucking cheek – not even a printed poster for that amount, just the right to use the image. “Oh blimey,” we thought, “just a little bit rude that innit and one thing we don’t like is yer Tarquins and Lucindas taking the mick”.

So we had words with them, and a firm and politely written email was sent with the underlying tone of “don’t mess with us, you posh wankers”. It was pointed out that CW, being anarchist, has never been bothered with copyright as we always wanted our images to be freely available to the working class – “you know, the ones who clean your galleries and sweep your streets” the Bayswater rich scum were reminded – but that we did find it just a tiny bit impolite to take it without asking and charge for its usage, and also we would imagine the last thing they really wanted in their privileged lives was the working class actually fighting back. Anyway, a few more digs at their wealthy arrogance and the email was sent.

For the rest of the day, comrades niggled away on Bridgeman’s FB and Twitter pages. Then, by tea time, they could’ve knocked us down with a feather. The creative luvvies had only gone and taken the poster off their website.

Yesssss! It worked! We won! A small victory in the grand scheme of things, but still that smug sense of self satisfaction that when the working class strikes back, we can still fucking do it!

Please use the image freely just to remind posh twats we ain’t to be messed with. Innit.

~ Jane
London CW