Dave Widgery Helped Build the Culture of Anti-Fascism
The British socialist writer Dave Widgery played a key role in Rock Against Racism, a mass movement that brought culture and politics together. With the far right on the rise again, Widgery’s ideas and example are now strikingly relevant.
The crowd at a Rock Against Racism concert at Alexandra Palace in London, April 14, 1979. (Virginia Turbett / Redferns via Getty Images)
The journalist Dave Widgery was to British socialists what Hunter S. Thompson was to US radicals. His writing expressed, with greater brilliance than any of his contemporaries, the sense of hope that millions felt in the epoch of the Beatles, Bernadette Devlin, and the Miss World protests.
Too few people remember Widgery today — in part because he died desperately young in 1992 following a freak accident at home; in part because the causes to which he dedicated his life are ones that contradict the fashions of our moment. Widgery was for the workers always, for socialist revolution without conditions or excuses.
Intimate Contradictions
Born in 1947 to a Quaker family, Widgery contracted polio at the age of nine. For months, he was trapped in hospital without friends of family, the children crying themselves to sleep, the nurses in tears “at their inability to comfort us.” He had a wheelchair, afterward calipers, then thrilled to his “first pair of shop-bought shoes.”
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