"What me and my mates like to do is go up Hamstead and roll the hippies. You know we go up to 'em and ask 'em for money, and then duff 'em up if they don't give us any. It's good, it is. You should see their faces when we start "itting them.
This remark was made during class-discussion College for Further Education by one of the "skinheads" group of delinquent youths that emerged out of the last football season. Although there are not very many of them - yel they already constitute a problem. A youth club leader in Walthamstow told me:
"They are ten times worse than anything we've had before. They are completely negative and completely brutal. They bring out your worst instincts you wish someone would come and lock them up for a very long time.
The betrayal of the working-class by the Labour Government the revelation of its inadequacy as a repository for working-class aspirations has left vacuum OI bewilderment in people's consciousness. In such a vacuum any polarity of thought which is dynamic and seems to know where it's going will gain ground. At the moment this polarity is being supplied by the right as much as the left. The skinheads are only one example - perhaps only a small one - of a drift towards a fascist or semi-fascist position by sections of the British working-class.
They are called skinheads because they wear very short crew-cuts. They are also called rop-heads and pin-heads for the same reaso id hobs because they wear hob-nailed boo (all the better to kick you with).
At first they confined their activities to having punch-ups on the terraces with the Supporters of rival football teams, and going around smashing things up when the match was over. But by the end of the season they have developed a corporate identity and their activities spilled out of the football ground. Press reports said that during the race-riots in Leeds a lot of the worst violence against the blacks was perpetrated by "large gangs youths chanting football slogans."
They were also very much in evidence at the free pop concerts. At the second concert at Parliament Hill Fields they went around the edges of the crowd systematically beating people up, and finally brought the concert to an early end by throwing bottles at the group on stage. It was clear that they had come to the concert with the specific intention of disrupting it as far as possible, and in this they were successful.
The skinheads may well only be a passing phenomenon. But the signs are that with the coming football season they will become more and more in evidence - to the extent that they may well represent a hazard for the left.
The interesting thing about the skinheads is that they represent an assertion of working-class identity against the Hippies and Lefties - groups that they very reasonably consider middle-class and irrelevant to their life-situation. A lot of it is straightforward jealousy. The Trendies are the ones who come class. who usually Come trom comfortable and secure homes. The skinheads are the real drop-outs - as opposed to the fancy drop-outs who take a few months off work to do very nicely living by their wits.
These latter people aren't really drop-outs at all - they are people whose disatisfaction with society had led them to take a long holiday from it. The skinhead is rejected by society. He is dropped out - because he is thick, because he can't cope with responsibility, because he's disorganised. He lands up in the lowest-paidjob where he has to work long, boring, unrewarding, unrecognised hours before going back to a home that has blatantly missed out on the glitter of the affluent society.
These people have watched the Trendies getting all the glamour and the girls for as long as they can stand. Now they are asserting cardigans and the very short hair that has given them their name. The combination is a cross between an ordinary English workman and an American teenager of the fifties.
Their attitudes, also, represent a crude expression of a lumpen working-class identity which has been untouched by psychedelia and (middle-class) Swinging London. To put it quite simply, they hate long-haired hippy wierdos, student layabout lefties, and wogs. They see all three groups as living off their backs; as having a privileged existence which doesn't stop them from making trouble and in way assaulting the identity of ordinary people.
On things like strikes - and working-class militants the skinheads are rather more confused. They sympathise instinctively with the rebels against the bosses (whom they also hate), but most of them are so naive they fall an easy prey to official propaganda about the Interests of the Nation and the Needs of the Economy. They also feel that industry, like everything else, is a competitive jungle where the smartest guy wins. If the boss can make more profit out of his workers (and if South Africa whites can keep the blacks in slavery then that just proves that he's clever and is getting what he deserves. "E's got it up 'ere," they say with admiration.
It's the blacks, of course, that they really hate, with all the passionate contempt that the underprivileged have for the eveR underprivileged. They would happily see all the "fuckin' wogs" kicked out of the country, or even slaughtered. Most them have participated in beating up of blacks, and have enjoyed the sense of power it gave them. Leeds is only the most dramatic example of this.
It would be a mistake to think of the skinheads as straightforward fascists, though. They aren't not yet, anyway. They hate Lefties and Hippies, but they hate coppers (the Bill) even more. At Parliament Hill they were