Punk started small. The December 1976 TV confrontation between Bill Grundy and the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie Sioux, informed millions of people across the UK and internationally about punk. Many young people felt attracted.The London Conservative party leader said that the Sex Pistols and all punk musicians should be shot.
London daily Evening News, part of the Daily Mail empire, considered punk nazi, linked to the neo-fascist National Front. The Sex Pistols denied that angrily, saying they were anarchist. London anarchist paper Black Flag reacted, supporting the Pistols, who, Black Flag said, brought anarchism to working class kids where it belongs. Among Dutch 1976-1982 punks, anarchism became the strongest political tendency. Not so much because of older Dutch anarchists, but influenced by British bands Crass and Poison Girls. The Dutch anarchist movement before punk had been mostly male: the new punk anarchists included proportionally more women than that. Non-anarchist tendencies were apoliticism, or the Communist Party of the Netherlands. There was hardly any political conflict between different views. Basically only between Crass and Maoist-influencerd Rotterdam band The Rondos.
Paradoxically, maligning punk as fascist happened not only in right-wing papers; but also in British Maoist and Trotskyist political parties. The Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party at first called punk fascist, but later changed their mind, inviting X-ray Spex to an event. The Maoist Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) did not change their ‘punk is fascist’ stance. Maybe also as their spokesman Cornelius Cardew, a cultural conservative, was not only an anti-anarchist Maoist, but also a classical music composer.
Other British Trotskyists, the Socialist Workers Party, and the communist parties of Britain and the Netherlands, saw punk positively.
Keywords: punk, history, anarchism, UK, Netherlands
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