Probably the best selling book by an UK Anarchist organisation in the past thirty years, is the Class War Federation's Unfinished Business - the Politics of Class War.
If you have a copy, do turn to page 1, which contains the following dedication:
"This book is dedicated to all those class warriors who are fighting for a better world, especially our comrade and friend Ken Keating."
Salford's Ken Keating has sadly just passed away (as you may have seen from the comments by his son Sean, elsewhere on this blog, and several threads on Ian Bone's blog). I never met Ken, but he was well known in Salford and Greater Manchester for his class politics, and across the UK when the spectacular falling out with his son, Sean, was covered in the national media.
If football is a simple game made complicated by coaches, politics, and especially class politics, is equally simple. Ken Keating recognised this, he was a man who unlike most of the British left, was more taken with Mary Burns than Fredrich Engels. To Ken, Lowry, far from being a chronicler of working class Salford, was a rent collector, pure and simple.
In the late 80s and early 1990s Ordsall Class War took their politics to the state, attacking the police, and those representatives of the local and national state who they felt needed to be removed from a rapidly changing Salford. In the long term such tactics were unsuccessful, although many years later, at the height of the MP expenses scandal, it was noticeable that one of the offenders who had the most difficulty moving safely in her constituency was Salford MP Hazel Blears.
Ken was seemingly reconciled with his son Sean, and I regret not meeting him. When you read of BBC staff not wanting to move to Salford's Media City, you know exactly what Ken would think - they are quite happy to milk working class people in Salford with a compulsory TV licence, and even see people jailed for not paying it, but don't want to work amongst, or live with, real live actual working class people.
Ken Keating 1938-2011.
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