Even anarchists like a little romance
| By Jon Kelly BBC News |
It's the day every singleton dreads. If recession, bad weather and global turmoil aren't enough to make a lonely heart's blood boil, then surely the arrival of 14 February must turn every spinster and bachelor into a committed anti-St Valentine dissident.
 Ugh. Valentine's Day is too commercial |
Happily, salvation is on hand from an unexpected quarter: Class War, anarchist agitators of tabloid infamy, and now Britain's most unlikely matchmakers.
Better known for generating outraged headlines - the group was blamed by Fleet Street for instigating 1990's Trafalgar Square poll tax riots, and featured a regular page three "hospitalised copper" in its own newspaper - its activists have arrived upon a fresh tactic to advance the downfall of bourgeois society. Speed dating.
This Valentine's night, the outfit once condemned by the Daily Mail as a "sinister urban revolutionary band dedicated to turning the nation's inner cities into no-go areas for the police" wants to help introduce curious insurrectionaries to each other for fun, friendship, or possibly more.
Dance if you want to
True, the self-proclaimed "anarcho-speed-dating" evening will be a far cry from most events of its kind.
 Co-organiser Pinki, who hopes those attending will meet someone nice |
Proceedings at the Cross Kings - a boozer in an as-yet un-gentrified corner of north London - will be overseen by a dominatrix known as Miss Scarlett L'amour. There will be no segregation by gender, out of respect to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender attendees.
Anarchist literature will be on sale all through the anti-Valentine's evening. And entertainment will be provided by punk bands with such names to set the heart a-flutter as Active Slaughter and Headjam.
It is, nonetheless, quite a change of tone for an organisation which, during the 1980s, staged "Bash the Rich" marches through Kensington, Hampstead and Henley-on-Thames, with supporters carrying banners proclaiming: "Behold your future executioners."
But just as the anarchist heroine Emma Goldman famously insisted that she didn't want to be part of the revolution if she couldn't dance, her ideological forebears are equally reluctant to be part of any struggle that won't let them look for love.
 |   I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy  Emma Goldman (1869-1940), after being told agitators shouldn't dance |
And the very incongruity of the event is what inspired Pinki, the 26-year-old social worker and Class War activist who jointly came up with the idea.
The night is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, she insists, hence the dominatrix: how else are anarchists meant to be kept in line?
But Pinki hopes that staging it against the current backdrop of recession and financial turmoil will illustrate the anarchist argument about poverty and working-class self-organisation.
"Things are pretty grim right now - and the poorest people are going to suffer the most," she says. "But it's at times like this that you feel a sense of community, and anarchists
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