King Mob Echoes

Print from a copper engraving showing rioters 

setting fire to Newgate Prison in June 1780

 

 

I. 

 

Without wishing to echo those who, like Professor David Betz, predict that the UK is now almost certainly heading for civil war [1] - perhaps not in the old sense, but something widespread and very nasty all the same - I would certainly agree that the future isn't looking particularly rosy.  

 

Like many other European states, we seem to have created the perfect conditions for mass social unrest (at the very least). Falling living standards, ethno-religious tensions fuelled by unprecedented levels of immigration, and loss of faith in the authorities, all add up to a feeling that things can't go on as they are and that something has to change. 

 

As Yeats would say: things are threatening to fall apart; the centre cannot hold; anarchy is about to be loosed upon the world [2] - and not in the romantic and radically chic manner fantasised by some.  

 

 

II. 

 

Perhaps it is the last of these things mentioned above - loss of faith in the authorities - that should concern us most. For as Betz says, insurgency is always rooted in a crisis of legitimacy. If governments and judicial systems lose not only the support but the trust of the people, then that's an extremely serious matter.  

 

In brief, break the magic spell that holds a nation together and things get very real very quickly and citizens - who desire stability and a sense of justice - begin to take matters into their own hands.    

 

And this is why it's so profoundly stupid and politically dangerous for the present government to have effectively put themselves in opposition to the British public by openly declaring that the rights of asylum seekers take precedence over the concerns of the native population [3].

 

 

III. 

 

Funnily enough, the current state of affairs in the UK puts one in mind of the situation in 1780 when a week of rioting in London was triggered by anti-Catholic sentiment and security concerns following the passing of an Act which was intended to reduce discrimination, but perceived as privileging a religious minority over the Protestant majority [4]. 

 

Trouble began on June 2nd, when a huge crowd - estimated to be around 50,000 strong - assembled and marched on Parliament. Many carried flags and banners, as mobs are wont to do. Having failed to force their way into the House of Commons, people grew increasingly angry and the situation quickly got out of hand; members of the Lords were attacked as they arrived and a number of carriages were vandalised and destroyed. 

 

Although this crowd was eventually dispersed by soldiers without further violence, this was not the end of the matter; that same night, Roman Catholic chapels were attacked in several foreign embassies. When it was discovered that protestors who had been arrested were being held in Newgate Prison, this was stormed and largely destroyed, allowing a significant number of prisoners to escape.   

 

On June 7th, things reached a climax when the mob decided to target the Bank of England. Finally, the government called in the army to restore order using deadly force; having been ordered to fire upon groups of four or more rioters who refused to disperse resulted in hundreds of casualties. 

 

Of the 450 people who were arrested, some twenty or thirty were tried and executed. Lord George Gordon who led the original mass protest (and lent his name to the riots that followed) was charged with high treason, but acquitted. 

 

Those who would like to know more are encouraged to read Dickens's historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), which provides a long and detailed (if fictionalised) account of the Gordon Riots and features Lord George in a prominent role [5]. 

 

IV. 

 

Whilst parallels between then and now can be drawn, they're limited in what they might teach us due to differing socio-historical contexts and circumstances. And Tommy Robinson is no Lord Gordon.  

 

However, we witnessed last year how rapidly situations can deteriorate and how quickly trouble can spread (especially in an age of social media) [6] and one suspects - fears - that if the political climate continues to heat up and the social fabric continues to come apart, then King Mob [7] may once more find its figurehead and assert its sovereignty.   

 

 

V. 

        

Having said all this, Betz may, of course, be mistaken in his analysis and anarchy in the UK may not be an inevitablity. There are those - including individuals in positions of power - who simply don't believe that prolonged and widescale mass violence (let alone civil war) is probable (or even possible); they have an unshakeable faith in the goodness and common sense of the British people. 

 

As one commentator notes:

 

"The UK Government's resilience website lists hazards ranging from severe weather to terrorism, but makes no mention of civil unrest [...] Perhaps politicians realise that any mention of civil war in an official publication would be a PR catastrophe. Or maybe they view Western citizens as simply too cosseted, too biddable. People raised amid relative plenty and security are simply not likely to erupt in significant numbers." [8] 

 

So perhaps we can continue to sleep tightly in our beds at night and wake up full of fresh hope in the morning. 

 

Or perhaps not: for after speaking with Betz, this same commentator concludes that even if the latter is only right in part, then still our lives will be transformed "utterly and for the worse", as we suddenly find ourselves living in a "smaller and more brutal world" [9].     

 

Notes

 

[1] Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London: click here to visit his homepage. He has been in the news and all across social media for the last couple of years offering his expert analysis of current events and predictions about the future. See this recent interview, for example, on YouTube with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster of Triggernometry: click here. 

 

[2] I'm referring of course to Yeats's famous poem 'The Second Coming' (written in 1919). The poem was originally published in The Dial (November 1920), but included also in his collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). To read on the Poetry Foundation website, click here.  

 

[3] I'm referring to the case surrounding the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which has been at the centre of recent protests against the use of hotels to house asylum seekers at tax payers expense and without consulting the local people, following an alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old schoolgirl by one of the residents. 

      In brief, a temporary injunction granted earlier this month by a high court judge that would have blocked migrants from being housed at the above hotel was overturned on appeal after Home Office intervention (the argument being that there is an obligation for the government to uphold the European Convention on Human Rights). And this has only further raised tensions in the area. A full hearing of the case is expected in mid-October.

 

[4] It should be noted that there were other factors and grievances; political and economic rather than religious in nature. It has been suggested, for example, that many rioters were more concerned about falling wages and rising prices - or the UK's involvement in various foreign wars - than their Catholic neighbours and, as is often the case, these blended together into a general feeling of angry discontent.   

[5] See also Christopher Hibbert's King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (Longmans, 1958), which provides another colourful reading of the historical record.  

 

[6] I'm referring to the (allegedly far-right) anti-immigration protests and riots that occurred in England and Northern Ireland from 30 July to 5 August 2024, following the Southport stabbings in which three young girls were murdered. The large scale disorder resulted in over 1,800 arrests and many people being handed harsh prison sentences (famously including one woman, Lucy Connolly, for posting a tweet which she deleted soon afterwards). 

 

[7] According to Christopher Hibbert's book on the Gordon Riots, rioters daubed the slogan His Majesty King Mob on the walls of Newgate Prison, after gutting the building. 

      In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a radical group based in London - influenced by (but excluded from) the Situationist International - called itself King Mob. The group, consisting of six main members, published five issues of a journal entitled King Mob Echo as well as many posters and leaflets which mightily impressed a young art student by the name of Malcolm McLaren who, it's claimed, took part in an action at Selfridges in December 1968, that involved freely distributing toys from the store's toy department to children (one of the members - not McLaren - was dressed as father Christmas). 

      Several commentators on the Sex Pistols have asserted the influence of King Mob on the band and McLaren, fascinated by the Gordon Riots, included a punk reimagining of the latter as the opening sequence of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980).       

 

[8] Alexander Poots, 'Is civil war coming for Britain?', on the news and opinion website UnHerd (25 April 2025): click here. 

 

[9] Ibid.  

 

The Sex Pistols - Who the Dickens Were They?

Malcolm McLaren: Oliver Twist Manifesto (42 x 32 cm)

Double-sided flyer created for the Sex Pistols' final British show 

Christmas Day, 1977 [1]

Punk came out of this strange culture that had been repressed through the Victorian times ... 

The Sex Pistols were something more feral and more dark and native to the English psyche than rock 'n' roll 

and Malcolm saw them very much in a Dickensian way. - Julien Temple 

 

 

I. 

 

I spent a fair amount of time earlier in the year arguing that D. H. Lawrence can be thought of as a Sex Pistol: click here, for example. But to think of Lawrence as a proto-punk is not to suggest that we might think of the Sex Pistols as Lawrentian. 

 

In fact, if we are to think of the Sex Pistols in English literary terms at all, it makes far more sense to conceive of Johnny Rotten and company as neo-Dickensian characters. That's certainly how Malcolm McLaren attempted to portray them late on in their career, as the above flyer, written by him in December 1977, illustrates.

 

It begins:   

 

They are Dickensian-like urchins who with ragged clothes and pock marked faces roam the foggy streets of gas-lit London. Pillaging. Setting fire to buildings. Beating up old people with gold chains. Fucking the rich up the arse. Causing havoc wherever they go. Some of these ragamuffin gangs jump on tables amidst the charred debris and with burning torches play rock 'n' roll to the screaming delight of the frenzied pissing pogoing mob. Shouting and spitting 'anarchy' one of these gangs call themselves the Sex Pistols. [2]

 

It's obviously a fantasy vision of the band. But the question is: why does the fantasy take this particular form? Why reference ragamuffin gangs and pogoing mobs, etc? Is it just because McLaren's grandmother adored Fagin and made him read Dickens as a young child, or is there also a wider political context?

 

II. 

 

Before addressing these points, let's first give a bit more background to the production of the flyer ...  

 

By the end of 1977, life had never looked so good for the four Sex Pistols; three hit singles, a number 1 album, and about to commence on their first American tour. 

 

However, things were rapidly coming apart at the seams as relations amongst members of the band - never particularly good - had significantly worsened due to various factors including Sid's addiction to drugs (and to Nancy), Rotten's loathing of McLaren, and Malcolm's desire to ensure the band were remembered as a spectacular failure rather than a benign success.     

 

And so, in hindsight, it isn't all that surprising that the two shows played on Christmas day in Huddersfield - the first, in the afternoon, a benefit gig for the children of striking firemen and the second, in the evening, for fans of the band in and around West Yorkshire - would prove to be their final British performances.

 

Perhaps sensing that the end was nigh, Mclaren began to reimagine the Sex Pistols as so much more than merely another boring rock 'n' roll group. And so he wrote the above text for distribution at the events and illustrated with artwork by George Cruikshank from the original 1838 edition of Oliver Twist [3].

 

According to Paul Gorman, this flyer "acted less as a promotion for the Pistols than a commentary on both his Jewishness and his strange relationship with the group" [4]. But it also demonstrates McLaren's (somewhat bourgeois and overly-romanticised) understanding of working class culture as inherently rebellious, violent, and non-conforming and that returns us to the politics of this manifesto ...

 

 

III. 

      

It's often the case that when commentators discuss the Sex Pistols in terms of politics they immediately reach for their French dictionary and start talking about the Situationists and referencing Guy Debord's La société du spectacle (1967). 

 

That's not mistaken, but it does mean that less attention is given to the fact that the Sex Pistols are also very much part of an English history of insurrection to do with the so-called London mob and the Gordon Riots [5]. 

 

As the opening sequence of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) explicitly informs viewers, the roots of 'Anarchy in the UK' can be traced back to the 1780s [6]. That is to say, to a period fizzing with revolutionary and carnivalesque energies on both sides of the Channel and one that Charles Dickens wrote about in his (little read and rarely adapted) historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) [7]. 

 

Wilfully conflating mob violence with punk rock, the cinematic re-enactment of the Gordon Riots makes clear that McLaren saw the Sex Pistols as first and foremost a rejection of authority - be it of parents, teachers, priests, policemen, or soldiers of the crown - and representative, as Julien Temple rightly says, of "something more feral and more dark and native to the English psyche than rock 'n' roll" [8].   

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The flyer was signed 'Oliver Twist' to emphasise McLaren's vision of the band as Dickensian urchins. It formed item 52 of the 71 item Stollper-Wilson Collection of Sex Pistols memorabilia auctioned by Sotheby's in October 2022: click here. 

      One of the most noticeable things about the flyer is the fact that Malcolm allowed corrections to the text to remain openly on display, just as they are on the Dickens manuscripts he saw as a child. As Paul Gorman reminds us, McLaren subscribed to the view that honest error is crucial to the creative process, rather than "'the icy perfections of the mere stylist'". 

      See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 48, where Gorman quotes from an aphorism coined by the Victorian church architect J. D. Sedding (one often falsely attributed to Charles Rennie Mackintosh). 

 

[2] The rest of the text scawled by McLaren (with a wooden stick dipped in ink) reads:

 

This true and dirty tale has been continuing throughout 200 years of teenage anarchy and so in 1978 there still remains the Sex Pistols. Their active extremism is all they care about because that's what counts to jump right out of the 20th century as fast as you possibly can in order to create an environment that you can truthfully run wild in.

 

[3] The illustration by Cruikshank to which I refer depicts the first meeting between Oliver Twist and Fagin entitled 'Oliver introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman'. It's an image which plays an important role in the mythologising of the Sex Pistols, paralleling as it does the first time that Malcolm and members of the band met with the nineteen-year-old who would become their singer and frontman: see the post 'On This Day ...' (22 August 2025): click here. 

      I am grateful for this clever insight to Michael E. Kitson, writing in 'The Sex Pistols and the London Mob', an unpublished doctoral thesis submitted to Western Sydney University (2008): click here to view the abstract and to download the work as a pdf. As this post makes clear, I agree with Kitson's central claim that the culture and semiotics of the London mob was fundamental to McLaren's (distinctly English) punk project and that the influence of Dickens on McLaren's thinking cannot be overestimated. 

 

[4] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren ... p. 381. 

      Interestingly, McLaren signs his manifesto with the name of Oliver Twist and not with Fagin, as one might have expected, as the latter was the explicitly Jewish character in Dickens's 1838 novel and the leader of a group of youngsters whom he grooms into a life of crime. 

      Still, whichever character McLaren ultimately identified with, the fact remains that Dickens's novel played a seminal role in his thinking. In 2000, he named the book as one of his favourites in a piece for The Guardian, describing it as an "unforgettable journey into criminal behaviour" that not only transported him back to his own childhood, but which justified his desire to - and here he paraphrases from his own Oliver Twist Manifesto - "create an environment " in which he could "truthfully run wild" whilst overseeing a generation of artful dodgers.  

      To read the list of Mclaren's top ten books in The Guardian (21 Feb 2000), click here.  

 

[5] The Gordon Riots of 1780 saw several days of violent disorder and destruction in London motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment and instigated by Lord George Gordon. After the mob - which had declared its own sovereignty on the wall of Newgate Prison - attempted to storm the Bank of England, the government finally sent in the army, resulting in several hundred fatalities.

 

[6] Funnily enough, the opening scene of the Swindle set in eighteenth-century London - featuring crowds cavorting in the streets as they joyously string up effigies of the Sex Pistols above a huge bonfire - is one that even Rotten admits to liking, conceding that it amusingly captures the spirit of punk. See John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Hodder and Stoughton, 1994), p. 289.

 

[7] I don't know if McLaren read Barnaby Rudge, but it's possible and Dickens's novel remains the definitive literary work detailing the phenomenon of the London mob at its height. 

      It's also more than likely that McLaren would have been (at least vaguely) familiar with Christopher Hibbert's King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (Longmans, 1958), which provides a colourful reading of the historical record. 

      And finally, it should be pointed out that McLaren certainly knew of (and admired) the newsletter King Mob Echo produced by the British offshoot of the Situationist International, with whom he was acquainted whilst an art student in the 1960s (see Gorman 2020, pp. 95-98).

 

[8] Julien Temple, director of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), speaking in the audio commentary [2:13] provided as a bonus to the DVD release of the film in 2005: click here. Temple is speaking with the writer Chris Salewicz. Interestingly, while Malcolm sees the Sex Pistols as Dickensian, Temple prefers to think of them as a bit Chaucerian.