David Widgery. Image used under Fair Use: Vagabond Voices.David Widgery was the comrade who, in the seventies, lit the fire of Rock Against Racism that drummed the British Nazis out of town. He died 25 years ago, when he was only in his forties. Against Miserabilism, an anthology of his essays, has just been published; described by former New Statesman editor Stuart Weir as a collection from the keyboard of ‘one of the finest writers and critics ever produced by the revolutionary left’. Indeed. As a new generation confronts both the possibility of a transformation of capitalism and the realities of fighting ascendant fascism, its publication has made me look back on a friend and a medical doctor who, insofar as one person can, embodied ‘the revolution’ the ‘68 generation sought and lost - and was as complete a revolutionary as there might be.
He was only 21 in the breakthrough year of 1968. But David Widgery emerged like a boyish Venus from its waves, his voice and politics perfectly formed to express its raging currents even as his judgment rightly scorned the mass of surrounding foam.
He rocked to the music, he trained to the science of medicine, he practiced as a doctor in working class London, he agitated with the strikers, he wrote, read and argued without cease, fighting racism instinctively and he embraced the feminism that emerged in reaction to the misogyny of sixties hedonism and was present at its founding moment in the UK. With his skills, intelligence, sensitivity and generosity, Widgery was the living spirit of intelligent solidarity.
