ANARCHISTS ate my hamster, nearly all newspapers report this morning. OK, I’m exaggerating here, but not dramatically.

‘Police lock down the City as anarchists prepare for G20 riot’, ‘Anarchists in plan to storm City offices’, ‘European anarchists ‘to invade London’ for G20 violence’, ‘Anarchists organize to Spread the word’: all these headlines and dozens more feature prominently across the mainstream media.

This is the most concerted red scare seen in this country for a long time, and much of the advance hyperbole clearly emanates from the police. This tactic is straight off a Kaiser Chiefs album; predict a riot often enough, and you are pretty certain to get one.

Right now, the giant plasma screen television in the news room is running pictures live from the Square Mile, which shows nothing worse than the standard argy-bargy between protestors and lines of cops, of the type that will be familiar to experienced demo-goers.

Scrub that; I’ve just seen pictures of a few missiles have been thrown, and it suddenly strikes me how ridiculous it is to use the word ‘missile’ in this context. I mean, say what you like about sticks of plywood, but they are qualitatively distinct from the oversized firework North Korea is gearing up to launch in the next few days.

Doubtless a section of the crowd is ready to kick things off, and the Old Bill have not come tooled up to reciprocate for nothing. Any significant ruckus will lead to page after page of anguished coverage this afternoon and tomorrow.

Whatever happens, it is now a week to the day since an outfit calling itself Bank Bosses are Criminals put bricks through some of the windows at the expensive Edinburgh home of disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin, also inflicting damage on his Merc while they were about it.

OK, it will be easy enough to write off both the disruption in the City and attack on Fred the Shred as the work of hotheads, the kind of people Boris Johnson derides as ‘nose-ringed twerps’. Bloody students, innit?

Yet it is harder to dismiss wave of wildcats centred on the Lindsey oil refinery walkout earlier this year in quite that fashion. This, remember, was the first serious co-ordinated defiance of anti-union laws since their introduction in the early 1980s.

The trade union bureaucracy combined compliance with their legal duty not to back such wicked deeds with fairly obvious tacit support, but were clearly not in control. These stoppages were organised by the rank and file, with neither sanction nor assistance from the official machine.

The Prisme packaging factory in Dundee is now entering the fifth week of an occupation against job losses. This company is not even unionised, remember. Elsewhere, some 200 workers at the Visteon car parts plant in Belfast and 80 of their colleagues in Enfield have also taken over their respective plants. Again, we have seen nothing comparable to this since God knows when.

For several decades now, it has been the stock in trade of sections of the far left to trumpet any minute uptick in working class activity as evidence of a ‘new mood’. Never mind the reality that statistics for industrial action are at the lowest level since 1893, that ‘brilliant’ 12-hour strike by binmen in some obscure council no-one has ever heard of points the way to a generalised upsurge in class struggle, we have repeatedly been assured.

But this time it looks different; the increasing radicalisation is palpable, as all the evidence presented above suggests. In so far as this widens the audience ready to give socialist ideas a hearing, the development will be welcome to everyone on the left.

At the same time, it is worth making a few precautionary points. Unlike the 1970s and 1980s, the process is not being refracted through the official structures of the labour movement. I am not aware of any evidence of increased turnout at union meetings, for instance, and certainly there has been no influx of new recruits to the Labour Party.

Great, many activists will maintain. Labour and the unions have in the past acted as a safety valve, redirecting anger into safe channels, and this time will be unable to play such a craven role.

Yet the radicalism that is emerging will inevitably find a political expression somewhere, and we cannot automatically assume that Britain’s disorganised and dishevelled far left is up to the job. While this blog broadly applauded the Lindsey strike, there is no point in denying that the nationalist undertones were clear enough. The dynamic was anti-foreigner as well as anti-capitalist.

Contradictory as it might sound, there is no reason why passive sympathy for those shoving bricks through bankers’ windows cannot be combined with electoral support for the British National Party if a vote for the far right is perceived as the angry, anti-establishment option. There will be a lot to play for in years ahead.