The organiser of an anti-gentrification protest in east London has accused the owners of a breakfast cereal cafe targeted by protesters of “milking” the publicity.

Ian Bone, the founder of Class War, the anarchist group behind Saturday evening’s Fuck Parade event in Shoreditch, also vowed to continue focusing on independent businesses at similar protests planned nationwide.



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Bone defended those who attacked the Cereal Killer Cafe with paint bombs and graffiti because they had helped publicise the movement across the globe. “Everyone on that march, who are so pissed off with the lot they’ve got in life, was fighting back. I totally understand and support it,” said Bone, who founded Class War in 1982.

He promised the movement, which has so far organised three Fuck Parade protests in London, would seek to expand. He said: “They’re going to take place all around Britain. I’m going up to Scotland now to talk to some people in Glasgow and Edinburgh about possible ones there.”

The cafe’s owners said the protest left some customers terrified for their lives, and that they had received subsequent threats.

Given the publicity over Saturday’s protest, future events would most likely be aimed at independent businesses seen as spreading gentrification, rather than chains.

Bone said: “I think it will. We’d be mad to go for Pret a Manger and Foxtons. A broken window at Foxtons isn’t going to get any publicity at all, whereas we’ve seen what happens with independent shops. We’d be stupid not to.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ian Bone, founder of Class War. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris

Bone said Fuck Parade grew out of 10 months of demonstrations by Class War outside 1 Commercial Street, a new block of luxury flats on the edge of London’s financial district, which has attracted some notoriety for having a separate “poor door” entrance for those living in its affordable and social apartments.

“We were campaigning outside 1 Commercial Street for 10 months last year, which is quite funny when people are now saying we should concentrate on property developers,” Bone said. “There’s was lots of stuff going on there – arrests, burning effigies – and not a peep in the press. Then someone throws a couple of bags of paint at a cereal cafe and it’s in the newspapers from Italy to New Zealand.”

Bone explained the idea behind the protests. He said: “The fight against gentrification has basically been lost and it’s speeding up all the time. So our philosophy is to go back to areas which have already been gentrified and start taking the fight back to them. In a way, going to Shoreditch was going behind enemy lines, the idea being that we take control of the streets for five or six hours, which we did.”

There had been no prior plan to target the Cereal Killer Cafe, he said: “No, it’s just what happened. The way the Fuck Parade works, people are there and then they wander off. It’s 1,000 or so anarchists and other people – it’s very hard to tell them to do anything. We just happened to be going past it.

“Anyway, I must have been one amongst many people astounded to see a cafe flogging cereal open at nine o’clock at night. If I’d have put money on us going for anything it would have been Foxtons, and it wasn’t.”

On Monday, one of the brothers who set up the cafe, Alan Keery, wrote in the Guardian that the protesters had been wrong to target an independent business, calling the action “unacceptable bullying”. He wrote: “Cereal Killer Cafe is not the cause of gentrification, nor can it instigate the solution.”

But Bone rejected this, saying the publicity showed it had been worthwhile: “Everyone keeps saying: ‘Wrong target, you should have done the City, you should have done parliament, you should have done Pret a Manger, Foxtons.’ It doesn’t work. You don’t get any publicity.

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“We had a riot virtually every night outside 1 Commercial Street, and it doesn’t get a dicky bird. We wouldn’t have got any publicity if it hadn’t been for the cereal cafe. But I give those two brothers their credit. They’ve milked this brilliantly. They’ve run a masterful campaign. I salute them for that.”

Class War, originally an eponymous newspaper as well as a movement, somewhat fizzled out during the 1990s but has been recently revived, standing six candidates in this year’s general election under the slogan: “Because all the other candidates are scum.”

Class War is organising a protest this Sunday at a museum originally billed as celebrating the role of women in London but which ended up focusing on the crimes of Jack the Ripper. This is not being held under the Fuck Parade banner, Bone said, and was part of regular protests at the site in east London.