The Zine UK

10 October 2026 | Newington Green Meeting Hall, London | 11:00–23:00
Tickets: £0–£27.80 via Eventbrite

Revolutionary art is not decoration. It is a weapon.

Founded in 1933, the Artists International Association brought together agitprop, Marxist debate, exhibitions and anti-fascist organising. Its members produced affordable lithographs for workers, supported the Spanish Republic and built a tradition later carried forward by Rock Against Racism and Cable Street Beat.

Artists Against Fascism picks up that unfinished work in 2026.

Organised by the Communist Party of Britain Culture Commission, it sets out to fight fascism through culture, put working-class artists on the platform and build an association that survives beyond one Saturday in London.

The Culture Commission names three aims:

fight fascism through culture
give cultural workers power in cultural life
build a lasting organisation committed to fighting fascism and promoting cultural democracy

The bill cuts across a cultural scene usually fenced off by genre, funding and class. What matters is what remains when the hall empties.

Grup Yorum: Still singing

For decades, Turkish revolutionary band Grup Yorum have endured raids, arrests, imprisonment and concert bans.

Police raided the İdil Cultural Centre in 2016 and destroyed the band's instruments. Within two years, they had raided it ten times. In 2020, band members died after hunger strikes against imprisonment, police repression and restrictions on their music.

Cem Dursun and Cemil Kurt have been on indefinite hunger strike in Marmara Prison since 29 April 2026. They are resisting "well-type isolation": confinement in 8.2-square-metre cells without communal areas, kitchens or adequate ventilation.

Fifty writers, artists and intellectuals have backed their demands. In September, 93 people were detained across 12 Turkish provinces, among them Grup Yorum members and their lawyers.

Forty years of persecution have not silenced Grup Yorum. And on the 10th October, they come to Newington Green.

Craic Killers: Political Punk Without Compromise

Fronted by the balaclava-wearing Mr Craic, they drive distortion-heavy guitars and abrasive rhythms under vocals in English and Irish. Their targets are not vague: police brutality, racism, the MAGA manosphere, Andrew Tate, ICE, the PSNI and the protection afforded to powerful men.

The solidarity leaves the stage with them. Half the proceeds from their latest EP go to Lina, a single mother in Gaza. Their handmade balaclavas, embroidered with "Saoirse", the Irish word for freedom, help fund Nurse Salah's medical work in Gaza. Available right here on The Zine UK — shop now.

Their debut EP, Who TF Is Craic Killers?, delivered raw, lo-fi electropunk. The 2026 follow-up, "Who Said I Was…", retains that force while sharpening the production and political edge.

Mr. Craic describes the change in his reasons for making music:

"I think a lot of my life I wanted to be a musician for the wrong reasons, and now I feel like I'm doing things for the right reason."

Ben Lunn: The structural anomaly?

When "composer and conductor" appears between a balaclava-wearing punk and a Turkish revolutionary band facing state persecution, the obvious question is: "what the fuck is a classical guy doing here?"

Attacking the same structures from inside a tradition that prefers to imagine itself above them.

Ben Lunn is a Sunderland-born composer whose music reflects "the material world around him, connecting to his North-Eastern heritage or how disability impacts the world around him or his working-class upbringing." That is not decorative biography. It shapes the work. In a classical culture that still treats class and disability as subjects rather than material conditions, refusing to smooth either away is a political act.

He chairs the Musicians' Union's Scottish and North of Ireland Regional Committee and the North Lanarkshire Trades Council. He founded the Disabled Artist Network in 2021. In practice, cultural democracy means meetings, motions, organising and showing up when the glamorous part is over.

His PhD explores "the impact of political ideology on composition" through Hanns Eisler, Alan Bush, Isang Yun and Luigi Nono. Eisler wrote for the workers' movement. Lunn knows the lineage he is entering.

"Will We…" honours hidden acts of heroism across Europe during the Second World War, threading 1940s rebel songs by Belorussian Partisans and Yiddish anti-fascists through a cello work performed at the Imperial War Museum North. Another composition, "Our Sophisticated Weapon," is written for mixed choir and ensemble. No coyness there.

Sean Cooney: A Golden Thread

Sean Cooney has won three BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. He is behind 'The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff', an acclaimed theatre show that "brings untold working-class stories to life by blending folk song, historical testimony, archival recordings, and spoken word."

"Untold working-class stories" is the entire point. Folk has always had a fighting wing: Ewan MacColl, industrial ballads, and songs that kept strikes alive when newspapers buried them. Cooney carries that history, but he also belongs to The Young'uns, a trio established enough to play festivals where folk is often cleaned up and sold back as heritage.

Folk can keep collective memory alive or preserve it behind glass. The same voice can sing about heroic dogs and carry the songs of the labour movement. What changes is the purpose, the room and the people singing back.

Kate Fox: the Northern Voice that Refuses to Apologise

Kate Fox is a stand-up poet, spoken-word artist and broadcaster from Bradford. She has been Poet in Residence at Glastonbury and the Great North Run and writes a weekly column for 'The Journal' in Newcastle.

The Northeast, and the North more broadly, carries a class history that London's cultural establishment prefers as texture rather than as politics. Thatcherism hollowed out communities. The Miners' Strike left wounds that did not close when the cameras moved on. Fox's work comes from that ground: funny, sharp, self-deprecating, and rooted.

Institutions love a "Northern voice" once it can be marketed without the conditions that made it. Fox appearing on an anti-fascist bill organised by the Communist Party's Culture Commission refuses that separation. The North is not a brand. It is contested ground.

Michael Rosen: The Revolutionary Inheritance

Michael Rosen's radicalism comes from family trauma and revolutionary tradition. His relatives died in the Holocaust; his parents were communists. He was never taught to bind Jewish identity to exclusionary nationalism. "As a Jew, I was taught to stand with the oppressed, whoever the oppressor is."

He writes children's poetry and political poetry. His 2025 collection, Words United, calls the genocide in Gaza a "nightmare" and donates all royalties to Medical Aid for Palestine. In a British cultural scene eager to turn anti-racism into a brand, Rosen refuses the respectable version: disinvited by schools, attacked by right-wing groups, he still writes in every column that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.

He appears at Artists Against Fascism not as a "children's laureate" symbol but as a Jewish leftist from a communist family, refusing to let the memory of the Holocaust be used as a licence to oppress Palestinians.

Alexei Sayle: The Burned Child

Alexei Sayle grew up in a Communist family in Liverpool—"a burned child," in his own words. His parents were Communist Party members. He marched against the Vietnam War, stood with the miners, opposed the Iraq War, and now marches for Gaza. Seventy years of left-wing life are collected in a memoir whose title says it all: How I've Tried to Change the World by Walking Down the Middle of the Street Shouting.

He was a pioneer of 1980s alternative comedy and is now an old man on TikTok dancing and explaining Marxism. He called the Gaza marches "the best of humanity," and said the ruling class response—"proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, freezing accounts, mass arrests"—is the real lesson.

Sayle stands on this stage not as a "comedy legend" warming up the room but as someone who has spent a lifetime against power, reminding everyone present: laughter can be a weapon, but only if it points at the right thing.

Scrapyard Vanguard

I am speaking at Artists Against Fascism too.

In my so-called real-life guise as Victoria Holmes, I stand as a Romani woman and the author of 'Scrapyard Vanguard', published by Manifesto Press.

The book puts Romani women at the centre of resistance. My argument is blunt: the Romani struggle is a vanguard struggle, and any class politics that excludes it is lying about liberation.

Writing in the Morning Star, Roger McKenzie summarised my argument better than I could:

"Holmes argues that the state creates slums through neglect and then uses the existence of those slums as an excuse to bulldoze them, which she calls the perfect loop of racial capitalism."

It examines racial capitalism, state bureaucracy, genocide, gender, and the survival of Romani resistance. Liberation will not be won through polite appeals to systems built to divide, contain and remove us. It requires solidarity organised against them.

Read it. Then come and argue, listen and organise.

Scrapyard Vanguard is available from Manifesto Press:
https://manifestopress.coop/product/scrapyard-vanguard/

Uniqulture and the Revolutionary Imagination

We here at TheZineUK were founded on Uniqulture in 2014, and we love bringing punk and poetry together.

Craic Killers are Uniqulture. Grup Yorum are Uniqulture. It was never a postcode or a genre. It was a political proposition.

Artists Against Fascism carries that proposition forward: art as a place to organise, resist and practise the world we are trying to build.

TheZineUK doesn't do "coverage." It does tapestry-weaving. It does #FertileEnvironment. It does the understanding that Kneecap, Craic Killers, NCP, and the 24:1900 Music Festival are all threads in the same cloth. Artists Against Fascism is another knot in that same tapestry.

Ben Lunn's presence shows that a united front cannot mean a familiar circle congratulating itself. It needs punks, folk singers, composers, poets, Romani writers and Turkish revolutionaries. Class struggle does not obey genre boundaries. Its cultural front cannot afford to either.

A classical composer and an Irish punk on the same bill. A Romani woman speaking beside a Turkish band persecuted by the state. A folk singer carrying industrial ballads into a room full of balaclavas. Power prefers culture sorted into harmless categories. AAF rejects the filing system.

Event information

Artists Against Fascism
Saturday 10 October 2026
Newington Green Meeting Hall, London
11:00–23:00
Tickets: £0–£27.80 via Eventbrite

Speakers include Michael Rosen, Alexei Sayle, Martin Rowson, Fran Lock, Arthur Smith, Andy Croft, Ben Lunn, Kate Fox, Sean Cooney... and eh, me.

Weapons need direction.
Direction needs organisation.
Organisation needs discipline.

Good souls will win. But first you must be in the room.