Election 2015: Meet Class War, the party standing 'because all other candidates are scum'

You may have heard of Class War before, especially if you were around in the 1980s. But the group has gone through a revival of sorts in recent years and now is fielding candidates at the 2015 general election.

As part of a series of articles looking at minor parties standing in the forthcoming election, IBTimes UK spoke to Class War - the party whose slogan is "because all other candidates are scum" - to find out more.

My name is Ian Bone and I was the founder of Class War newspaper way back in 1983.

Yes. The whole organisation and the newspaper stopped for about five years and then about three or four years ago started up again as a political organisation as well as a paper.

Because there's a huge gap on the left in this country. The left has been moribund for years. The anarchist media is moribund. It doesn't make any connection with a new kind of politics, it's just sort of sweeping around the rest of the world. It's rooted in the past. There's a clear gap in the market for something a bit more vibrant, a bit more oomphy, with a sense of humour which can relate to the mass of people who don't seem to want to vote at all.

Mansion tax, 50%. Abolition of public schools. And double all benefits.

We want to make the rich pay rather than the poor pay for austerity. So unlike all the other parties who are running scare stories on benefits, we'd double all benefits including pensions. A 50% mansion tax would go hand in hand with a 90% top rate income tax, and that would pay for improved social services, affordable housing and a great increase in benefits for working class people.

We've got nine candidates. Chingford, against Iain Duncan Smith. Maidenhead against Theresa May. And the others are Croydon South, City of London & Westminster, Norwich North and Norwich South, Forest of Dean, Sherwood, and Lichfield.

I think there's couple of seats we'll do pretty well in. I mean, we're not going to win any seats. We're not going to come close to winning. But I think we're going to put down a significant marker as being a major radical force in the UK after this election. We're throwing everything at Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford because he's a... a lot of people don't like him very much. So we think that's our best bet of having some significant impact.

It's not going to be apocalyptic or anything. Basically we just like to have a good time while we're doing our politics and have a laugh. We put up with a lot of the po-faced seriousness as the rest of the left drone on about a politics 100 years out of date. We're passionate about our politics, but we're funny as well. I guess we've got more links back to American groups like the Yippies and the Pranksters and stuff like that than we have a lot of the dead left groups.