Book review: pioneers of British Trotskyism
DID you hear the one about the Paddy, the Jewish bloke and the South African fella who came to London, joined the same Trot sect, and split it into three? No, that is not the opening line of a gag lifted from a third rate stand-up comic on the norther club circuit, but an entirely [...]
Alan Milburn: from Trotskyist to Tory adviser
ALAN Milburn is roughly the same age as I am, and joined the International Marxist Group and thereafter the Labour Party at round about the same time that I did in the early 1980s. By the 1990s he had metamorphosed into an ultra-Blairite, and yesterday it was announced that he has accepted the unpaid role [...]
Haltemprice & Howden: vote Trot
I used to visit rural east Yorkshire regularly back in the early 1990s, but only because I then had a girlfriend whose dad owned half of it. Unless things have changed dramatically in the intervening years, there can be few spots on the planet less propitious for the propagation of the Trotskyist weltanschaaung. Nevertheless, I [...]
National Trottery
There’s no way on earth that a leftie would ever be appointed as head of the National Lottery in this country. But in what could be good news for one of the local sections of one of the Fourth Internationals, Sri Lanka has just given the equivalent job to comrade A.P.A. de Vass Gunawardena, described [...]
In defence of Socialist Action. Sort of.
A Channel Four documentary tonight is set the launch the first full-on mainstream media attack on the evils of nasty, nasty Trotskyism for at least 20 years. As a middle-aged ex-Trot myself, I feel two decades younger already. It’s been too long, guys. If advance write-ups in the Sunday Times and Observer yesterday are anything [...]
Lionel Jospin and the French secret state
The Trotskyist pasts of such New Labour politicians as Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn and even chancellor Alistair Darling (allegedly, anyway) are all on public record. But would Britain’s secret state let a man or woman they knew to be a former deep entrist become prime minister without making sure the matter was leaked to the [...]
C’est la crise finale du capitalisme!
At last! It’s the final crisis of capitalism! That’s according to the publishers of Revolte Jeune – Toute la Verite, a badly-produced French Trot journal I picked up from a seller outside a metro station on Saturday. It seems that the subprime crisis is about to usher in a period of military dictatorship and fascism, [...]
LCR to launch ‘anti-capitalist’ party in France
The Ligue communiste révolutionnaire is going ahead with plans to launch a new and broader far left party in France. Local assemblies will be convened before the end of 2008 to discuss the question and organise the founding conference, according to a story in Le Monde republished here [in French]. Incidentally, the French Trots – [...]
Miscellaneous Trot gossip
Here’s an intriguing tale from the Moscow Times website. It seems that the webmaster of the residual Russian CP is guilty of ideological deviationism, 1930s style: Anatoly Baranov, editor of the party’s web site, has been plotting to subvert party policy to reflect “the interests of pro-Western forces,” the party’s Central Audit Committee said a [...]
SWP and Big Brother Carole
Mirror political editor Kevin Maguire – a man to watch under the Brown prime ministership, I’m told – cites this extract from an SWP internal document in his New Statesman diary column this week: Trot tantrums in the SWP’s weekly party notes under the intriguing head “Revolutionaries and Big Brother”. Walthamstow comrade Carole Vincent seemingly [...]
