Obituaries

The first and the Best

By Heenal Rajani We should remember George Best for his football alone and not his decline. All the rest, everything else that has contributed to the legend of George Best, is supplementary, incidental. Remember his achievements, remember how Best and a few other men helped to heal a city devastated by the Munich air crash (of February 1958 in which 23 Manchester United players, staff and supporters died). Some unkind commentators have remarked that Best’s death has only been covered with such volume because most sports journalists are middle-aged Manchester United fans. Unfair. He deserves...

Cynthia Baldry, 1949-1975

Exactly 30 years ago, on 19 November 1975 Cynthia Baldry died in Liverpool. She was a member of one of Solidarity/AWL’s forerunners, Workers’ Fight. Aged 26 at her death, she had suffered since the age of 19 from a rare and incurable disease which finally killed her, lupus erythematosus. Her political life spanned five years of gradual physical deterioration. Yet it was by any standards a life of intense activity and dedication to the cause of socialism and the groups she joined to fight in that cause — first the International Socialism group (now the SWP) and then Workers’ Fight. These were...

Rosa Parks and her times

“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over.” - Martin Luther King “My resistance to being mistreated on the busses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me and not just on that day.” - Rosa Parks (1913-2005) The Second World War changed the position of black Americans. In 1940 there were 12.8 million African Americans, 9.8% of the population. About one quarter lived in the north and east of the USA; but the majority of black Americans still lived in the rural areas of ex-Confederate southern states. In the South black Americans lived under a regime of vicious...

Death of Robin Cook, an honest Labour Party liberal

Bourgeois politicians praising other bourgeois politicians, even dead ones, is in the same category as self-praise. And as the saying goes, “self-praise is no praise”. Their “adversarial” posturing against each other. even where they agree fundamentally, is a sham. Why should we believe them when they belatedly discover that a departed colleague was an honest person, a humane presence, a great man who might-have-been, someone who, though on the surface an opportunist scumbag, was really a person of deep and unbudgeable integrity. Robin Cook died never knowing how highly esteemed he was in...

In memory of Leon Trotsky

This article about Leon Trotsky was written in 1943 by Victor Serge for the radical-cultural review Partisan Review He was hardly forty-five when we began calling him “the Old Man” as we had Lenin at a similar early age. All his life he gave one the feeling of a man in whom thought, action and his personal life formed a single solid block, one who would follow his road to the end, on whom one could always absolutely depend. He would not waver on essentials, he would not weaken in defeat, he would not avoid responsibility or lose his head under pressure. A man with so profound an inner pride...

Heath: the Thatcherite who lost

Former Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath, who died on 17 July, has elicited lavish praise from what the bourgeois press likes to call “all parts of the political spectrum”. Tony Blair has described him as “magnificent… an extraordinary man, a great statesman, a prime minister our country can be proud of”, and eulogies from Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy have been similarly gushing and hackneyed. What might appear, in hack terms, to be a remarkable display of unity is in fact Britain’s ruling class uniting in memory of one of its most prominent politicians. Because of the enormous shift to...

Karim Landais

Taking part in our international meeting on Saturday 18th June was Karim Landais. This young man worked with Yves Coleman on the magazine Ni patrie ni frontières and, unbeknownst to most of us at the meeting, he was battling with depression. A week later, on Saturday 25 June, he took his own life. This appreciation of Karim was written by Yves Coleman. Salut, Karim ! Cher Karim, Le week-end dernier, tu as décidé de mettre fin à tes jours. A peine une semaine avant, le samedi 18 juin 2005, nous avions participé tous les deux à une discussion fraternelle durant plusieurs heures avec des...

James Callaghan: of the labour movement, against the labour movement

Notoriety clung for decades to the Tory politician Enoch Powell for his 1968 speech predicting that “rivers of blood” would flow if black and Asian immigration was allowed to continue. That was a foul speech by a foul man. It was the time when Kenya’s Asian population was being expelled on mass. They had been given British passports when the country became independent five years earlier. They were entitled to come to Britain. But they weren’t allowed to. Powell made the vile and memorable speech. But it was the Labour Home Secretary James Callaghan, who has just died a day short of his 93rd...

Hunter S Thompson: scourge of the American elite

Mick Duncan examines the life and times of Hunter s Thompson, who killed himself on 20 February. Hunter S Thompson — journalist, novelist, juvenile delinquent, drugs and guns fiend, and abuser of Richard Milhous Nixon — left a note on a typewriter next to his body at his Aspen ranch. It read “counsellor” (sic). Who knows what that might mean? And is there anyone out there who does understand enough to evaluate Thompson? I guess we will just have to guess and muddle through. Thompson started writing in the 1950s, and wrote The Rum Diaries by the end of the decade. However, he didn’t publish...

Alan Clinton and the Trotskyist Movement

Alan Clinton, who in 1974 co-edited, with Richard Chappell, a collection of Trotsky’s writings on Britain in three volumes, has died of cancer at the age of 61. He lived a political life that encapsulated the history of the British left over 40 years. He is entitled to the respect of an honest, critical account of his political life. Beginning as a youthful Trotskyist, he wound up as the Blairite leader of Islington council in 1994–7. The last time I saw him, more than a decade ago, on Upper Street, Islington, he responded to an aggressive question about his subsidence into Labourism with the...

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