[PDF file]: […] and a number of his friends and colleagues were expelled from the ILP for opposing cooperation with the Labour Party. They remained together and joined the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a very small Trotskyist faction whose most prominent members were Ted Grant and Gerry Healy. Like them, Smith regarded the Labour Party 1945 election […]
[PDF file]: […] Oswald owned a Mannlicher-Carcano; and as recent analysis seems to have confirmed, the photographs of him posing with the rifle and American left newspapers, both Trotskyist and Communist, were authentic (despite his claim that they had been faked).13 In his memoir Chauncey Holt tells us that, in the months before the assassination, the weapons […]
A review of Lobster in the Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003.
[PDF file]: […] Larkin. HE Lobster story begins in Edinburgh in 1948 when Ramsay was born, the eldest child of a food chemist father and housewife mother. Both parents were Communist Party members until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, so Ramsay grew up in a bookish, lefty atmosphere which encouraged a sort of instinctive hostility […]
[PDF file]: […] another, had been schooled in the brutality of grassroots organising by John Spellar, the ageing warhorse of the old right who made a point of reading the Communist Morning Star to learn of his enemies’ activities, and to celebrate if a hard-left organiser of his acquaintance was on its obituaries page. Margaret McDonagh, Blair’s […]
[PDF file]: […] the left of the Labour Party in Parliament and the constituencies, the large trade unions (notably the Transport and General Workers and the Engineering Workers) and the Communist Party. Their most articulate spokesperson was Tony Benn, Industry Secretary in Harold Wilson’s Labour government at the time. The case made by Benn and his supporters […]
The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay Harold Smith RIP Harold Smith has died. In Lobster 24 I summarised Smith’s account of witnessing the outgoing British state rigging the pre-independence elections in Nigeria which, he argued, led to the Biafran war and millions of dead. Smith’s story can be found by Googling ‘Harold Smith + […]
