Ken Coates who died last week at the age of 79 of a suspected heart attack was actively engaged in left politics, writing and as ever bubbling with new ideas almost hours before he passed away.

Barely a week before he had been enthusing me about the need for what he saw as a ‘Labour Perestroika’, and had sent  a copy of a letter that he had written to Ed Miliband in May, who Ken believed presented the best chance for Labour to escape its recent, dismal past, a past that incidentally had seen Ken, in his incarnation as a truly internationalist Labour MEP, thrown out of the Labour Party in 1997. Continue reading →