Remembering Mohammed Ali: boxer, philosopher and poet

Mohammed AliAnn Pettifor remembers Mohammed Ali with whom she worked in the Jubilee 2000 campaign for cancellation of third world debt

Mohammed Ali – ‘The Greatest’ – died this weekend, at the age of 74. With his loss, the world is deprived of the terrific energy of a principled, devout and committed man. A boxer, a philosopher and a poet. But for those of us who worked hard to achieve the cancellation of about $100 billion of debt for thirty five of the poorest countries, Ali occupies a special place in our hearts. This great man, celebrated around the world, took time out to join us in London in 1999, and to give his backing to our campaign. Continue reading

Remembering Denis Healey – the good, the bad and the utterly hilarious

Denis_HealeyDenis Healey was a great figure for twenty-five years of Labour history, a politician with “a hinterland”, very well-read and deeply interested in art and music, and, though Jeremy Corbyn may not have approved, was a master of the brilliant put-down. Geoffrey Howe was forever diminished by that greatest of personal attacks – his attacks summed up as being “like being savaged by a dead sheep“.  He will be remembered fondly even by many of us for whom he was a bête noire in our youth in the 1970s.

As Chancellor under Wilson and Callaghan he was undoubtedly the Chancellor who sealed the end of the Keynesian approach that had been adopted by both Labour and Tory governments in the post-war period until then, and has only been reintroduced as Labour’s by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. He led the battle in cabinet for the cuts in public expenditure which were the price of IMF support for Sterling.

However, with hindsight, he was chancellor in the most difficult of times with rampant inflation that was largely a consequence of the Barber boom (named after the Tory Chancellor between 1970 and 1974) and the oil price shock, and he was unfairly blamed for the winter of discontent following Callaghan’s insistence in 1978 on a disastrously low 5% pay norm when inflation was still 10%. He did, after all, favour a system of price controls far more extensive than anything being proposed by Corbyn and McDonnell and his incomes policy, agreed through full cooperation with the TUC and trade union leadership, was clearly designed to benefit the low paid. Continue reading

Remembering Charles Kennedy

Charles_Kennedy_MPTurning on BBC News yesterday, I was thrown by the sad passing of Charles Kennedy. Not being a LibDem and living hundreds of miles from his constituency (as was), I never had occasion to bump into him in real life. Like most other political people the Charlie Kennedy I knew was the kindly presence on Have I Got News For You, Question Time, and (whisper it) This Week.

Perhaps by virtue of the media work, he could lay claim to one of those rarest of commodities. In an age where politicians and politics are almost universally spurned, among those who paid attention he was almost unanimously liked. Can you remember a scurrilous press attack on him? As the LibDems trouped through the government lobbies to vote for some of the most regressive legislation this country has seen in modern times, the opprobrium that attached itself to the LibDems left him untouched. That, however, was not enough to secure him against the SNP blitzkrieg that drove all before it. Continue reading

Obituary: Vladimir Derer, leading campaigner for Labour Party democracy

Vladimir Derer, co-founder and long-time Secretary of CLPDVladimir Derer who was the leading figure in the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) for forty years after its foundation in 1973 died yesterday at the age of 94. Although almost unknown other than amongst Labour activists, he was the Labour Left’s leading strategist at the height of its influence in the 1970s and 1980s. The organisation he created and his strategic vision made CLPD, the most effective organisation on the Labour Left not only in that period but through the New Labour years to the present.

Tony Benn, who died only three months ago, was rightly regarded as the Labour Left’s outstanding leader and communicator of the period but he was often wrongly credited with being the architect of the movement for democratic reform within the party. That role was performed by Vladimir Derer. As Frances Morrell put it in The Struggle for Labour’s Soul: “He was a strategist and tactician of outstanding ability…. if any single individual was responsible for the changes to the party’s constitution that were agreed in the period after the party left office, then it was undoubtedly Vladimir Derer“.

Without Vladimir, there would have been no mandatory reselection of MPs, no electoral college in which Tony Benn could come within a whisker of winning the deputy leadership of the party and in which Ed Miliband was to win the leadership. Those two reforms together with the unrealised objective of Labour’s manifesto being determined by its elected executive were CLPD’s core objectives through the 1970s . Continue reading

What made Brother Crow a truly admirable trade union leader

Bob CrowNow is not the time to debate the complex issues of whether the RMT’s industrial and political strategy has been an overall success; although there is a debate to be had there. The RMT’s strategy has of course also not sprung from the head of one man: it has also been shaped by other leading members of that union, and endorsed by their elected governing committees.

Bob Crow was the leader of an industrial transport union with particular strengths and opportunities, and he played the hand of cards he was dealt, with no small skill. Exhortations from some commentators that other unions should learn from the RMT model need to be contextualised by recognising the different membership demographics, membership densities, and economic and social clout. Continue reading