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Welcome
I use this site to record pieces of research and other published work of mine, from the past 13 years (this site was started in its earliest version as long ago as spring 1998). There are individual pages relating to the history of fascism and anti-fascism in Britain and Europe, including the history of the Anti-Nazi League in 1970s Britain, which was the subject of a book When we touched the sky that I published in 2006. My other books include a history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, studies in the political philosophy of fascism, two short collections of my poems, and biographies of the British economic historian Sidney Pollard, and of the writers, activists and revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and CLR James. My most recent book is a history of migration to North East England. Other features of this site include short studies in Renton family history, papers on the politics and history of migration, and a page containing various examples of my other journalism. There is also a full sitemap, a biography page, and a contacts page.
New stuff
7 March 2011: Eton and the Tories 17 January 2011: On race and national consciousness 13 May 2010: Colour Blind Reviewed by David Bates in Weekly Worker
20 March 2010: Edward Upward
31 October 2009: Fascism: Theory and Practice
6 December 2008: CLR James
11
November 2008: Belfort Bax and Henry Morton Stanley revisited
11
November 2008: The Congo, again at war
9 October 2008: Newcastle; city of migration
July 2008: Macintyre restored (Newsletter of the London Socialist Historians Group)
21
June 2008: Students, workers, struggle
30
April 2008: Cricket, lovely cricket
Let me start with a dog that didn’t bark. First, the dog: following Margaret Thatcher’s resignation as leader of the Conservative Party in 1990; the race for her successor was between Douglas Hurd, Old Etonian, and John Major, the boy who ran away from the circus to work in a bank. Hurd’s challenge initially seemed strong, but fell apart when Major raised Hurd’s background, “I thought I was running for leader of the Tory party”, Major said, “not some demented Marxist sect”. More here
I have recently been sent two essays (here and here) by Julian Samboma reviewing Jack Barnes’s book Malcolm X, Black Liberation & the road to Workers Power. More here
For over half a century, immigration has rarely been far from the top of the political agenda in the UK. More here
New site dedicated to the work of Edward Upward here
New review of my book here
I've now got 12 reviews online of my CLR James book; including 2 published this month in Australia. More here
Many thanks indeed to a correspondent James Heartfield who was caused me to reconsider some of the language of my short piece on HM Stanley and his treatment at the hands of the left. James has sent me a link to the relevant passages of Hyndman's autobiography in which he recounts with pleasure his first meetings with Stanley in the 1870s, and his determination to expose Stanley as a murderer, which he did by proroposing a vote of censure upon Stanley at the Royal Geographical Society. There is something equivocal about the passages from Hyndman; this is not a simon-pure incident of socialist virtue. Yet on balance, I'm glad that he saw the problem. And I'm happy to acknowledge that my comments on Hyndman before are not the full story. More here.
The news of renewed fighting in the Congo has provided the perfect opportunity for people to show off their ignorance of that country. Over at Socialist Unity for example, you can find a rather generous report of a protect by Congolese asylum seekers in Manchester. What should be a nice story is ruined by a rogue comment in the comments box from former soldier and sometime contributor to Searchlight magazine Terry Fitzpatrick, who regales anyone who'll listen with the story that the people of the Congo have been in a permanent condition of civil war, from which they were rescued only briefly by the intervention of white mercenaries at the time of the Katanga secession. More here.
Over the past 160 years Newcastle has been a great city of immigration. Other cities such as New York or London are better known for the part played in their history by migrants. But the extent of migration-based population growth has been no less striking in Newcastle than anywhere else. Of course, I am not going to suggest that migration has been a simple process, with new people arriving in the same proportion in each decade. To use the familiar metaphor there have been "waves" of immigration. There have inevitably been lulls in between, although these have usually been short. To draw a comparison with London, there were more recent immigrants in London in 1960 than there were in Newcastle in 1960. But there were many more recent immigrants in Newcastle in 1860 than there were in London in the same year. To see the total picture is to be struck by the volume and the continuity of immigration to this city. More here.
A review of Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson (eds), Alasdair Macintyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008).
Born in 1929, Alasdair Macintyre was active in the New Left. In 1959, he joined the Socialist Labour League, before leaving in 1960 to join the International Socialists. He remained a member of IS until 1968. Since then, he has been best known as an academic philosopher. His more recent books have included After Virtue (1981) and Whose Justice? (1988). His early books have been reprinted. Macintyre has published various collections of his essays. There is even a Macintyre Reader. But in a context where his present-day audience is largely restricted to the universities, the Macintyre presented to the world risks being merely a depoliticised selection from the whole. More here.
A review of Leo Zeilig, Revolt and Protest: Student Politics and Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa (London: IB Tauris, 2007). Published by South African Labour Bulletin, July 2008.
I read Leo Zeilig's history of recent student protests in sub-Saharan Africa in the days immediately following the latest Presidential elections in Zimbabwe. On the radio I could hear Tendai Biti, a former student activist, and now Secretary General of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), warn of the danger of violence, and predict in particular that Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's supporters in the governing Zanu-PF party would use wreak havoc on those who had voted for the MDC opposition in former Zanu strongholds such as Mashonaland.
Tendai Biti was a student activist at the end of the 1990s. He was a socialist, a law student, and then a trade union lawyer. In 2000, he became a founder member of the MDC and then an MP. At the time that Biti joined the MDC, the party lacked youth structures. Often they were formed by simply taking the existing structures of the student union ZINASU, and renaming them MDC youth branches.
Biti is just one of a very large number of recent former student activists to have played prominent roles in the MDC. Others include Arthur Mutambara, Nelson Chamisa, Brian Kagoro and Munyaradzi Gwisai. More here.
‘I shall muse over the great days when cricket was cricket, played for its own sake, and not as a commercial exercise.’ — Wisden cricket monthly, 1979
With the launch of the Indian Premier League, cricket is for the first time awash with the sort of money that we have recently associated with football. Eight teams have been created. They will compete in a month-long Twenty20 tournament. Sony has agreed to pay more than $1 billion dollars for the privilege of broadcasting the competition over the next ten years. The players too will prosper. Mahendra Dhoni stands to make a cool $1.5 million, not bad for a maximum of around 20 hours' work.
Press coverage in England has split along familiar lines. The Telegraph warned of 'the threat to English cricket', portraying the story as one of foreign greed and domestic virtue. The Times was more enthusiastic, befitting the fact that Rupert Murdoch's son James will own one of the sides, Jaipur. The Guardian was struck most of all by the novelty of commercialisation: 'The human auction is new to cricket,' it observed in an editorial, 'indeed, almost everything about the set-up is new.'
To a seasoned analyst of cricket, such as the Guardian's own one-time cricket correspondent CLR James, I wonder how much of this would have been truly new. James famously travelled to England to ghost-write the autobiography of his friend, the West Indian cricket star and Nelson club professional Learie Constantine. More here
10 April 2008: Document on student extremism seriously flawed
New policies being recommended to prevent extremism on campuses are aimed at the wrong target and could promote division and fear within the student body. More here.