The Scottish shipyards and mines were one of the few places in Britain where the Communist Party gained a foothold. Beginning with the Red Clydeside strikes against World War I, communists remained influential within the trade union movement until the 1980s. Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) members Mick McGahey of the National Union of […]
A younger Matt had among his bêtes noir those I considered to be traitors to the doctrine of scientific socialism. Among them were Richard Crossman. Crossman was a left wing MP in the post war Labour government but was hated by the pro-Soviet left because he had edited a seminal 1949 collection of essays by […]
There is a very interesting discussion between Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution and Roger Scruton on You Tube. In these times of Manichean witch hunts against anyone who does not sign up to a narrow left liberal agenda, it provides a breath of fresh air. Scruton himself was the subject of a successful […]
I was never a real leftie, but the more I see of of such creatures, the more I think that people who are not ‘real lefties’ may be among the most dangerous of all. I was what I would call a ‘soft leftie’, which pretty much describes 90 per cent of the Irish population right […]
My parting of the ways with the left, or rather the Marxist-oriented left, was a complex one. It took place during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states, although for a time I deluded myself that something better might emerge, or even that it might be preferable if the regimes survived. […]
Liam O’Flaherty is occasionally cited by Irish socialists as one of their own. His early membership of the Communist Party of Ireland, (he was editor of its newspaper Workers’ Republic for a time), and participation in the comic opera occupation of the Rotunda “soviet” in 1922 are given as support for this false iconography. The […]
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR In recent years, politics and society have rapidly, and dramatically, changed. Views that were mainstream a decade ago on subjects like marriage, trade, abortion, religion, and criminal justice now find themselves increasingly held by only a minority in society. In the UK, Arthur Scargill, the scourge of Margaret Thatcher, is […]