London Socialist Historians Group
Monday May 20th
Benjamin Schoendorff The Socialist Alternatives experiment: an 1980s attempt to search for a new revolutionary subject
Recording of the seminar
The then Editor of Socialist Alternatives Benjamin Schoendorff looks at what the 1980s project was trying to achieve and reflects on the input of one of its most well known contributors, Keir Starmer
Keir Starmer, Socialist Alternatives July/August 1986
Trade Unions in a Wapping World
The struggle for workers control means.. effective defense of the unions, supporting national and local pickets and a principled advocacy of solidarity action.
This is very interesting on Starmer’s history. Here’s a little note I can’t corroborate as my informant is sadly deceased. She told me that in 1983 she was shortlisted as a candidate for the Sedgefield Constituency. In the waiting area she was seated next to young man wearing a CND badge. This was Anthony Blair, to be known as Tony. My point is that digging out personal histories is fun because it can illustrate such cynicism. However it seems to me to ignore a much more important context. Call it the smell of power in parliamentary democracies and the way in which the system shapes behaviour. All Labour leaders including the most excoriated, Ramsey McDonald, end up somewhere different from where they started. The ‘ending’ is shaped by a combination of voters’ believed responses, parliamentary rules, national and international relationships and the prevailing state of the capitalist economy.
Keir Starmer was always a shit? Maybe, but that’s not why he follows the course he does!