Wednesday, June 15, 2016

When Kate Hoey was a Trotskyist



This seems a good day to explore Kate Hoey's long-lost Trotskyist past.

Brian Deer wrote in 1993:
Although she admits the details only under protest, before she joined the Labour Party in 1972, she had been a member of a Trotskyite outfit called the Spartacus League - at the time perhaps the most loony of British extremists. 
The league followed the Russian revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in expecting a spontaneous workers revolt, and was so notoriously penetrated by MI5, people joked that if security service agents raised their hands en bloc they could win every vote at meetings.

5 comments:

The Singing Organ-Grinder said...

No change there: Trotsky wouldn't have been a big fan of Juncker Inc. & TTIP either, and neither was he averse to first class travel.

Richard Gadsden said...

Rosa Luxemburg was German, not Russian.

Jonathan Calder said...

Oh dear, Deer!

Phil Beesley said...

I think we need some help from a historian of the UK far left. The Spartacus League of Germany was wound up in 1918 and wasn't Trotskyite. The Spartacist League/Britain was "founded" in 1978 from a merger of older Trotskyite groups.

Anonymous said...


It's all here :

Scroll down through the comments.

https://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/the-mayor-of-london/#comments