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:

  1. 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.

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  2. Rosa Luxemburg was German, not Russian.

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  3. 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.

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  4. It's all here :

    Scroll down through the comments.

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

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