When I wrote about this in June of last year, someone left a comment directing me to The Cedar Lounge Revolution, an Irish political blog.
There a commenter, NollaigO, left the following in 2008:
Living in London in the early 1970s she became a vice-president of the NUS.[Jack Straw was NUS president at the time]. Returning from an overseas conference, she found herself sitting next to Tariq Ali on the plane. Tariq persuaded her to join the IMG, which she did in summer 1971.
In subsequent years she used to muddy this connection by claiming that she was in the Spartacus League, a short lived youth wing of the IMG. She was never at ease with the Irish Republican Trotskyism of the IMG and was also very inimical to Gery Lawless an IMG member at the time.
She felt that having Lawless as a member discredited the IMG. Under the influence of Brian Trench [political influence of course!] she joined the IS in 1972 but her stay there was also limited.
She joined Hackney Labour party and supported the Troops Out Movement for a period before becoming a supporter of the BICO front organisation, Campaign for Labour Representation in Northern Ireland.
Nowadays the IPR group are quiet hostile to her,dubbing her TallyHoey in a recent article!You need a degree in far-left factions to understand all that, but NollaigO does drop in a fascinating point that should interest us all.
He says that Kate Hoey is the niece of the late BBC political correspondent John Cole. If true, this would certainly qualify as a Trivial Fact of the Day.
I can't find a definitive source that confirms it, but the same story is told by Malcolm Redfellow and he generally know what he is talking about.
No comments:
Post a Comment