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Welcome
I use this site to record pieces of research and other published work of mine, from the past 10 years (this site was started in its earliest version as long ago as spring 1998). There are individual pages relating to the history of fascism and anti-fascism in Britain and Europe, including the history of the Anti-Nazi League in 1970s Britain, which was the subject of a book When we touched the sky that I published in 2006. My other books include a history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, studies in the political philosophy of fascism, two short collections of my poems, and biographies of the British economic historian Sidney Pollard, and of the writers, activists and revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and CLR James (the latter is due out in spring or summer of this year). Other features of this site include short studies in Renton family history, papers on the politics and history of migration, and a page containing various examples of my other journalism. There is also a full sitemap, a biography page, and a contacts page.
New stuff
July 2008: Macintyre restored (Newsletter of the London Socialist Historians Group)
21
June 2008: Students, workers, struggle
30
April 2008: Cricket, lovely cricket
A review of Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson (eds), Alasdair Macintyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008).
Born in 1929, Alasdair Macintyre was active in the New Left. In 1959, he joined the Socialist Labour League, before leaving in 1960 to join the International Socialists. He remained a member of IS until 1968. Since then, he has been best known as an academic philosopher. His more recent books have included After Virtue (1981) and Whose Justice? (1988). His early books have been reprinted. Macintyre has published various collections of his essays. There is even a Macintyre Reader. But in a context where his present-day audience is largely restricted to the universities, the Macintyre presented to the world risks being merely a depoliticised selection from the whole. More here.
A review of Leo Zeilig, Revolt and Protest: Student Politics and Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa (London: IB Tauris, 2007). Published by South African Labour Bulletin, July 2008.
I read Leo Zeilig's history of recent student protests in sub-Saharan Africa in the days immediately following the latest Presidential elections in Zimbabwe. On the radio I could hear Tendai Biti, a former student activist, and now Secretary General of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), warn of the danger of violence, and predict in particular that Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's supporters in the governing Zanu-PF party would use wreak havoc on those who had voted for the MDC opposition in former Zanu strongholds such as Mashonaland.
Tendai Biti was a student activist at the end of the 1990s. He was a socialist, a law student, and then a trade union lawyer. In 2000, he became a founder member of the MDC and then an MP. At the time that Biti joined the MDC, the party lacked youth structures. Often they were formed by simply taking the existing structures of the student union ZINASU, and renaming them MDC youth branches.
Biti is just one of a very large number of recent former student activists to have played prominent roles in the MDC. Others include Arthur Mutambara, Nelson Chamisa, Brian Kagoro and Munyaradzi Gwisai. More here.
‘I shall muse over the great days when cricket was cricket, played for its own sake, and not as a commercial exercise.’ — Wisden cricket monthly, 1979
With the launch of the Indian Premier League, cricket is for the first time awash with the sort of money that we have recently associated with football. Eight teams have been created. They will compete in a month-long Twenty20 tournament. Sony has agreed to pay more than $1 billion dollars for the privilege of broadcasting the competition over the next ten years. The players too will prosper. Mahendra Dhoni stands to make a cool $1.5 million, not bad for a maximum of around 20 hours' work.
Press coverage in England has split along familiar lines. The Telegraph warned of 'the threat to English cricket', portraying the story as one of foreign greed and domestic virtue. The Times was more enthusiastic, befitting the fact that Rupert Murdoch's son James will own one of the sides, Jaipur. The Guardian was struck most of all by the novelty of commercialisation: 'The human auction is new to cricket,' it observed in an editorial, 'indeed, almost everything about the set-up is new.'
To a seasoned analyst of cricket, such as the Guardian's own one-time cricket correspondent CLR James, I wonder how much of this would have been truly new. James famously travelled to England to ghost-write the autobiography of his friend, the West Indian cricket star and Nelson club professional Learie Constantine. More here
10 April 2008: Document on student extremism seriously flawed
New policies being recommended to prevent extremism on campuses are aimed at the wrong target and could promote division and fear within the student body. More here.