Obituaries

Jacques Morand, 1938-2015

Jean-Claude Kerjouan, known in his political activity as Jacques Morand or Illy, died on 10 May, at the age of 77. He was a leader of the L’Etincelle group in France, with which AWL have collaborated for many years. L’Etincelle is now a group within the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party), but was previously, from the early 1990s until it was expelled in 2008, a faction in another large French revolutionary socialist group, Lutte Ouvriere (LO). As far as we can see Lutte Ouvriere has published no tribute to Morand. Yet for many decades he was a leader of LO. He joined in 1956, as a high-school...

Talking, explaining, and telling the truth

I knew Tom Cashman as a friend and comrade from the early 70s. Tom was someone who had a hinterland; his interests spanned good whiskey, particle physics, a love of Sean O’Casey’s plays, modernist architecture, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of schisms in the Catholic Church, which quite frankly bemused me. Tom was a very rounded person and a very humorous one. But I want to say something about Tom the public man. Tom was a Marxist, an atheist and trade unionist who dedicated his life to the working class and had an unwavering conviction that socialism was the only hope of humanity. Tom’s main...

Survey

The political vacuum in Albania (Colin Foster) Levers for the lovers of power (Joan Trevor) Blair wins a place in the Sun (Jim Denham) Glasgow councillors abandon election pledges (Stan Crooke) Tony Blair and the union laws. (Tom Rigby) Letter from prison (Dita Sari) Anti-abortion campaign, a winning scheme? (Helen Rate) Should holocaust denial be a crime? Iranian oil workers dare to fight Obituary: Coin Coyle The left and the election

Mike Banda: The Death of a Political Gangster

Michael Banda (Michael van den Poorten), who died recently, had for nearly three decades been a retired political gangster. For much of the previous three decades he had been an all-too-active political gangster, as one of the two or three central leaders of the Healy organisation known variously as the Newsletter group, the Socialist Labour League, and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. He was known in the organisation during the 1950s and early 60s as “Mike the Knife”, after he pulled a knife on a man who had grabbed Gerry Healy by the coat collar in a factional row. He also played “Mike the...

Raising aspirations, confronting vested interests

I am missing Tom, both as a friend and as a comrade. As a comrade, what I miss most is the chance to engage with his perceptive insights into the class struggle now, and his analysis of the history of the class. He had a deep understanding of the British (and Irish) labour movements. Tom was a highly intelligent man who used his great abilities to promote the interests of the working class, this purpose being at the centre of his life all the time I knew him. Tom was extremely confident in his political analysis, which meant he took no prisoners in an argument. But this was combined with a...

Tom Cashman

In the last issue of Solidarity , Bruce Robinson remembered the life of Tom Cashman, socialist trade unionist and long-time associate of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, who died last month. In this and future issues we will print further tributes. Tom Cashman was, quite simply, one of the finest and most principled people I’ve ever met. I first encountered him around about 1974 or 75 in the bar of Birmingham University Guild of Students. Tom was there attending a Troops Out conference; I was a naive young member of IS [today SWP] who had begun to have doubts about the Cliff regime and had...

Ahmed Seif el-Islam

On Wednesday, 27 August Egypt’s leading human rights lawyer, Ahmed Seif el-Islam died aged 63 after several days in a coma after heart surgery. As he lay dying, two of his children were behind bars for their political activism. Seif el-Islam represented people of many backgrounds in Egypt’s repressive legal system. A co-founder of the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre (dedicated to defending human rights cases), in 2001 he assisted in the defence of 52 men on trial for “performing immoral acts” in the ‘Queen Boat Trial’ and three years later he represented 15 men allegedly tortured while in detention...

Tom Cashman 1950-2014

Tom Cashman has died of a brain tumour aged 64. He was a life-long socialist and militant trade union activist, who had a long connection to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and its predecessors. Tom came from a family in Wallasey on Merseyside with Irish roots and labour movement involvement. He joined Workers’ Fight (precursor of the AWL) in 1973 while a student at Middlesex Polytechnic and subsequently recruited his brothers Mick, Tony and Peter and briefly his sister Liz. Unusually for student leftists at that time, Tom was already working in the Labour Party and was an early member of...

In memory of Jo Walker and David Hague

On Sunday the 2nd of July, minibus returning to Lancaster from our Workers' Liberty 95 summer school crashed on the motorway between Preston and Lancaster. We print our impressions of and tributes to David Hague and Jo Walker. Download PDF

Brian Munro, 1968-2014

Brian Munro, a London Underground worker, RMT Executive member, and former member of Workers’ Liberty and its predecessor group Socialist Organiser, died on Saturday 28 June after a long battle with ocular melanoma, an extremely rare form of eye cancer. Brian fought the disease, and significantly outlived his initial prognosis. He died peacefully surrounded by his family in an East London hospice. Brian was born in Glasgow in 1968, and joined Socialist Organiser (later AWL) in 1992. He was a member until the late 1990s. In the 1990s he began working on the railway — first in the ticket office...

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