Speech by former Mayor of Enfield, Nadia Conway, at North London launch of 'The Ghost in the Lobby'

Finally getting the time to post this. It was good, back in April, to see again, after twenty years, my old comrades Brian O'Flynn, Eddie Connolly and Paul Renny at the North London launch of The Ghost in the Lobby at Haringey Irish Centre in Tottenham. The very fetching hat in the photograph belongs to Mr Paul Renny.

Also in attendance were Nadia Conway, former Mayor of Enfield, and her husband David Conway, who was the (Conservative) Deputy Leader of Enfield Council back in the early 1990s, when I was Edmonton's answer to Tommy Sheridan (without the tight t-shirts or, generally speaking, the sex). 

The launch was covered in both the Enfield Advertiser and Enfield Independent. On this occasion I didn't make the front pages, as was the case in November 1990, when both papers ran screaming headlines about the local Labour Party's move to expel myself and Helen Redwood from the party. 

Back then David Conway used to regularly bait the Labour councillors at council meetings by making mention of "the egregious Mr Higgins". It took the Labour Party one year, three months and twelve days to expel me; the process was slowed down because a member of the committee the local party set up to find out if I was a member of the Militant Tendency publicly challenged me to a physical fight. This took place, I remember, at a General Committee meeting of Edmonton Labour Party. The individual in question was more than 70 years old. It did, though, land the Labour Party in potentially hot legal water because, to put it mildly, it raised the question of possible bias, and meant they had to re-do the entire 'investigation'. So I remained a member of the Labour Party for a further few months, during which Councillor David Conway got to throw a little more torment at the Labour Party by publicly reminding them of my continued existence within their ranks. Below is a poem from The Ghost in the Lobby. It's inspired by the contents of the carrier bag I used to always have with me back then, to assist me in my vital revolutionary work. I read it at the Haringey event.

I also treated those assembled to my elegy for the late Margaret Thatcher which you can read here.  

It's believed that several time serving middle of the table members of the Socialist Party - the Militant Tendency's successor organisation - were immediately overcome with ecstatic shock and had to be rushed to hospital when they heard that I had asked a former Conservative Mayor to launch the book. Unfortunately, it's believed they all made a fully recovery.

Below is what Nadia Conway said on the day. I hope she won't object to me saying that I now count her as a comrade, though of an admittedly very different sort. 

"Time carries out ironic revenges, and the sweep of years casts us in roles we would never have imagined for ourselves.

For myself, I was born in the military hospital at Prague Castle. Fifteen years after that I was, in swift order, a published poet, the President of the Slovak Communist Youth Movement, and a refugee in the then swinging London. And twenty years or more after that I was the Conservative Mayor of the Council of the London Borough of Enfield. You may boo now, if you wish.

In those distant days all political factions were deeply concerned with an innovation to reform local taxation. In retrospect it is difficult to understand either why one side thought the Poll Tax was so wonderful, or the other thought it so iniquitous; but as with many political arguments, the topic itself became rather less important than using it to beat opponents over the head.

What Margaret Thatcher can never have conceived, however, was that her flagship policy would have resulted in us all meeting together today at the Haringey Irish Centre.

For amongst those who roused themselves to battle this reform in local book-keeping was Kevin Higgins - or as he was dubbed by a Councillor (my husband in fact) 'the egregious Mr Higgins' - renowned throughout Edmonton and Ponders End as the leader of the local unit of the 'Anti-Poll Tax Union'. I haven't entirely fathomed Kevin's activities during this period, but they were doubtless such as to give him his present status, as he notes in one of his poems, as a name 'on the FBI's least wanted' list. But one important strategy was for him to heckle meetings of the Council.

You may not realise that the powers of Mayors of most London boroughs are almost insignificant; in fact just about the only ways they can exercise them relate to maintaining order at Council meetings. In general I used these powers to prevent my husband rabbiting on or raising obscure points of order; but Kevin's interventions gave me an opportunity for immortality. I expelled him from the Chamber - and when interviewed by the local press I made the world-weary comment, 'Eventually, Kevin will grow up.'

And that - I thought - was that, until a further fifteen years or so rolled by. Then we received in the post, out of the blue, a book with my comment on Kevin as its epigraph. It was in fact a very fine book of poetry, by the egregious Mr Higgins himself, showing not only a great feeling for language and imagery, but a wry compassion for our self-deceits; a wryness only occasionally extended to jaundice when looking at our greater hypocrisies, such as those we invoke in the name of society - but I forbear to cite Mrs Thatcher's comment on THAT topic. 

Those who place Kevin in the line of Jonathan Swift seem to me to have good reason. Where he has a target, he pulls his victims apart with laughter, but with a laughter which can often pierce the veins more accurately than a knife. And he is no more sparing of himself than he is of others; because for all of us it is true, as he writes in his poem 'Autobiography', 'I'm the things / they never found out about.' But his poetry is more than satire; because his smile, however bitter, also seems to contain compassion, albeit rueful, and a perspective which allows us to evaluate the judge as well as the condemned.

So here we are today the absurd but poetic inversion of our roles. I am retired from the public world, with only my imperialist bauble [MBE] as compensation; whilst Kevin is now a fully-fledged poet, and we know from Shelley that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. It is a pleasure for me to acknowledge Kevin's ultimate triumph. In standing here to launch his collection 'The Ghost in the Lobby' I feel a bit like the fraud his his poem:

'When you need someone to recite your lines to,

I'll have somewhere else

To be. But when, crossing the road,

On your way to the Oscars,

You're knocked into a coma

By a passing fire truck

I'll be happy

To accept the award

On your behalf.'

Kevin - to quote another poet, Emily Dickinson, continue to 'see the world, but see it slant' - keep away from fire trucks, and collect many awards - you deserve them." Nadia Conway, April 20th, 2014. 

Clare Daly and the true meaning of the word 'comrade'

with Clare Daly at the Dublin launch of my book Mentioning the War: Essays & Reviews (1999-2011)

http://www.irishleftreview.org/2012/06/12/speech-clare-daly-td-dublin-launch-kevin-higgins-mentioning-war/

Clare Daly has been much in the news over the past twenty four hours following her resignation from the Socialist Party. No doubt today's newspapers will have more.

I first met Clare in 1988 at a Labour Youth conference in Liberty Hall. She had become a supporter of Militant in Newbridge a couple of years previously and I'd been involved in Galway for the previous six years. At that conference Clare was elected to the Administrative Council [National Executive] of the Labour Party. The following year she was expelled from the Labour Party in Dick Spring's anti-Militant purge. I was similarly expelled from the British Labour Party a couple of years later.

I first really got to know Clare when I returned to Galway in 1991 after three years in London. Often times I stayed with her when I was up in Dublin for meetings which were so important I've got no memory at all what most of them were about. I left what we used to call the 'organisation' in 1994 but always retained huge respect for Clare. She is 100% principled and 100% human. A million miles from the caricatures of socialists which are all too often close to the mark.

The Socialist Party's statement about her resignation, which sparked off the media storm yesterday, is an absolute disgrace. But it is no surprise.

There are two types of people in organisations like the Socialist Party. There are those who would stand in front of an oncoming tank in defence of someone smaller than themselves. And then there are those dull little people for whom Trotskyist politics is less about changing anything than it is about finding a place to hide. They are the type who love committee meetings held on a Sunday and whose feeling of political purity tends to be dependent on their ability to find some ex-comrade to denounce.

Later today the Socialist Party is holding a press conference about Clare's resignation. It's likely that all their public representatives will line up to put the Party spin on her departure from their ranks after 26 years. Their faces will be a picture of earnestness. The one thing you can be sure of is that, whatever they say, you shouldn't believe a word of it.

One or two of their public representatives will probably be there only because if they were to refuse they would soon enough be on the receiving end of the sort of statement the Socialist Party issued against Clare yesterday.

Clare was never a Party hack in that way. She's the sort of person who'd speak up for you when there was no one else left to speak up, which of course is precisely why she is such a brilliant public representative. Long may she continue.

My Militant Tendency: me at a meeting addressed by Peter Taaffe in 1984

Dr. John Cunningham who teaches in the History Department at NUI Galway sent me this photo via Facebook today. It shows part of the audience of a public meeting here in Galway addressed by Peter Taaffe, the leader of the Militant Tendency in Britain. That is me scratching my neck and yawning slightly. I have to say, I don't remember being bored. The meeting took place in the Atlanta Hotel on Dominick Street in the Spring of 1984, just before the Miners' Strike began in the U.K. I was a couple of months shy of my seventeenth birthday and a fifth year student at the Bish secondary school. Here is a relevant poem:

My Militant Tendency
It's nineteen eighty two and I know everything.
Hippies are people who always end up asking
Charles Manson to sing them another song.
I'd rather be off putting some fascist through
a glass door arseways, but being fifteen,

have to mow the lawn first. Last year,

Liverpool meant football; now
it's the Petrograd of the British Revolution.
Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.

While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements; I promise to abolish double-chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar. In all of this

there is usually a leather jacket involved. I tell

cousin Walter and his lovely new wife, Elizabeth,
to put their aspirations in their underpants
and smoke them; watch

my dad's life become a play:
Sit Down In Anger.

 

'My Militant Tendency' is from my 2008 collection Time Gentlemen, Please which is available from Salmon Poetry here http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=35&a=108

The poem also features in the 2009 Forward Book of Poetry which is available from Faber & Faber here http://www.faber.co.uk/work/forward-book-of-poetry-2009/9780571243969/

Ted Grant Remembered

Ted Grant (1913-2006)

Ted Grant was born Isaac Blank in South Africa in 1913. He spent most of his life in Britain and was a key leader of the British Trotskyist movement, a founder of the Militant Tendency which grew to be, by the mid-1980s, perhaps the most successful Trotskyist organisation in history.

Ted died six years ago this month. You can read his Guardian obituary here http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/jul/27/guardianobituaries.southafrica

Ted was always predicting another 1929 style economic slump. It's ironic then that in the same issue of The Guardian in which his obituary appeared, there was an article about the record profits which a certain British bank had just announced. That bank  was Northern Rock, which was one of the first to topple when the present crisis began the following year.

Members of Militant (in the UK) included such well known names as Derek Hatton & Tommy Sheridan. Members of the organisation's Irish section included the T.Ds Joe Higgins, Clare Daly and Joan Collins.

From 1982 to 1994 I was a member of the organisation myself, at first here in Galway where I was a Militant supporter within Galway West Labour Youth and later in north London, where I was chair of Enfield Against The Poll Tax. For my trouble, I was expelled from the British Labour Party in 1991.

When I heard about Ted's death, it inspired this poem http://www.nthposition.com/deathofa.php

The poem is also available in my 2008 poetry collection Time Gentlemen, Please which can be purchased directly from the Salmon Poetry site. http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=35&a=108