On Target

A’FIDDLING WE WILL GO
We should baptise this period for History as ‘The Fiddlers’ Parliament’ and memorialise it for its exceptionality. The scale and detail of the rank dishonesty is truly startling and will neither be forgotten nor forgiven. These must have been halcyon days for those ever so honourable members of the House: an expenses system which allowed you, if you were without principle or any notion of morality, to abuse it so readily that it might as well not have existed at all. How lovely it must have been to go shopping for houses, furniture, food and virtually anything under the sun and not have to pay for it, whilst all the time claiming legitimacy of intent within the rules. Some MPs certainly appear to have an outstanding talent for creative cheating and this should be recognised in a ‘Dishonour Awards System’ such as Cardinal of Corruption or Baroness of Roguery. It took a Hercules of old to clean up the Augean Stables but no such figure of comparable stature is around today in any of the political parties. I was hoping that a reasonably clean figure would emerge from all this and I note that Geoffrey Robinson of Coventry made no claims at all. Presumably, this is because he is wealthy enough not to bother with the system (and not all wealthy MPs do this) but I do not see him as a Hercules, far from it. This should tell us to look for the MPs with legitimate and honest claims, and to avoid thinking that we are governed only by liars.
GOLDMAN SACHS WITH SACKS OF GOLD
The £2.1 billion profits recorded by the investment bank Goldman Sachs, in the second quarter, are certainly good news for the bankers as they will benefit from the obscene but perdurable bonus culture which has cost so many people their jobs, their houses and their security. Just ten months ago this very same bank took a bevy of mendicants to the US government asking it to rescue them from possible collapse. Now they are back to the pathways which took them to the edge of the precipice in the first place and we must surely once again be asking questions about regulation and accountability. Whenever things like this happen, I go to Cabletalk to find out what he thinks. He is the man who declared that the banks, during the crunch, should be coerced into operating for the benefit of the public and taken into temporary public ownership until the crisis was over and then they should be allowed to pursue their own agenda (snouts in the trough for fat bonuses for themselves and tant pis pour les autres and the rest of the world). I thought Vince would think that, now GS is up and running and making super profits, he would accept its recovery. It seems, however, that Cabletalk disapproves of the bank despite its ‘success’ and is spinning round in a kayak on this issue but doesn’t know how to paddle. Here we have an economic liberal at heart who wants regulation to secure financial security but only in times of trouble. Why not have it all the time and end the casino economy that puts profits before people?

LRC LOSING ITS WAY IN PR FICTIONS?
Ray Davison reviews: The Left Case for Proportional Representation. A Discussion Paper for the LRC by Michael Calderbank, Political Campaigns Officer, Electoral Reform Society Writing in a Personal Capacity.
This eight page article aims to present the case for the LRC to adopt as policy support for the introduction of proportional representation for elections to the Commons and for local councils in England and Wales. It is a most curious piece of writing for several reasons, although I personally would not undervalue it for its soporific qualities. First, incredibly, it does not argue for any particular system of PR, among the numerous on offer, but just for the principle. For the carnivorous tippler like myself, this is the electoral equivalent of a pub with no beer or Sunday lunch with quorn and no beef. Everything about PR is in the detail of the system and a left case without this is inadequately made. Second, Calderbank pays hardly any attention to what he means politically by a left case. Surely if there is a cogent case to be made, he must demonstrate how a particular proportional voting system can advance left-wing objectives such as promoting equal opportunites, opening blocked horizons, ending discrimination and exploitation and so forth. He may not see such notions as progressive or even left but his paper sets out no political programme of his own and he does not relate his PR arguments to any substantial political agenda. Instead, we are once again exposed to the tired and tedious preoccupation with fair voting of the Make Votes Count campaigners who do not seem at all concerned about whether what they call ‘fair votin’ would actually foster reactionary policies and immobilize political advance.
Although Calderbank refuses to back any particular PR horse, it is easy to see where his preferences are. He clearly does not like single member Constituencies as they, in his view, restrict voter choice. In another curious moment of this asymptotic article, he argues that a Blairite in Islington would have no choice but to vote for Corbyn, whilst the Labour left in Stalybridge and Hyde would be restricted to Purnell. Thus, the reader is able to see that the writer favours multi- member constituencies. Calderbank also accepts that restrictions on voter choice and concentrations of Party power come from closed list systems of PR, providing us with a further indication of his preferences-an open list system. We are by now not far from identifying where his true persuasion lies: STV with open lists and the possible refinement and complication of cross voting. This is the system which will challenge the brains of a sizeable proportion of the electorate, produce results like gasometer readings and take an eternity to finalize but for the boffinesque members of the Electoral Society, it is the stuff and nectar of their PR dreams of fairness.
Elsewhere, there are sections in this paper dismissing as myths of FPTP advocates the claim that PR helps the far right and gives too much power to party machines. In both sections the arguments advanced are terminally weak, amounting to little more than a statement to this effect. No supporter of FPTP would argue that that system does not produce BNP successes and mavericks and white suiters or that it can produce coalitions, but there is objective evidence that PR makes this much more likely and almost inevitable. ERS itself stresses that FPTP is ‘unfair’ to small Parties. As for Party machines, Calderbank concedes that closed lists and parachutings are undesirable but largely what he claims are myths of FPTP resist his assaults and survive as reasonable criticisms of PR.
Another big assumption of this article and of Make Votes Count in general is the claim that FPTP produces ‘wasted’ votes. Thus, we are told that, in the general election of 2005, over 19 million votes cast made no difference whatsoever to the outcome-70% of all votes cast. Well we all know about statistical fiddles but this one is off the radar. Of course, it will be the case that in single member constituencies with simple majority voting, there will be losing votes but these votes have been counted. It is clearly just a strategy to call them wasted. More importantly, there will be a winner who commanded more votes than any other candidate and that person is a dog wagging its tail! There are points in this section about targets and swing-voter concentration which are well made and it is clear that the way Parties focus their efforts on marginal seats can be very alienating for second and third parties in safe seats but FPTP supporters often make the same points.
At a certain moment, Calderbank makes a crucial point: ‘It is understandable’, he says, ‘ that some Labour Party members are reluctant to give up a system that has rewarded their party with three consecutive majorities… .’Well never was there a greater expression of the obvious and we accept that these victories were ‘disproportionate’ but Labour Party socialists are in the business of securing Labour governments, preferably left-leaning ones, because that ways lies progress and ‘fairness’. Electoral systems are part of political struggle and not some academic abstract exercise. If there is a left case for PR, it has got to demonstrate a cogent political argument that there is a link between ‘fair’ voting (properly conceptualized and defined) and political progress. This paper does not produce such a case and seems very close to the right-wing case most of the time. The LRC should send it back for amplification.

There was a time when the political economy was very much an issue for discussion but it was ever such a long time ago. We have lived for three decades in an era of deregulation, light-touched and even lighter-fingered, so much so that the basic questions of socialist thinking (what is money, what is wealth, who owns it and how do we change and egalicise these structures of power so that everybody benefits?) were a peripheral matter for the intellectual left. Now such matters return to haunt us and even Tribune is conducting a tombstone interview with Marx himself! New Labour antipathy to public ownership is holed spectacularly below the waterline and they will surely sink further unless it ends its residual quantum of pro-capitalist solace and gives the banks a fundamental lesson about economic power. As they take our handouts, they must accept and be forced to accept that the economy should serve the people and not their bonuses and profits. Their days as highwaymen and casino buccaneers must end and we must show our contempt for their self-serving greed and indifference to their victims (December 08).

'High Noon for the Boys of Chicago'
Ray Davison reviews Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin Books, 2007.

Those who want the name of Milton Friedman permanently glorified as a building in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, should be the first to read this book. Here they would find five hundred pages packed with reasons why this high priest of free-market capitalism, author of the seminal Capitalism and Freedom (1962), progenitor, with Hayek, of the 'Chicago Boys' School of Economics and their intellectual and political heirs the neo-cons, should not be celebrated in bricks and mortar but excised as an anti-democratic malignancy of the modern world economy. If the old wild west was tamed by sheriffs, rangers and marshals, then Klein can legitimately lay claim to be fulfilling a similar function for these equally wild and dangerous apologists of deregulated capital and market adulation. Klein does not fire blanks or miss her targets: her aim, in twenty one hard-hitting, bullet-raining chapters, is to show how over a period of thirty years or so, the core tenets of Chicago School economic theory (privatisation, deregulation and cuts to government services) exploited as an experiment a number of global crises, some natural but others, more ominously, created for the purpose. Klein baptises these experiments as the 'disaster capitalism complex'. Let us be very clear about this: her charge is that, by deliberate and fully conscious intent, the 'Chicago Boys' and their ilk used situations of shock and instability (coups, regime changes, wars and floods) to test and apply their theory that unconditional, deregulated capitalism was the pathway to individual freedom, prosperity and democracy. The theory naturally challenged any form of collectivist culture and practice (Marxist or otherwise) but also Keynesian developmentalism and protectionism. The theory was hatched in the fifties and sixties but first tested and applied in Chile after Pinochet's coup against Allende in 1973. However, thirty years later, Klein finds the same fundamentalist economic theory and practice underpinning the invasion of Iraq. In between Chile and Iraq, she tracks relentlessly and repeatedly the ever-present influence of the School in Brazil and Uruguay and Argentina in the seventies, South Africa under apartheid, Asia, the Russia of Yeltsin, Thatcherite Britain and the USA. In each and every chapter, she cogently exposes the disastrous impact of the theory and practice on the public sphere, its damage to the institutions of social solidarity. Far from being the begetter of wealth, democracy and freedom, cut-throat capital again and again generates a terrible 'ideological blowback' where immense inequalities thrive in ruthless greed-pickled cultures without proper democratic accountability or adequate public control, a breeding-ground for other forms of fundamentalism. Worst still, the Chicago Boys repeatedly boasted of their successes as they buried their disasters in mountains of lies and duplicity and one of their advocates, Fukuyama, even had the audacity to claim their tenets as the final form of History. Here is a book that comprehensively refutes the drip-down theory of wealth, unmasks self-serving greed and demonstrates beyond doubt that an agreement with capital is an agreement for it. A female Chomsky? Certainly, at the very least, a powerful addendum to his work. (This review was written for the 2008 Labour Party Conference edition of Campaign Group News which published it minus the last two sentences. This was the last issue of the paper as it became financially unviable. I had been invited to review regularly other books of my choice. I do not know if the events were connected!).

DON’T BANK ON THE BANKS
It is almost unbearably painful to see New Labour racking itself to persuade the banks of Britain to act to defend the public interest, rather than their own, as this financial crisis bites ever deeper. Almost unbearable, yes, but as total public ownership, and therefore accountability and control, edges closer, so the defining economic flagship of the Blair /Brown years, that special partnership with capital, will capsize and wreckage aplenty will follow. There will be many people who will be amazed that the gods of deregulation have been exposed with feet of clay, as the dethroned tyrants and tycoons of the market bring out the begging bowls and clamour for protection from the very forces they unleashed to satisfy their greed. However, what follows is the really important issue. Partnerships require trust and cooperation but the banks have displayed considerable indifference to anything but their own financial interests and bonuses. This should not surprise us as an agreement with capital is invariably an agreement for it. How far the banks will go in their resistance to Darling’s imprecations is not clear but their capacity to absorb public money so readily is a sponge of some proportions. In such times, real public ownership is required.

ITS TIME FOR A CHANGE
I am told that some irresistible electoral law determines that there shall be in Britain a change of government every so often and that nothing can stop the feeling that it is time for 'the other lot' to have their turn. I am not wedded to determinism of this kind, so if it has been like this in the past, I do not see that it has to be like this in the future. Even so, I have to ask: has it been like this in the past? Obviously not if you know anything about history! Did Labour and the Tories alternate power under Victoria and William the Conqueror? The sensibility that makes Labour possible as a government and a force in politics generally is a cultural construction born in struggle and conflict, some of it quite violent. If it is a time for a change and it always is if you are progressive and socialist, then it is not a change for a return of the Tories. Their raison d'être is to protect an interest and that interest is necessarily a privilege of the few paid for by the exploitation of the masses. When the Tories talk of the public interest or benefit, you know they are Greeks bearing gifts and you should fear them (pace Greeks). However, a country and a people that can spend so much time on and pay so much attention to the general garbage pumped into its cerebellum by the 'entertainment industry' (and I see most of the media as part of that) is probably not ready for the harsh, demanding and higher lessons of political life. There are people who say they are not interested in politics as they lose their jobs and houses and who demonise unions as instruments of oppression. Well, I suppose the jobless and the homeless can get together somewhere to watch Strictly Come Dancing and Celebrity Millionaire etc and get sucked into that dumb-downed world which then makes them think it 's time for a change to the Tories so that they can be rescued. But I think it would be better if they used their limbs and loins, eyes and synapses to engage politically and fight for a decent and fair society, a change that really matters and which is in their power to achieve but not with a remote in an armchair.And yes it is time for a change , a change to the politics of money, a change that will bring accountability to the deregulated casino economy so that it serves the public and not its own greed. New Labour needs to think this through and cease being the prisoner of capital and start being its jailer.
QUANTITATIVE EASEMENTS
This super laxative injection, which promises to unblock the constipated back passages of our Great British Banks and release capital flow aplenty, has a certain allure to it. I am sure that most of us could do with a few shots of it to get our own economies moving but it’s the banks and lamentably the bankers who are getting all the doses of this financial syrup of figs. The many face the insecurities of lost jobs and homes and the anxieties of making ends meet. Will the strategy work? Sisyphus pushed a stone up a hill only to see it roll down again and I know people who see this as a myth about constipation (pushing hard things to no avail). I hope it does not finish like that but things do not appear to be moving that easily. I must say that I endorse for once Rowan of Canterbury’s view that it is not enough to blame the bankers and the bonus culture for our troubles: we must address the system which gives rise to it, that is to say deregulated liberalism (or some would say capitalism and yes it must be abolished but that is not the agenda for our government. Nor is it on the agenda of the much- praised, dancing Cabletalk (the voice of Vince) who wants the banks to be taken into public ownership now and forced to operate for public benefit not private gain. He then thinks, inexplicably in my view, when all this is over, that they should return to the private sector. Where is the logic in that and why has he not been asked this simple question by media pundits?

BANK ON THE ROCKS

Mark Anthony took a long time to die, as did Bottom the weaver mechanical playing Pyramus, but neither can equal the death throes of Northern Rock as it finally slid into the arms of public ownership for the kiss of life. O my Darling, O my Darling, O my Darling Alastair, art thou lost and gone forever? Will those dark brows now whiten to match that snowy head? Here is a nationalisation too far for the architects of New Labour ideology and an arrow in the quiver of those who believe that the private sector, especially, but evidently not exclusively, those avaricious banks, are there for themselves and do not serve the public benefit. Where were they when the Rock faltered, where the insurance and protection financed from the obscenity of their profits? They are there when the sun shines on their greed, but nowhere to be seen when asked to feed the cow they milk. They pocket and privatise the profit but socialise their losses with the taxpayers. It is not an isolated phenomenon for we have the scandal of the Railways, the Water Authorities, the Post Office not to mention the abomination of PFI and the creeping privatisation and marketisation of the NHS. Northern Rock clearly places public ownership back on the agenda but you would not know this from the press. Now you see Paxman and Humphreys for what they are: slaves to the ideology of market freedom. Here was an opportunity for them and the rest of the media to stress the public benefit and castigate the private sector. Only Vince Cable could penetrate the smoke screens of reaction, whilst Gordon and Alastair uttered the tosh of the year: Northern Rock has been taken into temporary public ownership which means its future profits will belong to the taxpayers. When it regains full profitability, it will be returned to the private sector. There’s logic for you. It used to be said that we should nationalise the top 200 companies. Well one is a start. Only 199 to go. On this rock, we should build the people’s church.

BANKING ON THE BISHOP: ROWAN RORY ON THE ROCKS
I cannot be the only person who thought that Rory had kidnapped Rowan of Canterbury, gagged and cuffed him and placed him in a barrel of marmalade, when that deep speech was muttered. The venerable scholar, like a person in slippers about to prepare their late night Horlicks with the strike of a match in a room full of leaking gas, produced a mighty, off the scale, richter explosion and then looked surprised. It takes a special kind of 'academic' skill to launch in innocence a nuclear warhead into the heart of the multicultural debate and unite virtually the whole world against you, including allies in your own church. The Sun shone with typical warmth: 'What a Burkah' as it contemplated the 'inevitability' of sharia law on the shores of England. At last Labour was off the front page for multitudinous cock-ups incarnadine and the sea rolled over Moby Rowan as he sank under a downpour of harpoons. Thanks be to God of whatever variety.

TWO PRESCRIPTIONS FOR LABOUR’S ILLS
Ray Davison reviews Jon Cruddas’ and John Harris’ Fit for Purpose – a programme for Labour Party renewal. Compass, 2006 pp. 1-34 and Renewal – a two-way process for the 21st century, an Interim Report 2007 from LabOUR, an independent commission on Accountability, Party and Parliamentary Democracy, LabOUR Commission, 2007, pp. (ii)-59.

Those who metaphorically donate their organs and life-blood in the service of the Party, its historic vision and values, will find significant interest in these two pamphlets seeking the prescriptions of renewal and revival for a Labour Party not in the best of health. The symptoms are there for all to see: dramatic haemorrhaging of its membership, down by over 50% since 1997, widespread inertia and atrophy of its vital limbs - its branches and GMCs - chronic abulia, disaffection and alienation of its once active and engaged body of members and supporters. Both documents examine the ailing organs with acuity, pointing out the areas of degeneration and failure like Rembrandt’s Anatomist. Fit for Purpose ranges freely over the Party’s history as an organisation born to fight for the industrial working class and uses a compelling blend of sociology, philosophy and general cultural perspectives to identify the challenges facing Labour policy makers in a post-industrial social order with a much more fluid class base and where politics is centred on a terrain much wider than the workplace.
LabOUR’s Renewal constructs its not dissimilar arguments in a more down to earth language, making really good use of what it calls ‘an evidenced based approach’ information gleaned from focus groups supervised by Professor Stuart Weir of the Democratic Audit, University of Essex and commissioned LabOUR /You Gov polls of members and lapsed members. Both pamphlets emphasise the negative and morale- breaking effects of New Labour’s top-down authoritarian model of policy–making and control freakery; both dwell on the imperfection and sometimes inanities of Partnership in Power; both, of course, have a lot to say about the Party’s financial management and our government’s relationship with money.
Finding the antidotes to our Party’s multitude of afflictions is the pivotal aim of these contributions but there is not going to be an easy answer and certainly no systemic viagra to revitalise, re-engage, renew and even resuscitate. Both works want to retain the federal structure of the Party and keep Conference as its sovereign body; both want to reform the NPF and have its CLP delegates elected by OMOV regionally; both want to empower members and end the era of imposed, monological policy formulation ( LabOUR even advances the idea of a Charter of Members Right to enhance and give a quasi statutory authority to the voice of members); both, crucially, recognise the determining role of egalitarianism, redistribution and democratic procedure in the motivation and political aspirations of members of the Party.
It is to be noted that both these documents pre-date the Brown Coronation and the launch of the new Leader’s own initiative, the so-called consultation Extending and Renewing Party Democracy. The words of the Brown invitation make one wish for an additional section to each contribution, although LabOUR’s report is only interim, so a supplement will come. Timeo Gordonum ac dona ferentum! Like a cunning Dr Finlay with a casebook, Gordon sends us a welcome chance to get better but like that other equine structure, we must beware the swollen underbelly, potentially full of bowmen with their arrows pointed at Labour’s primary organ, its heart. *

*This review was written for Campaign Briefing70, which is the Newsletter of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. The Newsletter is prepared annually for distribution at the Labour Party’s National Conference, which was in Bournemouth this year (go to CLPD.org.uk for current edition). Brown’s proposals were heavily endorsed at the Conference, thus what was left of the sovereign voice of Conference has now been abolished and the annual event has become a rally and fan-club for the Labour government. Attendance levels and payment of exorbitant attendance fees are likely to shrink. Why pay for no say? Also, if the Latin bothers you, think of Trojan horses and suspicious Greeks bearing gifts.

MING TO THE KNACKER
Cursed are the merciless for they shall receive no mercy. He that profiteth from alcohol abuse shall be soberly dispatched. Like poor, exhausted Boxer in Animal Farm, the tired old cadaver to be of the sweet and dignified Ming was unceremoniously sent to the knacker. What a sorry sight was this. This frail and venerable gentleman, with failing teeth and pipe-cleaner limbs, a pitiful shadow of those doric Olympian legs of yore which scorched the very earth they barely touched, was untimely plucked from his dotage. Where there should have been affection, warmth and respect, a celebration of wisdom and experience, there was only a cold steel arrow pointing to a cold coffin. Will Ming now join Gordon’s big tentism to end his days away from the Kafkaesque jackals and ghouls of Liberal Democracy? Proposal for a Sun headline: It's the socks what did it.

A BODY FULL OF THREE CHEESE PIZZAS
This latest and possibly last issue of Tony Benn’s unfailingly readable diaries (More Time For Politics, 2001-2007) tells us many personal things about this unusual man, now in his eighties: his love of Caroline, his pride in his extensive family and in the achievements of Hilary whose politics he in no way shares, the curiously chaotic domestic infrastructure that accompanies a life political so relentlessly busy and engaged that it could be that of six pathological activists of the left. He complains of tiredness and aching limbs on occasions but that doesn’t stop him. And all this is fuelled by a thrice –daily intake of three cheese pizzas, an addiction to which he cannot overcome despite the occasional attempt to do so. Look at this entry for Saturday December 27 2003:
‘In 2003 I delivered 142 speeches in forty-six towns and cities, including Baghdad and Cairo. I did thirty-three press interviews, 385 broadcasts (235 radio and 150 television), to thirty foreign countries. I published a hardback, Free Radical, a paperback, Free at Last!, and I must have written sixty, seventy, eighty articles. So that’s not a bad record for a man of seventy-eight.’ I hope Ming will read these diaries and get to the nearest Pizza House for that is certainly my next stop.

A MAJOR BODY SHOCK FOR ALASTAIR
Alastair Campbell knows a thing or two about the libidinal impulses of the body politic and his diaries (The Blair Years) shows how quick on the uptake he is about the Robin Cook dalliance. Yet even this formidable press secretary is thrown into a moment of high lyricism on Saturday September 28, 2002: ‘Woke up to one of those rare and totally gobsmacking revelations that newspapers very occasionally produce, namely that John Major had a four-year affair with Edwina Currie. It was one of those ‘cor fuck me’ jaw-dropping moments. How on earth did he get away with it?’

AN UNWANTED BODY
‘Fair, kind and true: a simply wonderful socialist and an inspiration to all who love peace and progress.’

Ray Davison, Secretary of East Devon Constituency Labour Party, salutes the memory of Norman Stevens, life-long socialist and Labour Party member who died on Tuesday October 30th at the age of 93. His funeral will take place on Friday November 16 at 2.30pm at Exeter Crematorium and after at Buckerell Lodge.

Norman Stevens invites superlatives: he was the kindest and most considerate of people, always ultra polite and courteous, always full of cheer and positive. He was a real gentleman with a playful and enduringly youthful humour, a sparkling wit and a life-enhancing warmth and generosity of spirit which extended to everybody, whatever their politics.
These qualities were evident in all that he did in a very long and full life: as a Labour Councillor for Withycombe Urban Ward and Chair of the Council; as a member of the Cooperative Party and Movement and as an employee of the Cooperative Union; as a passionate supporter of the German Democratic Republic: as a pacifist, conscientious objector and member of the Society of Friends. He embodied in his social and political life values and principles which represented, particularly for us in the Labour Party, but also no doubt for the many who knew him outside the Party, the very essence of the human, the benevolent and the civilised.
These values and principles underpinned too his private life: Norman was a devoted husband to Margaret to whom he was married for sixty years. Margaret predeceased him in 2006, spending the last part of her life in a nursing home, where Norman visited her daily
We were proud in the Labour Party to have Norman as our Constituency President until March this year. He was a fine public speaker who could readily draw on his deep knowledge of the history of our Party, including even the odd ribald story with delicious bits of gossip and hints of scandal .
You might have thought that after 76 years of unbroken membership of our Party, Norman would want a bit of a rest from politics, but there was no sign of that when I visited him in his nursing home shortly before he died. Despite his evident frailty, there was a robustness and resolution in his conversation, and indeed a moving stoical acceptance in the way he lived his own declining health. Politically, Norman was a Bennite (it was Tony Benn who presented Norman with a Party Merit Award in 1987) and Bennites stay the course. At the same time Norman was a Bennite who knew you had to carry the people with you to secure a mandate and that took time and patience.
Such qualities of strength and endurance in a person of so open and friendly disposition made for a powerful and persuasive commitment. He was a person fair, kind and true: a simply wonderful socialist and an inspiration to all who love peace and progress. And it was a privilege and a pleasure for those who met him, and for me from 1980 onwards, when I came to Exmouth, to know him and to share the earth with him. His legacy is a challenge to us to match his purpose and sincerity.