Seeing Red (1990)

Book Review from the April 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Seeing Red—Being Green. The Life and Times of a Southern Rebel. By Denis Hill. Iconoclast Press. £8.95.

This is a disappointing book. The advance publicity suggested it would be arguing a case for socialists supporting the Green Party, but it turns out to be a wordy (nearly 600 pages) autobiography of a former member of the Communist Party (left 1969) and Secretary of Brighton Trades Council (1960-1974) who, sadly, expresses views that can only be described as racist.

At one point Hill does write: “I do not myself think that we can achieve a truly equal and just society until we have abolished the wage-system altogether. This implies the abolition of money itself, for it is the existence of these token vouchers which distorts everyone's thoughts and values". But this is marred, indeed completely negated, by a passage in the following paragraph about the need to form “a classless national community . . . based on the original Anglo-Saxon/Celtic stock" and references to “our country’s racial stock” having been diluted by mass immigration and turned into a “hybrid mixture of non-European races". Hill now supports the Green Party but we can't believe that such views will be any more acceptable to them than they are to us.

Adam Buick