Socialist Party Meetings (1988)

Party News from the September 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

I actually went to the debate in Luton featuring Steve Coleman and the Labour Party's Kelvin Hopkins.  I would have been 17 at the time. I can't remember if it was this Luton meeting or another one where I missed the last bus and, as I was living in the age of no mobile phones and no phone at home, I had no other option but to duck and dive the streets of Luton overnight until I could get the first bus home the next morning.  Luton city centre even back then was not for the faint-hearted at 2 in the morning. 

It's a shame there isn't a recording of the meeting. I remember an older Labour Party supporter in the audience who mentioned that he worked in a factory alongside an SPGBer when he was a young man, and he couldn't reconcile the SPGBer's revolutionary fervour with the fact that the SPGBer used to do all the overtime on offer.  Kelvin Hopkins was on the Left of the Labour Party, and was elected to Parliament in the 1997 Labour landslide. He ended up representing a constituency in Luton for the next twenty years. Coleman was an able representative for the SPGB and, even in 1988, when Kinnock was leader of the Labour Party, he anticipated the real future of the Labour Party. I specifically remember him mentioning at that meeting in 1988 that the person to watch out for in the Labour Party was not Kinnock or Hattersley or even John Smith: it was Gordon Brown. Well, he anticipated half the future . . .