OBITUARY: TED GRANT

Ted Grant, Trotskyist guru of the Revolutionary Socialist League (aka the Militant Tendency) has died at the age of 93. Thanks to Hak Mao for the link to this oddly moving obit by his long-time comrade in arms Alan Woods.

TOMMY SHERIDAN LATEST

"Of all the things about me the worst thing said was that I had sex on my wife's bed with another woman behind my wife's back." Does this involve a particularly painful feat of contortionism? Or have I missed the point?

GEORGE GALLOWAY, STALINIST SCUMBAG – 2,453

My thanks to Ken Weller for alerting me to this, a nasty little piece by Galloway in Alexander Cockburn’s cretino-leftist Counterpunch to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish civil war. It purports to be an appreciation of John Cornford, the communist poet who died while fighting for the International Brigade in Spain at the age of 21 – but it is laced with venom.

“But for a bullet in the brain on the Ebro,” he declares, “Rupert John Cornford might have loomed as large as George Orwell in the British left-wing lexicon.” Fair enough. I’m not a great fan of Cornford as a poet, but he’s undoubtedly worth reading (and Orwell thought so too). But then Galloway goes on:

Orwell would probably have informed on him to his bosses in British Intelligence. For Cornford was a Communist.

And he continues, a propos the volunteers for the International Brigades:

their memory has been sullied by Orwell's slanders, unfortunately reinforced by Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom.

This is disgusting Stalinist drivel. Orwell did not have “bosses in British Intelligence”, and he did not inform on anyone: the famous list he handed over in the late 1940s to his friend Celia Kirwan, then working for a Foreign Office propaganda operation set up by a democratic socialist Labour government, was of people he considered should not be approached to write for it because of their pro-Soviet sympathies. Big deal.

And Orwell did nothing to sully the memory of the International Brigade volunteers. He did expose the vile role of the Stalinists in suppressing the Spanish revolution in 1937 – and his disgust at the failure of the British left to recognise what they did remained with him throughout his life. But that is not the same thing. There is not a word against the International Brigades volunteers anywhere in his work. Indeed, he became friendly with at least two veterans of the brigades, Hugh Slater and Tom Wintringham – both of whom parted company with the Communist Party soon after their experience in Spain and played key roles in the Home Guard in 1940-41 when the CP was defending the Hitler-Stalin pact. In the leftist jargon of the time, which of course Orwell hated and would never have used, his attitude to the International Brigades was that they were lions led by jackals. Which is a bit like the ordinary members of the Respect coalition.

LORD LEVY ARRESTED

Well, what are they going to do about this? I think it's the fabled tipping point. Blair cannot go on.

FITBA DAFT - 5

Well, what about that? Italy-France is rather a good prospect. Come on you blues, as they say in Ipswich. But I'm going for the balder team. Who have Italy to compare with Zizou when it comes to out-and-out slapheads?

FITBA DAFT - 4

OK, so all my bets were wrong, and England turned out at last OK – a battling Scotland-style performance against Portugal, who cheated as if they were England in disguise. Rooney should not have been sent off, and when he was it turned into a scrap in which England acquitted themselves well. I was almost proud to be British again. But you needed a Gordon Strachan or a John Wark to turn it round. Or a Duncan Ferguson.