Ken Coates, who has died at the age of 79 of a suspected heart attack, was actively engaged in left politics, writing and as ever bubbling with new ideas even hours before he passed away. Barely a week before, he had been trying to enthuseme about the need for what he saw as a “Labour perestroika”, and had sent me a copy of a letter that he had written in May to Ed Miliband, who Ken believed presented the best chance for Labour to escape its recent, dismal past – a past that incidentally had seen Ken, in his incarnation as a truly internationalist Labour MEP, thrown out of the party in 1997.
That expulsion – it hadn’t been the first – was over the Blairite revision of Clause IV but, as ever with Ken Coates, that most original of working-class intellectuals, his revolt was based on principles and ideas that his tormentors simply wouldn’t have understood.
In his letter to Ed Miliband, Ken wrote: “Clause IV was a highly imperfect document, much aggravated by the false identification of common ownership with Morrisonian nationalisation. I railed against these when I was meeting with your father while you played under the kitchen table.” Perhaps Ed is still under the kitchen table, as Ken has yet to received a reply.
Coates’ deep-held, lifelong principles were punctuated by a series of clashes with authority, including the Communist Party in 1948 over his opposition to Stalin’s attacks on Tito and the crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956. Pre-dating this, he clashed with the British military authorities. He refused to accept the draft into the army, at that time fighting Communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya. Instead he opted to work in the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coalfields for eight years as a miner. Years later, as the local MEP, he was to lead a spirited – but ultimately doomed – battle to keep open his old colliery, Bilsthorpe.
His experiences in the coalfields led him to become the seminal figure in the Institute for Workers’ Control, which argued for more democracy in the workplace and for “workers’ plans” for alternative production to meet social need – which included the Meriden workers’ co-operative and the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards plans’ to convert arms production to socially useful products, such as kidney machines and early plans for hybrid road and rail buses.
Many will remember Ken Coates for his work with Bertrand Russell in the campaign against nuclear weapons and, with like-minded campaigners, the launch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1966, which organised some of the biggest demonstrations ever seen in Britain.
Despite the innumerable setbacks that would have floored a lesser individual, Ken remained one of life’s optimists. He was editor of The Spokesman, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, and continued writing and pamphleteering right up until the end. His work as a Labour MEP – his initiatives for an European Union-wide pensioners’ parliament and the Convention for Full Employment, went hand in glove with his integrationist, pro European views. As always, these were with his fierce belief that working people deserved jobs, justice and peace.
It may be said of Ken Coates that many of his achievements came despite, rather than because of, the Labour Party – a sad reflection of what is perhaps an engrained conservatism and fear of change and ideas that may be endemic to this country.
Mark Seddon
I first met Ken Coates when I interviewed him for the BBC on his book Poverty: the Forgotten Englishmen about the poor in Nottingham at the end of the 1964-1970 Labour Government. It is a reminder that there was not some golden age of Labour government sold out by Labour leaders who came after.
Ken published my book on Polish Solidarity – the first account in English of this workers-nationalist-religious movement. He had profound commitment to European democratic socilism in years when Labour was hostile to European integration.
To be sure, his passionate socialism led him out of the Labour Party. Some comrades can handle opposition better than the compromises of government. But Ken Coates loved ideas, loathed orthodoxy, especially Stalinism, and believed workers could do more for themselves then their leaders – in unions or parties – were ever able to imagine.
Denis MacShane
