Spokesman Books

Spokesman Books keenly follows local Nottingham magazine LeftLion . We read with interest Robin Lewis' interview of Lisa McKenzie, whose book Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain may be seen as a spiritual successor to Ken Coates' Poverty: The Forgotten Englishman . A research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Lisa spent her early life in the St Ann's area of Nottingham, a council estate borne out the experimental 'Radburn' urban planning design. She describes reading Coates' Poverty when she was taking a course in social work, and realising that 'that was what [she] wanted to do. From the point of view of someone who's lived through it.' Read the interview in its entirety here: http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/lisa-mckenzie-on-class-and-culture-in-st.-ann-s/id/8557  Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen is available to purchase online from Spokesman Books here.  http://www.spo...

Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, will give the inaugural Ken Coates Memorial Lecture at the University of Nottingham   (Law and Social Sciences Building) on Wednesday 3 June 2015 at 6.30pm , a few weeks after the General Election. Ken Coates died on 27 June 2010, in his eightieth year. He was a prolific author whose work included the Penguin Classic  Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen , about the St Ann’s district of Nottingham, co-authored with Richard Silburn. The Times commented: ‘Writing with compassion, style, wit and an almost complete lack of jargon, [they] present us with inescapable facts which must remould our thinking and our actions.’ During the 1960s, Bertrand Russell invited Ken Coates to work with him  at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. This was to lead to location of the Foundation’s offices in Nottingham, where they remain to this day. Ken Coates edited The Spokesman, the Foundation’s journal, for 40 years; he als...

Russell Tribunal on Palestine New York Session 6-7 October 2012 Leila Shahid and Raji Sourani, two Palestinians, were prevented from attending the New York Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which met in the Grand Hall of Cooper Union during the first weekend of October 2012 with hundreds of people attending over the two days. They weren’t granted visas in good time by the US authorities. Their absence denied the Tribunal direct testimony from Gaza (Sourani maintains the human rights centre there), as well as the presence of one of its initiators (Shahid, together with Nurit Peled of Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Parents for Peace, and Ken Coates of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation issued the initial call for the Tribunal in 2008). Both Leila and Raji had been present when the Tribunal was publicly launched in Brussels in 2009. Since then, it has held sessions in Barcelona (on EU complicity against Palestine), London (on corporate complicity), Cape Town (on th...

The new issue of The Spokesman includes Lord Byron's scintillating speech in defence of Nottinghamshire's followers of Ned Ludd, made 200 years ago. George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, was the ‘examplar’ of the aristocratic rebel, according to Bertrand Russell. At ten years old, after living modestly in Aberdeen, he suddenly found himself a Lord and the owner of Newstead Abbey, the Byrons’ ancestral home in Nottinghamshire. From there, he was to make a powerful impact on the wider world, which resonates to this day. In Greece on the 29 February, 2012 the Byron League is organising an international meeting to mark the 200th anniversary of the good Lord’s maiden speech against the Framework Bill and in favour of social justice. The Spokesman will be there . In 1812, a popular uprising swept across parts of the Midlands and North of England. The development of new machines for textile production was causing widespread distress. Independent manufacturers were being squeezed...

In her article for the Guardian , Green jobs: a utopia we nearly had , Green jobs: a utopia we nearly had, Anna Karpf revisits workers' plans for their enterprises to produce socially useful goods, which unleashed much creative energy during the 1970s and continue to resonate to this day. " Four decades ago, a green way out of recession was proposed. Lucas Aerospace, a major designer and manufacturer of combat aircraft and missile systems, planned to close a number of factories and make 20% of its 18,000-strong workforce redundant. The shop stewards combine committee, representing the 13 different trades unions in the company, decided to draw up "an alternative corporate plan for socially useful and environmentally desirable production". It sent out a questionnaire to the company's 17 plants, as well as outside experts, asking for an inventory of skills and machinery that already existed, and ideas about what they should make. The company's workers – both bl...

‘The first King Herod was born in 73 BC and followed a military career, starting out as a general … his fame among present generations is attributable to the Gospel of St. Matthew, which tells us that the King sent for the wise men who famously came from the East to Jerusalem and asked them where the Christ should be born. They told him that He would arrive in Bethlehem of Judaea, whereupon Herod sent them to search diligently for the young child ‘that I may come and worship him also’. But the wise men were too wise to fall for that one, although according to Matthew they had the advantage of being ‘warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod’. Be that as it may, ‘they departed into their own country another way’. At this point, an angel told Joseph to take the young child and his mother ‘and flee into Egypt … for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him’. With his victims holed up safely in Egypt, Herod ‘was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the c...

Slump and War The Spokesman 102 Edited by Ken Coates The election of Barack Obama came as the culmination of a profound surge of optimism in the United States, and of hope against hope in large parts of the rest of the world. Widely detested, the Bush administration was the most unpopular in living memory. Obama had fought an audacious campaign, calling in question not only the war in Iraq, but the train of events which had brought the United States into contempt all around the world. The American military, far from exercising full spectrum dominance, was arousing full spectrum detestation. Its symbols were Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, water boarding and extraordinary rendition. As the American economy raced from recession to slump, Obama’s campaign seemed to gather momentum. Earnest crowds of young people were seen on television singing the anthem of Woody Guthrie: ‘This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to New York Island.’ Would that it were so. This land crea...

Democracy Growing or Dying? The Spokesman 100 This is the hundredth number of The Spokesman , so we are expected to have a birthday party. Nostalgia is in order at such events, and we have accordingly devoted quite a large part of this number to reproducing articles and features which involved us, with many of our readers, in a variety of campaigns to change things for the better. Sometimes these have succeeded, if only, say the sceptics, in provoking our old antagonists to find new ways to make them worse again. Sometimes they have failed, only to stiffen our resolve to try again, when times may be more propitious for their success. There are, of course, a number of key concerns which have continuously preoccupied us. There has been no possibility of forgetting, even temporarily, the desperate urgency of the struggle for peace and disarmament. It has been quite possible, but very regrettable, to forget the struggle for the widening and deepening of democracy, and this possibility has...