Am 27. Juni starb im Alter von 80 Jahren Ken Coates, nachfolgend dokumentiert ein Nachruf, gefunden auf ESSF, eine weitere Würdingung auf Tendance Coatesy
Ken Coates obituary: Politician, activist and writer of the left
PALMER John, 29 June 2010
Kenneth Sidney Coates, politician and writer, born 16 September 1930; died 27 June 2010.
Ken Coates, who has died after a suspected heart attack, aged 79, was one of the most perceptive minds and eloquent voices of the radical left. From the mid-1960s, for four decades he was a major influence in seeking to renew and give greater coherence to militant left politics. He was the leader of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation during the anti-Vietnam war campaigns and was the key animator of the Institute for Workers’ Control, founded in 1968, during a period of major confrontations between the trade unions and the Labour government of Harold Wilson.
Ken was born in Leek, Staffordshire, to Eric and Mary Coates, and was brought up in Worthing, in West Sussex. When called up for national service in 1948, he refused to be drafted into the army, then fighting communist and nationalist guerrillas in Malaya. He opted instead to work for eight years as a miner in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfield, during which time, inspired by the trade unionists he worked with, he developed a lifelong commitment to the cause of organised labour.
Coates’s political career was punctuated by clashes with authority. As a teenager in the 40s, he joined the Communist party, but fell foul of the party leadership as a result of his opposition to Stalin’s 1948 denunciation of Tito. He was subsequently a strong supporter of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Moscow rule, which in some ways prefigured his work in the 80s as a founder of European Nuclear Disarmament, with peace movement activists in both western and eastern Europe.
In the aftermath of 1956, Coates, with a handful of comrades, was an active supporter of the Trotskyist Fourth International organisation. Influenced by the Belgian economist Ernest Mandel, one of the leaders of the Fourth International, Coates helped relaunch an organisation of British supporters that later evolved into the International Marxist Group.
Coates did not respond well to the strictures of orthodoxy and preferred to work in broader leftwing initiatives. He was active in the New Left movement in the late 50s, with EP Thompson, Ralph Miliband and Michael Barratt Brown. He served for a period on the editorial board of International Socialism magazine in the early 60s. By this time, he had a scholarship as a mature student at Nottingham University, gaining a first class honours degree in sociology. He went on to tutor in adult education at Nottingham (and was made special professor in continuing education, 1990-2004).
Coates first emerged as a significant political figure on the left after the launch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1966. His work with Russell had begun in earlier campaigns against nuclear weapons. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign organised some of the largest political demonstrations seen in Britain, at the height of the US war.
Two years later, the launch of the Institute for Workers’ Control coincided with an upsurge in rank-and-file trade union militancy and attracted the support of large numbers of shop stewards, as well as influential trade union leaders such as Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and Hugh Scanlon of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Coates’s focus on achieving reforms designed to increase the role of workers in running their enterprises – including the Bullock Report on industrial democracy of 1977 – attracted criticism from more orthodox Marxists. But those years saw a remarkable flowering of “workers’ plans” for alternative production to meet social needs. The best known of these was the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards’ proposal in the face of plant closures; they prepared detailed plans for converting from arms production to a range of “socially useful products”, which included portable kidney machines and hybrid road/rail buses.
Coates’s influence in the wider Labour movement was a cause of growing concern to the Labour and trade union establishment. He was expelled from the Labour party for a period in 1965, while he was president of the Nottingham Labour party. Their anxiety grew when he was elected as a Labour member of the European Parliament in 1989.
He won great respect during his 10 years as an MEP, not least for his work as chairman of the human rights sub-committee and his initiatives for an EU-wide Pensioners’ Parliament and Disabled People’s Parliament, and a Convention for Full Employment, bringing together trade unionists and unemployed workers’ organisations. Coates was a strong supporter of closer European integration, including adopting the euro.
The emergence of New Labour represented a serious setback for everything Coates stood for. His relations with the Labour leadership in London went from bad to worse when he voiced trenchant criticism of New Labour’s turn to the right. This eventually led to his expulsion and that of his friend and fellow MEP, Hugh Kerr, from the party in 1998.
In later years, he maintained an intense workload as editor of The Spokesman, journal of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and in adding to his list of books and pamphlets about economic and political issues. He took immense pleasure in his family, the Derbyshire countryside and his network of friends and comrades, drawn to a man of great humour and culture as well as profound commitment.
He is survived by Tamara, his wife of more than 40 years, three daughters and three sons.
