New Labour Left podcast featuring Geoff Bell

Geoff Bell of Labour for Irish Unity is on the Labour Left Podcast.

Bryn Griffiths, of the Labour Left Podcast, suggests that a new generation of socialist activists can learn an enormous amount from the Irish struggle.  If you’re a Palestinian activist today and you are trying to understand why the Labour Party is so bad on Palestine there’s no better place to start than Britain’s colonial history in Ireland.  Plot spoiler – unfortunately, Labour and much of the left has an appalling history when it comes to imperialism.

Geoff Bell is part of Labour for Irish Unity.  He is an outstanding historian of the troubles; but more than that he has decades of experience as an Irish activist in Britain fighting for a united Ireland.  His most famous book, published in 1976, and reprinted five times is The Protestants of Ulster.  More recently, he has published Hesitant Comrades and The Twilight of Unionism. He is an organic intellectual in the truly Gramscian sense of the term.

The podcast will give socialists an excellent grounding in modern Irish history and along the way you’ll hear stories of minding Vanessa Redgrave, fighting in the Bogside alongside Bernadette Devlin, carrying Eamon McCann’s megaphone, Neil Kinnock trying to torpedo Geoff’s Channel Four Documentary and being followed by police spies whilst driving Gerry Adams.

Geoff explained in Michael Farrell’s Twenty Years On, published in 1988, that during the events in Derry of the late sixties and early seventies he “gained a political education the like of which few contemporary European Socialists have had the privilege of receiving.”  In this episode of the Labour Left Podcast, you find out why.