Bertrand Russell 150
Celebration of the 150th anniversary of
the birth of Bertrand Russell
Join us on
Wednesday 18 May from 12.30pm for readings and recollections in the
Bertrand Russell Room, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London
With Michael Mears
as Bertrand Russell, Caroline Moorehead (Russell’s biographer), Rick
Lewis (Philosophy Now magazine), Tony Simpson and Tom Unterrainer
(Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation). Followed by a picnic in Red Lion
Square (Please bring your own!) and a walk through Russell’s Bloomsbury
to launch a new Chapter of the Bertrand Russell Society.
Please register as
spaces are limited. Contact: The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, tel.
0115 9708318, email: tonysimpson@russfound.org,
Twitter: @SpokesmanBooks,
Web: spokesmanbooks.org
This new issue of
The Spokesman
can be purchased from our sister website, www.spokesmanbookshop.org
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Ken Coates Memorial Lecture
Frances O'Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, gave the inaugural Ken Coates Memorial Lecture at
The University of Nottingham on Wednesday 3 June 2015. The lecture was on the subject 'The future of the left – where next for Britain's labour movement?' Watch the
video recording here.
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 also directed the Foundation’s activities, such as launching the
Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament in 1980, which ultimately led to the removal of a category of nuclear weapons from Europe in accordance with the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That significant disarmament achievement is once again under threat as international tensions worsen. Ken also established the
Institute for Workers’ Control in the 1960s, which organised a series of influential conferences during the following decades, several of which took place in Nottingham, addressing aspects of industrial and political democracy.
Tony Benn was one among many political associates who participated.
Many people will remember Ken for his adult education classes at the Workers’ Education Association in Shakespeare Street and elsewhere. He was an industrial tutor for many years, and became a Special Professor of Adult Education at the University of Nottingham when he was elected to the
European Parliament in 1989. During the next ten years, he chaired the
Parliament’s Human Rights and Employment Committees. His work for full employment and a New Deal for Europe, in conjunction with
Jacques Delors and Stuart Holland, continues to attract attention in the current era of austerity and mass unemployment in many European countries.