Ron Spencer (right) lessing the Morning Star
TRIBUTES have been paid to a Lancashire trade unionist, campaigner and communist whose battles included imprisonment for refusing to pay the much-hated Tory poll tax.
Ron Spencer, who died on April 28 aged 86, was active in the former Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) and a shop steward at Lucas Aerospace when unions developed the ground-breaking Alternative Corporate Plan away from weapons production in the 1970s.
He was a member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Communist Party, serving on the party’s Lancashire district committee and national executive, and a member of Lancashire regional committee of Co-operative Retail Services.
In part II of a serialisation of his new book, JOHN McINALLY explores how witch-hunting drives took hold in the Civil Service as the cold war emerged in the wake of WWII
Witnessing a war of words at a meeting on tackling militarism at The World Transformed, BEN COWLES spoke to a union rep who is organising against war from inside the arms industry itself, to hear about worker-led solutions to ending weapons production
Maggie Bowden was a trailblazing campaigning lawyer at Birnberg and Thompsons, women’s organiser of the Communist Party, and general secretary of Liberation
