By Robin Jamieson
Although we carried messages on the Left Horizons Facebook page and group, the website itself did not at the time publish a fitting obituary following the death of Mike Howard, a suspended member of Hastings and Rye Labour Party. We are now belatedly correcting that omission with this appreciation from Robin Jamieson.
In trying to come to terms with the death of Mike, I am unable to separate what is personal from what is political. The connections between the two were at the core of his identity, of who Mike was, and go too far back to fully comprehend.
Long before he was born two 14 year old girls, preparing to leave school, walked in off the street to the Royal London Hospital, found the Matron in her office and asked what they had to do if they decided to train as nurses. The Matron smiled politely and did her best to lower their expectations. Perhaps they could be nursing assistants. Nurses at that time were young ladies with correct elocution, recruited from good families. Nursing was for Florence Nightingales, not working class girls, or the children of immigrants.
The two girls were Renee Weinstein and Doris Lerner, Mike’s mother and mine. That was in 1936, months before Mosely was stopped at Cable Street. The women also threw themselves into the fight against Fascism and went on to become trade union activists and socialists. To anyone who knew them, nurse training would perhaps have been a modest achievement, but this was no longer relevant to their lives.
Years later, Renee looked after me when Doris had a late shift on the buses and eventually after Mike was born, I would babysit sometimes. I remember him as a noisy toddler who tried to talk whole sentences before he knew the words, possibly because everybody talked at the same time.
Mike joined Hackney Young Socialists after I had left London, when it was the most lively and interesting YS branch, a place where Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott would have been regarded as right wingers. The YS was critical to stopping Mosely, again, at Ridley Road – unlike the BBC fictional account – and it was quite usual to discuss whether the ruling class would ever give up without a fight. Would they use the monarchy to stage a military coup and how would we build support for socialism among “workers in uniform”, the army, police and security services? Hackney YS from the 1960s and 1970s still exists in exile, and hopefully June Tatch can help Dee to gather and publish some personal recollections.
When Mike came to Newcastle and stayed on to work in Gateshead libraries, I was already there, and not surprisingly, we both supported Militant when it was at its best. Again, when Militant fell apart, as its leadership lost its sense of direction, we came to similar conclusions. The task ahead was to keep the ideas of socialism alive in the Labour Party and to prepare for a change in the party under pressure from below, first to support Jeremy Corbyn and then to prepare for new upheavals that create a more thought-through and strategic leadership capable of changing society for the better.
For those of us that have no belief in an afterlife, Mike has obviously gone but still there is a feeling of him being near. There is a Mike-sized gap in my universe and probably for what remains of my life I will think ‘I must tell Mike about that’, or ‘I wonder what Mike would say’.
What Mike represents to me is the opposite of being in the here and now. It reflects the past present and future in turbulent times, a feeling of being pushed by something long buried and deep in the mind , perhaps not even conscious, to change the world for the better, there can be no full awareness of the present time without traces of the past and a glimpse of all possible futures or, as Trotsky might have put it, “the highest human happiness, my friends, lies not in exploitation of the present but in preparation of the future”.
The Jewish word “mensch” has been used to describe Mike Howard. I will add another – “chutzpah”. Perhaps translated as cheek or assertiveness. If something needs to be said, don’t be inhibited. Sing it out loud and clear. As a tribute to Mike I offer three suggestions.
1 Sir Kier should explain why he thinks expelling the Jews is a way of getting rid of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.
2 The young asylum seekers forced to drown in the shipping lanes are the latest scapegoats for a racist ideology. They should be invited to arrive by ferry and apply legally, because we know that many will go on to be the HGV drivers, the structural engineers and midwives in the future, so badly needed here, and because they are human and deserve protection no less than animals.
3 It is time to recognize that Palestinian are Jews who converted to Islam in the first Jihad, that the similarity to Ashkenazi Jews is in the blood, in the bones, in the DNA genotypes, in history and in all sources not tainted by poisonous nationalism or religious bigotry, to remind ourselves that they descend from people who were building cities in the stone age, had advance Bronze Age culture ahead of Egypt, created the earliest phonetic alphabets and were also the Phoenicians traders who founded cities around the Mediterranean. Time then to recognise a right of return for the Palestinian diaspora and move towards a unified secular state with equal rights, including also the Christians, Samaritans, Druze and other minorities.
Jewish Voice for Labour, in which Mike Howard was active, published their own obituary in November, here as well as Robin’s appreciation.
