Stan Newens (1930-2021) - a socialist with a sense of internationalism and history

Stan Newens with Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, and Fenner Brockway, 1970

The London Socialist Historians Group was saddened to hear about the passing of the former socialist, internationalist and Labour MP and MEP Stan Newens who has died at the age of 91 - and our condolences go to his friends, family and comrades.  He had a long and varied life on the left and in his later years did much work on labour and socialist history - and was President of the Socialist History Society in his later years - and also spoke at events organised by the London Socialist Historians Group around 1956 - a memorable year about which he wrote an essay about fifty years on - and at a memorial meeting to his long standing friend and comrade Ray Challinor - who Newens recalled 'consistently mocked my abstemious attitude to alcohol and what he saw as a puritanical cast of mind. I was, he told me, the most conservative socialist he had ever known!'

There is a Guardian obituary here - which sadly if unsurprisingly has little sympathy for Newens's politics, particularly his anti-imperialism - Newens was a critical figure in the Movement for Colonial Freedom (later Liberation) and there is a nice tribute by his comrade on the Labour left Jeremy Corbyn in Tribune here.  Neither piece incidentally mention Newens's early membership of the Socialist Review Group around the revolutionary Marxist Tony Cliff in the 1950s (a group which at the time was inside the Labour Party, but in 1962 became the International Socialists and later the SWP outside of Labour) - and how Newens would travel around in the 1950s on a motorbike delivering copies of Socialist Review.  

Newens published his autobiography In Quest of a Fairer Society in 2013 - which Ian Birchall reviewed at the time for Review31.  The blurb to the autobiography gives a useful summary of his life and work.  RIP Stan. 

'In Quest of a Fairer Society: My Life and Politics' is the autobiography of Arthur Stanley Newens. Now in his eighties, Stan Newens was a Labour MP from 1964 to 1970, and again from 1974 to 1983. Subsequently he was for fifteen years a Member of the European Parliament. His aim has always been ‘to persuade the Labour Party to adopt socialist policies’. Beginning with his working-class upbringing in Bethnal Green, Stan Newens describes his education at state schools and University College London where he obtained a history degree. After working as a coal-miner for four years in lieu of national service he has spent his life in public service, as a teacher and parliamentarian. He describes his time in Parliament with a perceptive political commentary, recounting his relationships and views. He was always seen as a left-winger and was a founder member of the Tribune Group of Labour MPs. In 1956 he was active in the campaign against the Suez expedition and, in the House of Commons, he opposed supporting US involvement in Vietnam. Throughout his career he supported innumerable international causes and strongly opposed Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. "In Quest of a Fairer Society" is the account of a life dedicated to a cause but characterised by loyalty and commitment to family, friends and the community in general.