Posted by Duncan on April 23, 2003 at 09:27:02 from 205.188.208.8 user Duncan.
In Reply to: Re: AR's Politics (was: Ransome on TV and Radio) posted by John Nichols on April 22, 2003 at 14:48:32:
By the way,
I certainly wasn't suggesting that AR's politics was of more interest/importance than the recent preoccupations - just that people were interested in different things, and that this shouldn't really matter. (As I haven't had my head bitten off yet, I'm assuming people have reached a level of acceptance that AR's politics may come up from time to time...)
As for fishing... Then as now - probably more so then - if somebody asks you your politics you are likely to reply in terms of party politics. The Scotland Yard fellow was expecting AR to reply 'Labour' (or perhaps even 'Communist' - but bear in mind that neither party existed, as such, before AR went to Russia) the fact that AR replied 'fishing' as opposed to... well 'Liberal' (which one assumes he would have replied as a schoolboy) is, in itself, quite intriguing. Of course, the police threatening to tell George Lansbury that AR had given them information about the Bolsheviks was of no interest whatsoever to AR (probably very little interest to George Lansbury or the Bolsheviks - the security services have always had a very peculiar and skewed take on socialist politics) - at that time, AR did not know Lansbury (I believe they became acquainted at some stage). AR had no organised political affiliation so fishing was as honest an answer as any other.
One little AR domestic politics thing I've remembered: the Hands off Russia Campaign (run by the CPGB) showed that film reel that has been discussed recently of AR walking through famine-torn Russia, with live musicians playing Russian folk-tunes to busy, angry meetings in many urban centres of the UK, to help raise money for the Russian Famine Fund (the left's main cause of the day). It was very much presented in order to make an argument against intervention. Of course, there is no suggestion that AR himself made any of the arrangements with the CPGB, but would it have mattered if he had?
I wonder what AR said about UK politics when he was asked (as he undoubtedly would have been) by senior Bolsheviks?
Duncan