Page 2 - Eric Heffer News Today

She could defuse a dangerous or tense situation in the Chamber, and transform the snarls of MPs into gusts of laughter.

TOM UTLEY: What can we expect, in an age when T-shirts fly off the shelves at Labour Conferences, emblazoned with the slogan: Never kissed a Tory?

It is over twenty years since the final collapse of the left-wing Liverpool Labour council of 1983-6. Through that council, the avowedly Marxist “Militant Tendency” had the leadership of a mass workers’ movement which could have shaken or defeated the government. Arguably it marked the highest point ever (so far) of active mass influence for would-be revolutionary Marxists in Britain, higher than anything achieved by the Communist Party when it was a revolutionary party in the 1920s.

From the blog of Diana Johnson at Jewish News

Died: March 6, 2021. NIKKI van der Zyl, who has died aged 85, played a vital but unacknowledged part in one of the best-remembered scenes in 20th-century film history. In the first James Bond film, Dr No (1962), it was her voice that issued forth from the bikini-clad form of Ursula Andress, whose own tones were judged “not exotic enough”, as she emerged onto a Jamaican beach, under the intrigued gaze of Sean Connery in his debut as 007. A specialist in dubbing – or “revoicing”, ...

Last modified on Fri 2 Apr 2021 11.02 EDT The former Labour MP Stan Newens, who has died aged 91, would never accept office under the governments of Harold Wilson or Jim Callaghan, as ministerial duties seemed to offer too many opportunities for compromise. Sitting on the backbenches as a dedicated MP for Epping from 1964 to 1970 and then for Harlow for nine years from 1974, he was rarely happy with those Labour governments, once comparing Wilson’s second stint in Downing Street as like “si...