March 5, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Canadian Dimension Born poor on Belfast’s Shankill Road in the midst of the Great Depression was certainly no entré to a life that would cross paths with Bertrand Russell, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Ernest (Ernie) Tate would nevertheless work closely with luminaries such as these and many others who, like him, opposed the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. A lifelong revolutionary socialist, Tate was a leading organizer of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, worked for Russell’s Peace Foundation and its International War Crimes Tribunal, and partnered with the then leftist, David Horowitz (now a prominent conservative spokesman), in taking the anti-war side at an Oxford Union debate.
Posted on 8th February 2021 // Fourth international / Obituaries // 3 Comments
Ernest (‘Ernie’) Tate, one of the founders of the International Marxist Group (IMG) and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) in the 1960s, has died from cancer at the age of 86 at his home in Toronto. He played a vital role in a campaign that would re-shape the British far left. Here we publish a tribute to him by
Phil Hearse.
Ernie was born in 1934 in the Shankill Road, heart of Protestant Belfast. In 1955 at the age of 21 he migrated to Canada and within a year had become a member of the Canadian Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist Educational League.