April 29, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal We warmly welcome you to join us for a tribute to the life, activism and legacy of Ernie Tate (1934-2021).
Ernie Tate believed capitalism is a cruel and unjust system that has to be changed. Ernie was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1934 and emigrated to Canada in 1955. As a Marxist, union activist and revolutionary, Ernie spent his life working to achieve that in organizing against the war in Vietnam, in union struggles at Toronto Hydro, for protecting universal healthcare and living wages, and much else. Ernie, along with Tariq Ali, was a leading organizer of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in Britain, worked for Bertrand Russell’s International War Crimes Tribunal and was a founding member of the International Marxist Group in Britain.’ In 2014, Ernie published a memoir of his life on the far left in Canada and Great Britain called
THE public inquiry into undercover policing is back this week to shed more light on one of the force’s most coveted secrets.
Restarting after a five-month pause, the next stage of the inquiry, which is working chronologically through decades of undercover policing and serial abuses by officers, will now look at operations from 1973 to 1982.
But what have we learnt from the undercover policing inquiry so far, and do the campaigners, who fought for years to uncover the truth, feel satisfied with its progress? Before we move on to the second round of hearings, here’s a little recap.
The judge-led inquiry was launched in 2014 by Theresa May, following years of revelations exposing industrial-scale undercover policing of protest groups arching back decades.
Industrial-levels of police infiltration of progressive campaign groups began during anti-Vietnam war movement in 1968
Metropolitan Police admits for the first time to Declassified that it spied for MI5
Justice campaigns led by families of people killed in police custody were a particular target of so-called “spycops”. The victims were mostly black men
Undercover police spied on Labour politicians and nearly every group to party’s left
Some women, who were tricked into romantic relationships, say it was like being “raped by the state”
Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter believed to be the most likely targets of current undercover police infiltration
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.