31.10.2024
At the very storm centre
Jack Conrad remembers Kevin Bean: February 14 1955 - October 12 2024
Kevin first took out a Weekly Worker sub in 2015 and rapidly gravitated towards our organisation. You can see why he was impressed and why he wanted to join.
In September 2016 Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader. The American cousins were stunned; the British army, MI5 and civil service tops were stunned; the big financiers and captains of industry were stunned; the confessional sects such as the SWP, SPEW and SSP were stunned; above all Labour MPs, councillors and the party’s national and regional machine were stunned. The ‘morons’ had allowed Corbyn to get onto the ballot and the rank and file - existing members and affiliated trade unionists, plus the massive influx of new full and associate members - did the rest.
But the CPGB and Labour Party Marxists were not stunned. We confidently expected Corbyn to win from the get-go. More than that, we were equipped with a fully worked out programme for transforming the Labour Party into what we call a ‘united front of a special kind’ - special because, like soviets, we were looking for a united front in permanence, a Labour Party that included not only trade unions as affiliates, but all working class political parties and organisations. Kevin got it.
There were huge hustings throughout the country. The media began to talk about Corbynmania. Meanwhile Labour HQ did its best to exclude new members in a cynically named ‘Bash the Trots’ operation. Those who once stood for the Greens, Left Unity and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition were blocked or rooted out in what rapidly developed into a full-blown witch-hunt. It could never be enough though. The incoming tide was simply irresistible. Membership doubled between May and October 2015 and reached well over half a million shortly afterwards. Not surprisingly Corbyn romped home in the first round with 59% of the vote.
Liverpool was at the very storm centre. Constituency and branch meetings mushroomed in size. Whereas before there were a few dozen attending, suddenly there were hundreds. General Committees were swept aside, sitting councillors and MPs, including fake lefts, feared for their precious careers. Out went the old and in came the new. Kevin was elected secretary of Wavertree Constituency Labour Party and became one of the leading figures on the left in what is nowadays Britain’s most leftwing city.
Kevin became a committed political activist in the early 1970s and remained a Labour Party member till his expulsion in 2020. He briefly joined the International Marxist Group - the British section of the so-called Fourth International - where he got something like a passable education in the ABCs. Kevin was also a militant trade unionist and keenly interested in Marxism and working class history.
Born to Irish Catholic parents in the Medway town of Chatham, he remained a life-long Gillingham FC fan. His family were socialists and republicans, but Kevin was in particular influenced by his mother: The new politics of Sinn Féin (2007) is dedicated to her. I am told that Kevin’s request for a Catholic funeral mass comes as no surprise to family and friends of long standing. While never devout, his early life was shaped by the common rituals and universal claims of the church with all its contradictions. Like James Connolly, Kevin identified with the congregation, while dissenting from the dogma. He remained deeply attached to Catholic art and architecture and the whole grand theatre. Visiting the Vatican in December 2023 and seeing Michelangelo’s masterpiece, Kevin recalled the words of Goethe: “Without having seen the Sistine Chapel, one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving.” This was his last trip abroad.
Kevin studied history at the University of Leicester and moved to Ellesmere Port on Merseyside, where he got his first job as a school teacher. By all accounts, he was highly regarded by fellow staff members and the kids alike. He told me how he eventually became disillusioned with the profession. Not the teachers, not the kids - no, it was the prescriptive syllabus and the whole tick-box approach imposed from on high.
Writing
He completed an MA at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. His subsequent book, The new departure (1995), showed that the IRA’s August 1994 ceasefire was both the product of a radical reappraisal and a continuation of Irish republican traditions. A theme developed in The new politics of Sinn Féin, which, moreover, examined the transformation of the republican movement into a partner in governing the Northern Ireland statelet. Kevin taught in the Institute, having a special interest in Irish republicanism, including dissident Irish republicanism. He was much admired and much appreciated by his students, as their many tributes testify. They talk of a great man, a great loss.
Kevin passionately supported Irish reunification: he was a long-time supporter of the Irish in Britain Representation Group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as someone studying dissident republicanism, he was subject to scurrilous attacks from the fringe of the fringe. Kevin responded in his usual calm and measured way, issuing a public statement to reassure those who he interviewed in the course of his work that he had always carefully protected identities and activities.1
His first Weekly Worker article came from his session on Ireland at Communist University in August 2016. Many more talks and articles followed - both under the name, Kevin Bean, but also James Harvey. He went on to cover everything from Ukraine to America, from Sri Lanka to strikes, from Brexit to the Durham miners’ gala.
However, his main focus of work was Labour. He joined our LPM cell, where we followed developments and planned interventions. That included Labour Party conferences - both in Brighton and Liverpool. We produced thousands of Labour Party Marxists and a daily bulletin, Red Pages. The reception was enthusiastic, to say the least. Kevin was one of the key members of our team, which wrote, printed, distributed and intervened in and reported on numerous fringe events.
He worked in the Labour Left Alliance too. An organisation which began life as a typical broad-left lash-up. There was no individual membership as such. People simply signed a vacuous petition. The politics were staggeringly awful too. Its platform did not even include any mention of socialism. When a LLA conference did agree a resolution on “socialism”, it was confined to the “United Kingdom”. So a royal national socialism!
Naturally, we fought for our programme and, not unexpectedly, found ourselves in a minority. Not only at the LLA’s two conferences, but in what functioned as the - ever diminishing - national leadership made up of delegates from affiliated organisations. We officially constituted ourselves as an opposition fraction. Stan Keable and Kevin Bean played the leading role.
After the LLA effectively died a death, along with much of the soggy left (eg, the Labour Representation Committee), we readily agreed that Kevin should participate in its new, much more welcome, rebirth as an education platform - Kevin’s very element. And he acquitted himself well. Videos of his many sessions, along with his books and articles are being collected together, including by his partner, Pauline, and will form the Kevin Bean Online Library.2 A fitting memorial.
Witch-hunt
As everyone knows, it took the Parliamentary Labour Party, the party bureaucracy and the whole media and state apparatus a little while before they alighted upon the weapon that would eventually bring down Jeremy Corbyn. First, they tried the Czech agent stuff. That did not work. Then that he was a friend of Hamas. That did not work either. But the ‘Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ big lie … that worked a treat.
Desperate to deny accusations of racism, Corbyn and the Labour soft left became active witch-hunters in their own right - classic Stockholm syndrome behaviour. Corbyn’s general secretary, Jenny Formby, boasted of “fast-tracking” suspensions and expulsions. And, as the witch-hunt tore through the Labour Party like a storm force five, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs kept their heads down. None of them defended Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Pete Willsman or Marc Wadsworth.
We successfully argued for Kevin to be elected to the steering committee of Labour Against the Witchhunt alongside other comrades, such as Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Stan Keable and Tina Werkmann. While it lasted, LAW did an outstanding job - conference fringes, pickets and solidarity meetings. To its everlasting credit LAW was declared a proscribed organisation by Labour’s NEC in September 2021.
By the time the witch-hunt got round to Corbyn himself, the official Labour left had been completely routed. The charge laid against him? Anti-Semitism, of course. At last he had dared tell something approaching the truth: “accusations” of anti-Semitism had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media”.3 CLP chairs and secretaries tempted to allow debates on, or resolutions protesting against, his subsequent suspension faced threats of suspension themselves. Most buckled.
Inevitably, in 2020, Kevin was purged along with three other CLP officers - Nina Houghton, Helen Dickson and Hazuan Hashin. Together they became known as the Wavertree four. To his amazement, certainly mine, amongst the prime movers here was a former leading member of Workers Power, a Trotskyist group which has now collapsed into social-imperialism over Ukraine.
Entirely unconcerned for himself, Kevin recognised that what had begun as a possible revolution with the election of Corbyn had rapidly turned into a counterrevolution - a counterrevolution capped with the election of Sir Keir. Labour as a site of struggle has effectively been closed, at least for now.
Naturally, he continued to play an active role on the Liverpool left. Until his retirement, Kevin was chair of the University and College Union branch at Liverpool University. He was well known for organising strike pickets, turning up to at 5am to sort out rotas and making sure everything was covered.
Kevin was also an active member of the Merseyside Pensioners Association. Elected as one of its four chairs in 2023, Kevin attended countless protests and actions - sometimes along with his cardboard cut-out Sir Keir. Kevin planned to write a history of Merseyside PA - but sadly had to abandon the project when he became too ill.
The comrade was elected to our Provisional Central Committee in October 2020. When I first suggested the possibility to Kevin, he was quite reluctant to begin with. A highly capable individual, he often hid his light under a bushel.
Kevin had a generous heart. My memory immediately takes me back to a Communist University session in Goldsmiths - I was speaking, Kevin was in the second or third row. During the debate a partisan of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review - origins, Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party - ferociously denounced the CPGB for not saying this and not saying that - well not loudly enough anyway. I was just itching to give a double-barrelled reply, but Kevin caught my eye. He seemed to be saying, ‘The poor guy clearly has psychological issues - be gentle, be understanding’. Kevin’s unspoken advice was followed. However, I have to admit, on many other occasions, I have followed his spoken advice too.
Kevin, you will be sorely missed.
Kevin’s funeral will be held at 10am on Thursday November 14 at St Anthony of Padua RC Church, Queens Drive, Liverpool L18. There will be a celebration of his life and work on January 24 2025 at the Casa Bar, 29 Hope Street, Liverpool L1