Peter Cadogan

Peter Cadogan (26 January 1921 – 18 November 2007) was a well known writer and activist [ [http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicsobituaries/story/0,,2221924,00.html Obituary: Peter Cadogan | World news | The Guardian ] ] as well as being Vice-President of The Blake Society and chairman of the The London Alliance for Local Democracy. He is best known as an opponent of nuclear weapons, a proponent of direct democracy and a supporter of the short-lived breakaway Nigerian republic of Biafra.

Born into a middle-class family in Newcastle upon Tyne, where his father was employed by a shipping company, he was educated at the King's School in Tynemouth during the 1930s depression. After working as an insurance clerk, he joined RAF Air Sea Rescue in 1941. Demobbed in 1946, he joined the Communist party, drawing inspiration from its historians' group, which included Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. But he found the CP's authoritarian style, and uncritical support of the Soviet Union, hard to stomach. He was suspended from the party for publicly criticising it in 1956 for its failure to denounce the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution, and he then joined the Labour party. Meanwhile, he had studied history at Newcastle University, married Joyce Stones in 1949 and taken up teaching posts in Northampton and Cambridge.

Influenced by Trotskyist ideas, he took part in the 1959 founding conference of the Socialist Labour League (later to become the Workers Revolutionary Party) under the leadership of Gerry Healy. He was expelled from the Labour party when it added the SLL to its list of proscribed organisations in 1959, and expelled in turn from the SLL, whose leadership style he found to be no different from that of the CP. In 1960 he joined the editorial board of the Trotskyist publication International Socialism (IS) and contributed subsequently to its more populist paper Labour Worker - which, as Socialist Worker, is still extant as the paper of IS's successor, the Socialist Workers Party - only to be expelled too from that group.

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