Alongside the current affairs aspect of Left eye view’s self imposed mission to hold the government to account I thought it’d be useful to run a little history project outlining the development of British democratic socialism and some of the philosophies, events, characters, friends and foes from across the world and the centuries that influenced it. The list below is a sort of index. Entries will be hyperlinked as new sections are written or filmed over time.
There is no such thing as a ‘lefty loser’, only lefties who are in it for the long haul. We are resililent, we are strong, we are part of a centuries old tradition and we will prevail!
0-33: Jesus of Nazareth
The Nazarene (0-33) seems to have been an extreme lefty by today’s measures. He preached against greed (many of his followers conveniently ignore that bit) and recommended compassion instead. He even got a bit ‘fighty’ with the capitalist pigs in the Temple grounds.
121-180: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
It may be only a short step too far to call him one of Europe’s earliest socialists, a man who thought little of rank and status when compared to the worth and dignity of all people, a ruler who despised injustice and who devoted his life as emperor to leaving the Empire a fairer and more just place than when he found it.
849 – 899: Alfred the Great
Alfred’s influence stretches far beyond the ninth century world he inhabited. Without Alfred we would live in a very different (I suspect a much poorer), religiously dominated society indeed. He was one of our nation’s most benevolent leaders and he genuinely seems to have understood the value of opportunity for every man (women’s rights still weren’t a thing in Alfred’s day, I’m afraid) to be educated to the limit of his ability and for all to have an opportunity to learn and develop intellectually. That’s one of the many reasons why Alfred is still recognised as ‘The Great’.
1027 – 1087: William the conqueror
1214 – 1215: The Barons’ revolt
1215: The Magna Carta
1258: Provisions of Oxford
1347: The Black Death
1381: Wat Tyler’s peasants’ revolt
1398-1468: Johannes Gutenberg
1420-1492: William Caxton
1450: Kent rebellion and Jack Cade
1455: First Gutenberg bibles printed
1469 – 1527: Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
1570-1606: Guido Fawkes
1599 – 1658: Oliver Cromwell
1600 – 1649: Charles I of England
1642: First English Civil War
1642: The Levellers
1666: The great fire of London
1706 – 1790: Benjamin Franklin
1711-1776: David Hume
1737-1809: Thomas Paine
1748-1832: Jeremy Bentham
1750 – 1900: The agricultural revolution
1751-1836: James Madison
1756-1836: William Godwin
1759 – 1833: William Wilberforce
1759 – 1797: Mary Wollstonecraft
1771 – 1858: Robert Owen
1790 approx: The Luddites
1819 – 1900: John Ruskin
1819: The Peterloo massacre
1821 – 1905: George Williams
1829 – 1912: William Booth
1834: The Tolpuddle martyrs
1844: The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers (the co-op)
1847 – 1933: Anne Besant
1848: The chartists
1856 – 1915: Keir Hardie
1856 – 1950: George Bernard Shaw
1858 – 1928: Emmeline Pankhurst
1972 – 1913: Emily Wilding-Davison
1876 – 1952: Albert Mansbridge
1879 – 1963: William Beveridge
1881 – 1951: Ernest Bevin
1883 – 1967: Clement Attlee
1883 – 1946: John Maynard Keynes
1884: Fabian society
1894 – 1994: J.B. Priestley
1896 – 1980: Baronet Ernold Oswald Mosley
1897 – 1960: Aneurin Bevan
1900: The Labour party
1903 – 1950: George Orwell
1903: Suffragette movement
1903: Workers’ Educational Association (WEA)
1904 – 1988: Jennie Lee
1912 – 2005: James Callaghan
1912-1998: Enoch Powell
1912-1954: Alan Turing
1912 – 1988: Harold ‘Kim’ Philby
1913 – 1983: Donald Maclean,
1913-2005: Rosa Parks
1913 – 2010: Michael Foot
1916 – 1995: Harold Wilson
1918 – 2013: Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
1921 – 2002: John Rawls and the ‘Veil of ignorance’
1923 – 2018: Harry Leslie Smith
1925 – 2013: Margaret Thatcher
1925 – 2014: Anthony Wedgewood Benn
He was eloquent and insightful with an almost uncanny ability to boil down apparently complex concepts into the simple fundamentals that grunts like me can understand. Consider for example his five questions for those in authority.
1926: Miners strike
1926: General strike
1926-1984: Michel Foucault
1928: Noam Chomski
1929-1968: Martin Luther King Jr
1931: Desmond Tutu
1933: Amartya Sen
1936: Jarrow march
1936 – 1939: The Spanish civil war
1936: Battle of Cable St
The Battle of Cable Street was a major turning point in the fortunes of the paramilitarised, uniformed British Union of Fascists. This was the day that ordinary British people showed them exactly what they thought of racism, Nazism and Fascism and it wasn’t pretty.
1938 – 1994: John Smith
1938: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
1938: Kofi Annan
1939: Bruce K Alexander
1939: The Right Club
Members included…
- Chesterton,
- William Joyce,
- Anna Wolkoff,
- Joan Miller,
- Francis Yeats-Brown,
- H. Cole,
- Lord Redesdale,
- 5th Duke of Wellington,
- Duke of Westminster,
- Aubrey Lees,
- John Stourton,
- Thomas Hunter,
- Samuel Chapman,
- Ernest Bennett,
- Charles Kerr,
- John MacKie,
- James Edmondson,
- Mavis Tate,
- Marquess of Graham,
- Margaret Bothamley,
- Earl of Galloway,
- T. Mills,
- Richard Findlay,
- Serrocold Skeels.
1939-1945: World War II
1942: Neil Kinnock
1943: Lech Walesa
1946/8: NHS
1948: The state of Israel
1949: Council of Europe
1949: NATO
1949: Jeremy Corbyn
1951: Gordon Brown
1953: Tony Blair
1953: Diane Abbott
1953: European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) enacted
1957: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) founded
1962: Keir Starmer
1963: Ian Lavery
1964: Boris Johnson
1964: Nigel Farage
1966: Aaron Banks
1966: David Cameron
1966: Jeremy Hunt
1967: The 6 day war
1967: Michael Gove
1968: Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the commons’
1969: The Open University
1969: Jacob Rees-Mogg
1969: Savid Javid
1971: George Osborne
1972: Priti Patel
1974: Dominic Raab
1979: Rebecca Long-Bailey
1984: Miners’ strike
1985: The War Game (film) finally aired
1997: Project Prevention
1997: Malala Yousafzai
2001: September 11th attacks
2013: Joshua Greene’s ‘Tragedy of common sense moralilty’ (Moral tribes)
2020: Brexit
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