Do They Mean Us? #3

As Michael Foot's nephew, Paul Foot, has been mentioned in the comments section of the previous post, I thought I would dig out the excerpt from the letter that Paul Foot wrote to a comrade, where he writes of his memories of the SPGB in Glasgow in the early sixties, when he was living and working there as a journalist:

"I went to Glasgow for my first job (a reporter on the Daily Record) in September 1961. I joined the Young Socialists and the Woodside Labour party. A highly influential figure in the Woodside YS at the time was Vic Vanni, a big, very good-looking and persuausive bloke, a sheet metal worker, whose father had come to Glasgow from Italy, and ran a fish and chip shop. I became friendly with Vic and liked his sense of humour. He was greatly influenced by the SPGB, and many times I went with him and others to hear the SPGB lecturers in St Andrews Hall (I think). We also heard SPGB speakers like Dick Donnelly speak at open air meetings off Sauchiehall St.

"Before I left Glasgow in 1964, Vic joined the SPGB and I think he is still a member, probably a very senior one. . .

"These SPGB speakers had a wonderful, proletarian, down-to-earth way of conveying Marxist ideas. They were all, without exception, sardonic and witty speakers, and they made a profound impression on me. In particular, they scornfully rejected the idea - prevalent at the time, that Russia etc were Socialist countries . . ."

I'm cutting and pasting the excerpt from another place that I had previously posted it. Unfortunately, I don't have the original letter in front of me, otherwise I would have also included the passage where Paul Foot writes of his disagreements with the SPGB both then and at the time of writing the letter. (15th January 2003.) I don't want to give out the mistaken impression that Foot was a closet SPGBer. He wasn't, but he was a wonderful writer.