Paul spent six years at Socialist Worker, from the autumn of 1972, when the political struggle against Edward’s Heath’s Tory Government was at its peak, until the summer of 1978.
He could have gone to almost any national newspaper in the country when he decided to leave Private Eye, but the pull of his politics outweighed any other consideration. In the 1970s, Socialist Worker was expanding in size and circulation, new printing presses were being bought, the political opportunities for left-wing socialists were considerable. There was an audience for radical ideas and radical writing.
He joined as a journalist, with a column of his own called ‘Footprints’, became editor for just over a year between March 1974 and June 1975, and then returned to what he loved most, writing about workers’ struggles.
The buoyant politics that had brought Paul to Socialist Worker had retreated by the late 1970s: there was a general level of political collapse among the unions and the British working class which, together with a growing disillusionment in Labour politics, which would lead to the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister the following year and the start of the long era of neo-liberalism.
After he left the paper, Paul continued to write for Socialist Worker, taking up the challenge of a weekly and then fortnightly column, which ran from 1984 until his aneurism and hospitalisation in 1999. Even that didn’t stop him, although his writing continued in a more irregular pattern from then to the end of his life.
Some highlights of Paul’s articles in Socialist Worker on the Marxist Internet Archive
Following the collapse of Ronan Point: 3,000 people at risk in sky-high death traps
–September 1968
“It is almost a year now since Francis Taylor, founder, chairman and managing director of Taylor Woodrow Ltd., the second largest construction firm in Britain, burst into the headlines with violent attacks upon the unofficial strikers at London’s Barbican.
Night after night the smiling, confident features of Frank Taylor told the public about …
After a visit to Northern Ireland: Derry, the grim facts about Ulster’s divide and rule city -December 1968
THE DEMONSTRATIONS which have erupted in Northern Ireland and which, in spite of the sacking of Home Secretary Craig, will almost certainly continue, started in Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second city.
Derry’s predicament sums up the ‘divide and rule’ policy of …
West Indies: 20 years of pirates, profits and blood -April 1969
IN JANUARY 1935 there were what the Governor of the Leeward Islands, Sir R. St. Johnston, called in his report ‘some troubles’ on the island of St.Kitts. Leaders of the newly-formed Sugar Workers’ League, protesting at the rate of pay (one shilling a day), marched around the plantations calling a strike.
The Governor found this especially annoying, because he was having a garden party at the time. He summoned up a frigate and a few platoons of infantry …
The local Labour council standing up to a Labour Government: Clay Cross double-crossed -April 1974
ELEVEN WORKERS at Clay Cross, Derbyshire, who risked their freedom and their livelihood in the fight against Heath’s Tory government, have been snubbed by the Labour government’s first month of office.
They are the councillors who refused to implement the Tory Housing Finance Act. They saved the council tenants of their town thousands of pounds in unpaid rents. As a result, they …
Following the death of Blair Peach at the hands of the police: Blair – our brother,our friend –June 1979
From Manchester to Tolpuddle the martyrs of our movement have been humble people. They neither sought the limelight nor found it. They were unknown except to a close circle of friends and family. They became famous not because of their ambitions nor their vanity, but because…
Tony Cliff and Zionism -January 1988
Pondering the critical comments of the representatives of American Jewry on the Christmas upheavals in Gaza and on the West Bank, I go to Central Books to buy myself a Christmas present.
I know there is one there for me because Dave…
Arms dealing: Will they get off Scott free? -May 1995
Two extreme opinions circulate on the left about the inquiry by Lord Justice Scott into the export of defence related equipment to Iraq. The first is that…
