Speechification

This show’s a bit like when you’re a kid and your friend’s parents are Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or something and you’re dying to get a look at the inside of their house to see if they have an altar or interesting dietary habits and then they turn out to be just like your own Mum and Dad (only no Christmas presents—which is just inhuman). It’s about The Socialist Workers Party and it got me grumbling and groaning round the house (”Bloody Trots”) a few weeks ago.

I never attained the heights of political awareness that my SWP mates did. But that didn’t stop them bugging me for years (and selling me their infernal, braindead newspaper in my own front room). So I wasn’t very positively disposed towards this 15-minute doc (part one of two) about the party. But the members and loyalists interviewed are less nutty and self-righteous than I remember and they provide some interesting insight into the ways of Britain’s largest kooky political tribe (but none at all into their actual politics, which is a pity—maybe that was in part two). MP3.

The shows originally went out as part of Sunday evening’s excellent Westminster Hour and they have a good archive so you can listen to both shows again here.

Rupert Allman, editor of iPM, got in touch to recommend a segment from Broadcasting House on Sunday. He’s right, it’s terrific. Here’s the intro to the piece:

“They were the best of times they were the worst of times, as a generation came to its political senses. In 1968, alongside a string of protests in Democratic countries was a series of calamities that might overpower today’s mood swings. The world veered from disaster in Vietnam to the assassination of Martin Luther King and on to the Soviet clampdown in Prague and Bobbie Kennedy’s murder in a US Presidential Election year. They were the generation that gave us Jack Straw, Peter Hain and Hillary Clinton. Collectively, they’ve become known as the soixante-huitards and they’ve been given a warning; this is your last chance to influence politics. For BH Brian Hanrahan re-joins the sixty eighters: ”

MP3 here. Thanks Rupert.