I bumped into him a couple of times a long time ago (mid or early 2000s) on London demos and I assumed he was some sort of social scientist, though I subsequently discovered that he was a professional journalist writing for the Scotsman. During the course of a discussion about the merits of the Soviet decision to recognise the State of Israel in 1948 he maintained that he was a "Leninist" and no longer a Trotskyist and used to term dimissively to describe his former comrades. But he was still opposed to the Stalin leadership and "Stalinism" (you can guess my side of the argument). On the other occasion he argued for the need for intellectual "discussion" amongst the left as a whole.
He was clearly well-read and on a one-to-one basis he made his case rationally in contrast to the pseudo-donnish rants in his magazine which the EPSR faithfully reproduces on the web. I suppose a lot of this is to do with the culture that surrounded the old WRP and Newsline but that's another story altogether.
pip,pip,
H A R Philby
(Col.ret'd)
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