OBITUARY
Hard-left Labour MP, conscientious objector and friend of Jeremy Corbyn who nevertheless backed Mrs Thatcher over the Falklands
Tuesday March 30 2021, 12.01am, The Times
It never seemed to bother Stan Newens, the Labour MP for Epping (1964-1970) and Harlow (1974-1983), that the party whips regarded him as an incorrigible left-wing rebel. What mattered to him were his convictions and the backing of his local party. What his snappily titled memoir In Quest of a Fairer Society (2013) lacked in humour it more than made up for in earnestness, as it doggedly recounted his political struggles over the previous 60 years.
To be fair, it did have an arresting opening sentence: “I would never have been born but for Jack the Ripper.” His policeman grandfather, it turned out, had been moved to Bethnal Green in the East End of London to help to deal with the investigation of the murders.
Newens, who spoke with a Cockney accent and bore a passing resemblance to the comedian Stanley Baxter, never knowingly allowed a hard-left cause to pass by without jumping on board. With a Marxist belief in the primacy of the class struggle, he was not only for public ownership of industry, but also nuclear disarmament and fundamental social and economic change. While supportive of the new left’s interest in feminism and gay rights, he regarded them as secondary issues.
He was one of the founders of the Tribune group of MPs, a cohesive and reliably left-wing group in parliament. When it split over Tony Benn’s bid for the deputy leadership of the party in 1981 Newens was chairman of the group. He suspected that Benn had joined to further his deputy leadership ambitions.
As an MP he made his mark early on. In 1967 he and Peter Kirk, Conservative MP for neighbouring Saffron Walden, mobilised large-scale and successful opposition among MPs to the proposal for a third runway at Stansted. In a diary entry that year Richard Crossman, the Labour leader of the Commons, expressed his frustration with Newens, describing him at a party meeting as “a nice, left-wing, proletarian backbencher who made a constituency speech”. Crossman approvingly quoted another Labour MP who claimed Newens was being used by “a conservative middle-class lobby”.
A frequent critic of the Wilson government’s support for the US bombing raids on Vietnam, he was unmoved by Wilson’s appeals for military backing and was suspended by the party for regularly defying the whips in votes on defence, spending cuts and statutory pay controls. When he lost at the 1970 general election to the Conservative Norman Tebbit he readily accepted that his criticism of Israel during the Six Day War in 1967 cost him some Jewish votes. Out of parliament and with a young family to support, he returned to teaching.
He was returned for Harlow at the election of February 1974 and remained its MP until 1983 when he was swept aside in the Thatcher landslide. He had hopes of regaining the seat in the future and for that reason rejected Michael Foot’s offer to nominate him for a peerage. In the meantime, he was elected as MEP for London Central which meant he had as one of his constituents the Labour MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn. He fought Harlow again at the 1987 general election but lost again.
Hostility to US foreign policy was a tedious theme in his political career. It figured in his support for CND, opposition to Nato and admiration for Castro’s Cuba standing up to the US blockade and sanctions.
He later became interested in Middle East politics and backed human rights groups in Iraq and Iran. He also warned of the likelihood of Islamist fundamentalists taking over if the rulers in the region were displaced.
Yet, for all this, it was too limiting to describe Newens as just left-wing. He was that and more; an internationalist, a localist, a historian of left-wing ideas and groups and, above all, an independent. “I make my own mind up,” he often replied to questions about what influenced him.
That could make him unpredictable, possibly even contrary. He broke with many of the left in backing British membership of the European Economic Community and in opposing Benn running for the deputy leadership (although he reluctantly voted for him rather than Denis Healey). Opposed to wars generally, he made an exception for Margaret Thatcher’s dispatch of the task force in 1982 to recapture the Falklands from the Argentine military regime.
He did not look up to political leaders and had no political mentors. Yet he seemed to have a weak spot for authoritarian leaders, particularly if they were anti-American. Some friends were intrigued when in 1968 he appealed to Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, to grant a pardon to Leon Trotsky, who had been assassinated on Stalin’s orders. In the same year Brezhnev ordered troops into Czechoslovakia to crush dissent.
There was more eyebrow raising over his approval of Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania. He visited the dictator, resisted his efforts to set conditions for an interview, and published a record of their discussions, subtitled The Man, His Ideas and His Socialist Achievements. Many thought he had treated his host with kid gloves but he anticipated the critical reaction and could point to efforts by British governments to curry favour with the dictator.
Stanley Newens was born in Bethnal Green, east London, in 1930 to Arthur and Celia (née Furssedonn) who ran a haulage business. As a small boy he witnessed the street battles between Harry Pollitt’s communists and Oswald Mosley’s fascists and he was politically aware at an early age. His mother was a Conservative but, having first flirted with the Liberal Party, Newens decided he was Labour.
During his teenage years the family moved to the North Weald and he attended Buckhurst Hill County High School. He then read history at the University of London and joined the student Labour society in 1948 and the Labour Party proper the following year.
As a conscientious objector at the time of the Korean War he volunteered to work for four years in a coalmine in Staffordshire. After gaining a teaching qualification he started teaching history at Edith Cavell school in Hackney, east London, in 1956.
His involvement in national politics emerged from his social activism. As a miner and a schoolteacher he was active in the National Union of Mineworkers and an office holder in his local National Union of Teachers. The two largest occupational categories of Labour MPs at the time were former teachers and miners.
He was also an inveterate joiner of organisations, holding office in the London Co-operative Society and the Movement for Colonial Freedom. His track record and local connections helped him to be selected as Labour candidate for Epping, which he won in 1964. Among the losing applicants for the nomination was the future playwright Dennis Potter.
His first marriage was to Ann Sherratt, an office employee at Mintons ceramic pottery works in Stoke-on-Trent, with whom he had two daughters, Sarah and Caroline. Ann’s death in 1962 meant that when elected as an MP he was a widower with two young children. His second marriage in 1966 was to Sandra Frith, a secretary, with whom he had a son, Thomas, and two more daughters, Helen and Margaret. The children are all university graduates and they and Sandra survive him.
An active member of his local Labour party, he was still knocking on doors at election time in his late 80s. He disapproved of Tony Blair and what he regarded as his government’s opinion-poll driven pursuit of the political middle ground. Corbyn’s politics were more to his liking and they were good friends. While still party leader in February 2020, Corbyn hosted a reception for Newens’s 90th birthday in his office in the Commons. A few months later when Corbyn was suspended from the party, Newens wrote to his local paper condemning the action.
He was formidably well read, particularly about history. Books dominated his Harlow home. He wrote pamphlets on political issues, an autobiography and a book on his local patch, A History of North Weald Bassett and its People. He had a strong sense of identity, remained committed to the values that brought him into politics 70 years earlier and looked with pride on the work of the 1945 Labour government.
As a young man he was interested in his family’s history, instructing his parents and grandparents not to throw away any documents and building a family archive. He was an Essex man before the term, with a different political connotation, was invented. Tending the vegetable patch in his large garden kept him fit. “He kept the family in vegetables for years,” said his wife.
When asked by a Conservative friend why so many of the causes he fought for were defeated, Newens replied: “I’ve lost many more campaigns than I’ve won in my life, but you don’t give up, do you? You keep fighting for what’s right.”
Stanley Newens, Labour politician, was born on February 4, 1930. He died of heart failure on March 2, 2021, aged 91