It must be, what, more than twenty years ago, while working on a local campaign against Housing Action Trusts (the Tory version) that I attended a public meeting on the council estate I lived on at the time at which the invited guest speaker was Dave Nellist, who was, at the time, the Labour MP for Coventry South East.
If the the truth be told, I remember very little about the detail of the meeting and my memories of the campaign are, today, a little sketchy. We won the campaign, in the sense that the Conservative government eventually backed off and dropped the idea of trying sell off the estate to private developers, ran a couple of really good alternative comedy shows as fund-raisers, one of which gave a friend a nice line in personal anecdotes about Attila the Stockbroker, who did one of the gigs in return for a ticket to a West Brom game at the Hawthorns and a curry, and a write-around for support from Labour MPs netted us, amongst the usual typewritten letters on Commons stationary, a handwritten note of support from Tony Benn which included a fiver. Continue reading
