Incredibly, it’s ten years since we interred (or, as I prefer to say, planted) Greg’s ashes in the Flower Garden in Kennington Park. We also planted a couple of trees and a bench. It is fitting that the Flower Garden has just received Gold in the London in Bloom competition.
The event was attended by close to a hundred of Greg’s comrades and friends, including the late Bob Crow and our People’s Chancellor, John McDonnell. John and my speeches can be found here.
We both referred to the 2008 financial crash and the likelihood that the world was heading for depression and impoverishment. The next decade of neo-liberal austerity policies as the ruling elite has sought (sadly, all too successfully) to recoup their losses and pile the cost and blame for their reckless greed onto workers across the world has been worse than we foresaw. And we definitely did not foresee the amazing rise of our – and Greg’s – friend, Jeremy Corbyn, to the Leadership of now the largest socialist Party in western Europe; nor, in stark opposition to our fight for socialism, the rise of racist and fascist forces across Europe and the USA. Despite his leading role in the RMT, Greg would have been no fan of Brexit – not even of the mythical Lexit. He was an internationalist and anti-racist through and through, and would have instantly grasped the dangers and anti-working class nature of the right-wing Tory project based on so-called free trade, deregulation and privatisation – as Jeremy said last week, their dream of returning to the dark ages of Empire when Britannia ruled the waves and waived the rules.
He is sorely missed.
Here’s some pictures
Joan Twelves 