Stan newens autobiography of a face

Arthur Stanley Newens, In Quest of a Fairer Society: My Life and Politics

The Memoir Club, pp, £, ISBN

reviewed by Ian Birchall

The recent death of Tony Benn prompted the question: what has happened to the Labour left? A similar question is posed by the autobiography of Stan Newens.

Former Epping MP talks about his autobiography ahead of world ...

Newens was a Labour MP from to , and again from to ; after that he was for fifteen years a Member of the European Parliament. His memoirs, clearly based on detailed notes, record his activities over several decades; to someone like myself, a little younger than Newens and a rank-and-file activist, they provide a fascinating perspective on events I lived through.

Newens’ background was close to those he set out to represent.

Born into the ‘respectable working class’, he was the first in his family to go to university. He worked four years as a miner as an alternative to military service, then taught in an East London comprehensive. Nor was parliament the gateway to a Pushing Labour Leftwards? - Review 31 DEQA