Nina Temple

Last updated
Nina Temple
General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain
In office
January 1990 –November 1991
Alma mater Imperial College, London

Nina Claire Temple (born 21 April 1956) [1] is a British politician who was the last Secretary [2] of the Communist Party of Great Britain and was formerly a think-tank director in the United Kingdom.

Contents

Early life

Temple was born in Westminster, London, the daughter of Barbara J. (Rainnie) and Landon Roy Temple. Born into a communist family (her father ran Progressive Tours and was a Communist Party of Great Britain member), [2] she joined the Young Communist League when she was 13, later protesting in London against the Vietnam War. [3] She has a degree in materials science from Imperial College, London. [3] [4] She is the sister of film director Julien Temple and the aunt of actress Juno Temple. [5]

Communist Party of Great Britain

During the late 1970s she was general secretary of the Young Communist League and became a prominent member of the Eurocommunist faction within the party. She became a member of the CPGB executive in 1979, and then a member of the Political Committee in January 1982. [6]

She was the Press and Publicity Officer of the CPGB from January 1983 until 1989, [7] when she became the last general secretary of the party in January 1990, aged 33. [3] She pledged to make the party "feminist and green, as well as democratically socialist." [8] In this role Temple became one of the leading proponents of the dissolution of the CPGB in November 1991, and the founding of its legal successor, the Democratic Left, [9] [10] proclaiming that "The internationalism of the 1990s will be as much informed by Greenpeace and Oxfam, as communism once was by Marx and Engels". [11]

Think tanks

The Democratic Left continued through the 1990s, becoming the New Politics Network in 1999. Temple was its first director [9] and worked for five years for the Make Votes Count Coalition. [12]

In June 2005 she started work as head of development and communications at the Social Market Foundation, a role she held until 2008. [4]

Personal life

Temple has two children with a schoolteacher, a daughter born in 1987 and a son born in 1988. [3]

Temple became ill with Parkinson's disease in 2000. [4] She trained in counselling at the Gestalt Centre in Old Street, and in September 2003 founded Sing For Joy, a choir of people with chronic degenerative diseases. [4] [13] [14]

Related Research Articles

The Communist Party of Scotland was a communist political party based in Scotland. It was established in January 1992 by former members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who disagreed with the CPGB's disbanding and reforming in 1991 as the Democratic Left think-tank. The party was itself dissolved in the late 2010s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee)</span> Political party in the United Kingdom

The Communist Party of Great Britain is a political group which publishes the Weekly Worker newspaper. The CPGB (PCC) claims to have "an internationalist duty to uphold the principle, 'One state, one party'. To the extent that the European Union becomes a state then that necessitates EU-wide trade unions and a Communist Party of the EU". In addition, it is in favour of the unification of the entire working class under a new Communist International. It is not to be confused with the former Communist Party of Great Britain, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist), or the current Communist Party of Britain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Communist Party of Britain</span> Political party in the United Kingdom

The New Communist Party of Britain is an anti-revisionist Marxist–Leninist communist party in Britain. The origins of the NCP lie in the Communist Party of Great Britain from which it split in 1977. The organisation takes an anti-revisionist stance on Marxist–Leninism and is opposed to Eurocommunism. After the fall of the Soviet Union the party was one of two original British signatories to the Pyongyang Declaration in 1992. It publishes a newspaper named The New Worker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party (British Section of the Third International)</span> British political party

The Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) was a Left Communist organisation established at an emergency conference held on 19–20 June 1920 at the International Socialist Club in London. It comprised about 600 people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Democratic Left (Great Britain)</span> 1990s UK political party

Democratic Left was a post-communist political organisation in the United Kingdom during the 1990s, growing out of the Eurocommunist strand within the Communist Party of Great Britain and its magazine Marxism Today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert Inkpin</span> British communist politician (1884–1944)

Albert Samuel Inkpin, was a British communist and the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He served several terms in prison for political offences. In 1929 he was replaced as head of the CPGB and made head of the party's Friends of Soviet Russia organisation, a position he retained until his death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gordon McLennan (politician)</span> British politician

Gordon McLennan was a Scottish political activist and draughtsperson who served as the seventh General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 11 March 1975 to January 1990.

Thomas Hargrave Bell was a Scottish socialist politician and trade unionist. He is best remembered as a founding member of both the Socialist Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain and as the editor of Communist Review, the official monthly magazine of the latter.

Finlay Hart was a Scottish communist politician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party of Britain</span> Political party in the United Kingdom

The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) is a communist party in Great Britain which emerged from a dispute between Eurocommunists and Marxist-Leninists in the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1988. It follows Marxist-Leninist theory and supports what it regards as existing socialist states, and has fraternal relationships with the ruling parties in Cuba, China, Laos, and Vietnam. It is affiliated nationally to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. It is a member of the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, together with 117 other political parties. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the party was one of two original British signatories to the Pyongyang Declaration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Young Communist League (Great Britain)</span> Communist youth organisation in Great Britain

The Young Communist League (YCL) is the youth section of the Communist Party of Britain. Although its headquarters is based in London, the YCL has active branches across England, Scotland, and Wales. Aside from sports and social programs, the YCL heavily focuses on publishing political literature, with its own political journal called Challenge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party of Great Britain</span> Communist party in the United Kingdom that existed from 1920 to 1991

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB founded the Daily Worker. In 1936, members of the party were present at the Battle of Cable Street, helping organise resistance against the British Union of Fascists. In the Spanish Civil War the CPGB worked with the USSR to create the British Battalion of the International Brigades, which party activist Bill Alexander commanded.

George Bolton is a Scottish former trade unionist and communist activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Bonnar</span> Scottish politician

Bill Bonnar is a founding member of the Scottish Socialist Party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Alexander (politician)</span> British communist activist (1910–2000)

Bill Alexander, born as William Alexander, was a leading activist within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), most known for commanding the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. During World War II he underwent a commissioning course at Sandhurst military academy, graduating top of his year. He then served in Germany, Italy and Northern Africa, during which he was promoted to the rank of captain in the Reconnaissance Corps. Later in life he became an author, the vice-chairman of the International Brigade Association, and the president of London's Marx Memorial Library. Alexander spent the remainder of his life promoting Marxism–Leninism, and was a member of the CPGB until the party was dissolved in 1991.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Crawfurd</span> Scottish suffragette, 1877–1954

Helen Crawfurd was a Scottish suffragette, rent strike organiser, Communist activist and politician. Born in Glasgow, she was brought up there and in London.

Alexander Geddes was a Scottish communist activist.

Douglas Chalmers is a Scottish academic and former communist activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Far-left politics in the United Kingdom</span>

Far-left politics in the United Kingdom have existed since at least the 1840s, with the formation of various organisations following ideologies such as Marxism, revolutionary socialism, communism, anarchism and syndicalism.

Margaret Annie Hunter was a Scottish communist activist and trade unionist who is known for playing an active role in the Communist Party of Great Britain from the 1940s until her retirement in the early 1970s and eventual death in 1986.

References

  1. ↑ "Ms Nina Temple's Biography". Debretts. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  2. 1 2 Temple dropped 'General' from her job description, see Francis Beckett Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party, London: John Murray, 1995, p213
  3. 1 2 3 4 Rule, Sheila (2 February 1990). "New Name and New Age (Is There a New Party?)". New York Times. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Newman, Sara (10 July 2008). "Parkinson's sufferers are in full voice!". Camden New Journal.
  5. ↑ Rafanelli, Stephanie (7 June 2014). "Juno Temple, interview: 'I'm not the high-school catch'" . The Telegraph .
  6. ↑ Bull, Martin J.; Paul Heywood (1994). West European Communist parties after the revolutions of 1989. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN   0-312-12268-3.
  7. ↑ Clark, William (29 December 1989). "Scottish Communist Party 'in good heart'". Glasgow Herald. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  8. ↑ "Communist Choice". Glasgow Herald. 15 January 1990. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  9. 1 2 Cohen, Nick (23 October 2000). "Up for grabs: £3.5m of Stalin's gold". New Statesman. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  10. ↑ "British communists propose name change". Herald-Journal. 23 November 1991. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  11. ↑ "The eclipse and re-emergence of the Young Communist League". YCL. Retrieved 2023-07-30.
  12. ↑ Tempest, Matthew (6 January 2003). "Voting change would be fitting legacy, say campaigners". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  13. ↑ "Music a 'mega-vitamin' for the brain". CNN. 3 June 2009. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
  14. ↑ Stretton, Penny (13 July 2007). "Singers discover the healing power of song". Ham & High. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
Party political offices
Preceded by
Tom Bell
 General Secretary of the Young Communist League
1979 - 1983		Succeeded by
Preceded by General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain
January 1990 - November 1991		Succeeded by
post abolished
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.