Michael Barratt Brown

Our good comrade and friend, Michael, died in London on 7 May after several weeks in hospital following a fall at home. During his long and eventful life, he worked closely with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Institute for Workers� Control, and was a regular contributor to The Spokesman journal. We shall miss him greatly.

Michael Barratt Brown had written extensively throughout his life on economics, workers’ control and politics. During his long career he served in a Quaker Ambulance Unit and worked for the United Nations and, subsequently, in documentary films, in workers’ education, in industrial democracy, in socialist economics, in resisting nuclear warfare, in honest academic research, and in Fair Trade among co-operative organisations.

He wrote an autobiography in which he recalls something of the places, people, family and friends with whom he has been seeking to find a way to live a decent life, and to help others to do the same. Not always successful in these endeavours, he has nevertheless found wonderful love and friendships, as Seekers: A Twentieth Century Life makes clear.

His father, Alfred Barratt Brown, wrote Great Democrats>. Long out of print, Spokesman Books has printed a new edition, which restores to new generations a seminal work in the struggle against the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1930s.