Published: 19 January, 2012
by JOHN GULLIVER

STUART Hall, one of our leading thinkers, may not be in the best of health – he is living with a transplanted kidney – but he cannot stop writing. 
 
I had heard of his state of health and felt reluctant to ring him at his West Hampstead home on reading his stinging attack on Ed Miliband and Ed Balls in the Guardian on Monday.

I had no need to worry.

He has been in and out of hospital, his new kidney isn’t behaving well.

But a man like Stuart, who earned his reputa­tion not only as a left intellectual but also as a man of action, cannot be kept down.

A Jamaican, he came to England in the early 1950s as a Rhodes scholar but remained active in the black movement.

His involvement probably started with the murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959 – still, disgracefully, an unsolved racist killing.

He mentioned the murder yesterday (Wednesday) over the phone – naturally. It is still on his mind. He is a man of conviction.

Just as he mentioned his friendship with Ralph Miliband, father of Ed, and their part in the life of the influential magazine New Left Review, all a world away from the ideas of his son now leading the Labour party.

As he sees it, the gravitational pull of New Labour ideas is creating a “one-party state” with both Ed Miliband and, essentially, David Cameron, on the same wavelength.

Full of irony, Stuart’s letter in the Guardian refers to the “creepy crawlies” of New Labour and Ed Miliband’s poli­cies, ending with: “The death wish is unstoppable.”

He didn’t need to say it but he did. Ralph Miliband will be spinning in his grave at both his sons, he said.

Keep it up, Stuart, I am keen to read the memoir you are busy working on.