Labour Hub Editors

Remembering Alice Mahon

This event has now been postponed until further notice.

By Carol Turner

We will soon be celebrating the political work of Alice Mahon, who lived from 28th September 1937 to 25th December 2022. Alice was a trade unionist and working class woman who stood for Parliament ‘to make a difference’. And that she did,  as Labour MP for Halifax from 1987-2005.

Alice was a socialist, a feminist and an internationalist. She was also an example of an increasingly rare, even endangered, species of parliamentarian – an MP who stood up for her principles in hard times as well as good.

Campaigning for peace meant opposing injustices. Alice fought cuts to lone parent benefits, one of the first acts of the Blair government in 1997, as well as opposing Apartheid South Africa and supporting the rights of Palestinians. As an MP she visited Timor to witness first-hand the effects of the war of independence and observe the referendum. She visited the Occupied Territories, and would have been at the forefront of today’s protests.

She was a life-long CND supporter and a national Vice President at the time of her death, as well as a member of her local Calder Valley CND group. Alice campaigned against war and nuclear weapons throughout her life. Her time in Westminster saw her on the streets and on her feet in the Commons chamber, from the bombardment of Iraq in 1991 to its invasion in 2003.

She didn’t duck out when the going was tough. She founded the Committee for Peace in the Balkans in 1993 and visited former Yugoslavia several times during NATO bombing in 1999, arguing for a just settlement to the civil war and speaking out against Britain’s participation in the military attacks – for which she was vilified by the media and some of her colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

In one of her regular news releases in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Alice said of Blair: “The Prime Minister has failed miserably to make a case for military action… Briefings by ministers are pathetic – lightweight statements of belief with no facts whatsoever about the actual situation.” That same accusation might be levelled at Government and Opposition today over Ukraine, as well as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Saddened and disillusioned by the New Labour approach, Alice resigned from the Labour Party in 2009, but rejoined in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn became leader. Join Labour CND, with Jeremy and friends to learn more.

Carol Turner is Labour CND Chair.