Earlier this year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer used Treasury Questions to take a swipe at Paul Mason. Osborne described the former Channel 4 economics editor as a ‘revolutionary Marxist’. Mason responded by denying the claim in a blog post, even though he is a former member of the Trotskyist Workers’ Power group.
Happily Mason had a chance to take a trip down memory lane on today’s Daily Politics. Producers dug up an old video of Mason from his revolutionary Marxist days. They then brought on his former hard-left comrade Peter Taaffe, the general secretary of the Socialist party. Mason explained why he is now a reformed revolutionary:
PM: I’m not one now. That’s what, Thatcher had destroyed the miners, we had extra judicial force used against working class people. There were riots on the street, you know we were fighting a battle for the survival of working class communities that we lost, which I am terribly sorry about.
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