Word: firebrands
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...wave of shock and recrimination. In the House of Commons, Home Secretary William Whitelaw reported on a personal visit to Brixton, conducted during a lull in the rioting, and announced that a respected and nonpartisan peer, former Jurist Lord Scarman, would investigate the causes of the violence. Firebrand M.P. Enoch Powell, a Tory turned Ulster Unionist and a longtime opponent of nonwhite immigration to Britain, warned that "you have seen nothing yet." Five M.P.s demanded "a vigorous policy" of subsidized repatriation of nonwhite immigrants. The ruckus spread as far away as New Delhi, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher...
...those stirring words uttered last week by the Rev. Ian Paisley, 54, the durable firebrand of Ulster politics, had a strangely familiar ring, it was not accidental. Precisely the same call to arms had been issued 69 years earlier by Ulster Hero Sir Edward Carson, when he rallied fellow Protestants fighting to keep their ties to the United Kingdom rather than accept Irish home rule and Catholic domination. Paisley, too, was seeking to stir support among Ulster's 1 million Protestants against any conceivable sellout to the Catholics, and he had an additional motive. With local elections scheduled...
Foot's message to the increasingly restive extreme of his party was the same then as it is now: cool it. But it is falling for the most part on deaf ears. Even Foot, a firebrand himself in his youth, has been overtaken by a new breed of militant British leftists. They are mostly youthful, largely middle-class ideologues who habitually spout Marx, Lenin and Trotsky but shun Soviet-style Communism. Combining pie-in-the-sky visions of a British Utopia with a pragmatic flair for nuts-and-bolts political organizing, they have driven a wedge deep into...
...managed to check Solidarity's innate militancy. Says Bogdan Lis, 28, the only union leader who belongs to the Communist Party: "None of us has trust or belief in those people [the authorities]. We consider them opponents." Alina Pienkowska, 28, a meek-looking nurse who is actually a firebrand, says the authorities have to prove that "the renewal of our life doesn't end with the personnel changes in the party." Most Solidarity leaders believe that the party needs to be shoved. Says Bogdan Borusewicz, 31, a professional activist...
...Isaac Foot, was a Liberal Member of Ramsay MacDonald's government, and his three brothers have had distinguished public service careers. His wife of 31 years, Jill Craigie, is a well-known writer and documentary film producer. Though he has always relished the role of iconoclast and socialist firebrand, when he became deputy to the cautious Callaghan in the last Labor government, Foot damped down his fires. It is now widely believed that he may once again backtrack on some of his most radical positions, including unilateral nuclear disarmament. Foot himself, however, was not about to concede the point...