John Kotz, who died last month of leukaemia aged 84, joined the Hackney South Labour League of Youth in 1945 and never wavered in his commitment to his class and his party.

Born in south Hackney to the children of Jewish refugees from the anti-semitism of the Polish and Byelorussian outposts of tsarism’s Russian empire, his childhood was shaped by exposure to the Workers’ Circle, battles against the British Union of Fascists and awareness of the war against fascism in Spain.

After national service in the RAF on Merseyside, he became a councillor in Hackney in the days before expenses were payable and he had to attend council meetings after a hard day’s work.

Not for him the current politician’s roadmap tracing a route from university, student politics and special adviser to parachute drop into a safe seat.

Kotz was Hackney through and through and he had no desire to move beyond the town hall where he was for many years deputy leader, acting leader, leader and mayor.

Morning Star Fighting Fund organiser Ivan Beavis remembers the times when they sat across the table from each other as Nalgo (now part of Unison) branch secretary and employer’s side representative.

“I came to Hackney in 1982 when housing and education were transferred to the boroughs from the Greater London Council and Inner London Education Authority,” Beavis recalls.

“The GLC had better conditions and he was very amenable to sensible negotiations. He conceded the 35-hour week because the GLC had it and Hackney had been working 37.

“He also introduced the ‘Hackney factor,’ by which social workers were given an extra couple of increments because he recognised the difficulties of working in inner London boroughs.”

Beavis emphasises that he and Kotz, despite being on opposite sides of the table, came to respect each other.

“You could always do a deal with him. He was real old-school Labour.

All the Trots in my union branch called him a rightwinger, but he was Labour to the core. He recognised the class basis of society. That’s what I admired about John. He knew that exploitation had a class basis.”

Kotz had no time for Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, opposing the Iraq war and the neoliberal policies followed by new Labour.

Whether this explained the difficulty he experienced in having his Vintage Red autobiography launched at Hackney Town Hall is debatable, but Beavis is in no doubt.

“When he launched his book, we had a terrible fight to get it launched in the council chamber at the town hall.

“These Blairites regarded him as old-fashioned and irrelevant, but look at his record. We talk about the need now for massive house-building programmes, but people like Martin Ottolangui, Joanie Anderson and John Kotz actually did it.

“They were building thousands and thousands of houses and establishing new estates because of war damage.”

Anderson, who knew Kotz for over 40 years and served with him on Hackney council, remembers vividly the first time she met him when he was borough agent and she was Victoria ward secretary.

“I’d never been involved in running an election campaign and John

put us through our paces,” she says.

“He was very passionate about socialism. He had a good sense of humour and there was a warm side to him, but mostly it was his politics and getting a better society for ordinary working people.

“He had a clear vision and kept that vision throughout his life.”

Former Labour MP and MEP Stan Newens first met Kotz in 1963 when he was teaching in Hackney and took pupils to the town hall where they had a ceremony with the mayor at 33 the second youngest ever after Herbert Morrison.

Newens stresses that Kotz’s work as deputy secretary to Alf Lomas on the London Co-operative Society political committee should not be underestimated, since this was a “very important organisation for building the left in those days.

“John was always on the left and was very prominent, becoming leader of the Labour group.”

It was during his period in the borough leadership that a successful campaign to oust the racist National Front from its headquarters in Great Eastern Street in the south of the borough was carried through.

Apart from legal proceedings, the council, backed by Hackney Trades Council, the Anti-Nazi League and various left-wing parties, mobilised a thousands-strong protest march past the NF Excalibur House headquarters.

He documented his frustration in Vintage Red with one of Labour’s Trotskyite councillors who pooh-poohed involvement in legal proceedings, insisting that it was more important to confront the fascists physically than to defeat them.

“I have never been against direct action if it was appropriate, but it is using the method most likely to achieve victory which is important,” Kotz wrote.

Newens witnessed the changes taking place in Hackney Labour Party and was not impressed.

“He was eventually ousted by a group of what I regard as ultra-lefts who wanted a revolution next Tuesday and some of them drifted off and became Blairites later,” he says with feeling.

However, Hackney Labour’s loss became Essex Labour’s gain when Kotz’s beloved wife Betty, who died last year, persuaded him to move out to the village of Foxearth on the Essex-Suffolk border.

His local party branch had just 15 members and met once a year until he and Betty arrived.

That marked the end of Tories being elected unopposed and he even stood as parliamentary candidate in the barren territory of Saffron Walden, being supported at public meetings by Lomas, Newens, Ted Graham and Stanley Clinton Davis.

“He put up a reasonable show but

then became secretary and then chair of Essex Labour Party, becoming a tremendous hard worker and inspiring force in that capacity,” says Newens.

Hard work was in Kotz’s DNA. Apart from a variety of jobs from printworker to bus driver and insurance salesman to keep his wife and four sons while working unpaid on the council, he was active in international solidarity.

Following a colloquium in Dresden in 1964, he met the mayor of the east Berlin suburb of Prenzlauer Berg, which was subsequently twinned with Hackney.

Friendship societies with the Soviet Union and eastern European socialist states were proscribed organisations for Labour members at that time, but Kotz, who visited the German Democratic Republic many times, became active in the Britain-GDR Society, which he chaired until the GDR was swallowed up by West Germany.

Kotz’s driving skills that he had gained on London Transport came in useful in 1974 when Hortensia Allende, the widow of the martyred Chilean president Salvador Allende, came to Britain on a speaking tour and he provided her transport.

His willingness to do whatever was required, without thought to supposed status or importance, leads Newens to say: “If you look at the Labour Party, it wouldn’t exist but for dedicated leftwingers — people who do rank-and-file work and don’t become national figures. Without the John Kotzes of this world, dyed-in-the-wool socialists, there would never be a movement.”

On reaching his 80th birthday Kotz posted a Facebook message that he was “still waiting for the revolution and the socialist millennium.”

Despite feeling let down by the “antics of new Labour,” he recalled being told by an older comrade after joining the Labour League of Youth: “To be a socialist, you have got to be an optimist,” commenting: “I remain an optimist.”

He is survived by his sons Peter, Colin, Derek and Simon and their families.

His funeral takes place at the Three Counties Crematorium in Braintree at noon today, followed by a reception at Witham Labour Hall.