Skip to main content
Tom Mann: fighting until the end
The final extract from PHIL KATZ’s book looks at the great communist’s last years, which saw him still regularly imprisoned, and finally venerated as ‘the most persuasive mob orator in the three kingdoms’

TOM MANN now threw himself into the issue of unemployment, becoming president of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement.

It put him in firing sight of the state, which used brutal repression and intimidation against the unemployed. On April 12 1931, he chaired a National United Front Conference.

Given the circumstances and the desperation in the country at unemployment benefit cuts, wage cuts and destitution, the attendance was a large and significant representation of the forces that had managed to survive the defeat of the miners, the capitalist onslaught and the Great Depression.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Harry Pollitt (right) with International Brigade volunteer David Guest, who was killed at the Ebro in July 1938 [Pic: Marx Memorial Library]
Spanish Civil War 90th Anniversary / 4 July 2026
4 July 2026

ALEX GORDON applauds the leading role played by Harry Pollitt and the Communist Party in the fight against fascism in Spain and salutes the memory of the International Brigades

Tom Mooney Company from the Lincoln Battalion, during the Spanish Civil War, Jarama, Spain, 1937
History / 24 February 2026
24 February 2026

CJ ATKINS commemorates one of the most dramatic moments in working-class history

Maggie Bowden
Features / 13 September 2025
13 September 2025

Maggie Bowden was a trailblazing campaigning lawyer at Birnberg and Thompsons, women’s organiser of the Communist Party, and general secretary of Liberation

Jeremy Corbyn (second left) and Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South (second right) on the picket line outside London Euston train station, August 18, 2022
Features / 20 August 2025
20 August 2025

Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY