Michael Barratt Brown

Michael Barratt Brown (15 March 1918 - 7 May 2015) was a British economist, political activist and adult educator. He was a key figure in the creation of the British New Left in the period after the Soviet invasion of Hungary; he helped to found the Fair Trade movement in Britain; and he was the first Principal of Northern College, a residential centre for adult learners in South Yorkshire.

Barratt Brown was born in 1918. His father, Alfred Barratt Brown, was a Quaker who was imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War. Alfred became Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford, where visitors included the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the Indian nationalist leader Gandhi and William Temple, the Anglican primate. After attending a Quaker boarding school in York, Michael Barratt Brown studied Classics at Oxford. In 1940 he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit, then switched to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He later stated that his wartime experiences, particularly in Yugoslavia, led him to distance himself from his Quaker faith and join the Communist Party.

He had resigned from the Communist Party, along with a number of other radical intellectuals who objected strongly to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He was one of the founders of New Left Review in 1960, and he contributed to the May Day Manifesto (edited by Stuart Hall, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams), which appeared as a Penguin Special in 1968. He also went on to help found the Institute for Workers' Control in 1968, the Conference of Socialist Economists in 1970, and the Society of Industrial Tutors in 1974.

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