Resist Much, Obey Little (The Spokesman)

We dedicate this issue of The Spokesman to Ken Coates, the journal’s editor for forty years, from 1970 to 2010. During those decades he oversaw the publication of more than one hundred issues, notching up the ton in 2008 with this comment about the military industrial complex and ‘If we continue to generate another hundred issues of this journal, while we have breath left, we shall resist these embodiments of militarism, and continue to devote our energies to laying the foundations of the peaceful commonwealth which will come into existence with the abolition of war.’So it is that we begin this little collection with two previously unpublished pieces from Ken’s own hand. They may have been works in progress, but they have all the hallmarks and attributes of luminous Coates’ prose. (Ken was very heartened when he heard that his friend, the playwright Trevor Griffiths, had said ‘no one writes like Ken Coates’.)