Ernie Tate

Ernie Tate (24 May 1934 – 5 February 2021) was a long-standing supporter and leading member of Trotskyist groups in Canada and the United Kingdom, and a founder in the 1960s of the International Marxist Group and Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in Britain.

Born on Shankill Road, in Belfast, Northern Ireland to an Ulster Protestant family, he received little formal education, leaving school at 14 to work at the Belfast Flour Mills as an apprentice machine attendant.

Though Protestant, he became sympathetic to Irish Republicanism after befriending a Catholic co-worker and began thinking of himself as a communist after being on holiday in Paris and encountering and being inspired by left-wing demonstrations celebrating the French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

He worked in the mill until 1955, when he emigrated to Canada at the age of 21. Within a year, he was recruited by Ross Dowson into the Canadian section of the Fourth International, after dropping into the Socialist Education League's Toronto Labour Bookstore on Yonge Street (in 1961, the SEL became the League for Socialist Action). By 1962, he was joint editor of the Socialist Caucus Bulletin, the newspaper of the socialist caucus of the New Democratic Party.

In 1960, he was charged with public vandalism after spraypainting "Ban the Bomb" on the side of a plywood and cement fallout shelter at Queen's Park. Unrepentant, he was fined $50.

Tate was sent to British Columbia in the early 1960s, tasked with consolidating the quarrelling factions of the LSA's Vancouver branch.

In 1965, Tate moved from North America to Great Britain on an assignment to work with supporters of the reunified Fourth International to solidify its British section, of which he became a leader, leading to the founding of the International Marxist Group in 1968. Tate and fellow Canadian Pat Brain worked alongside Bertrand Russell in the Russell Tribunal set up to investigate US war crimes in Vietnam.

Tate was hospitalized in 1966 after being allegedly beaten by supporters of Gerry Healy while selling a pamphlet critical of him outside a public meeting of Healy's group. Healy was allegedly present and "essentially supervised" the assault. The incident became a cause célèbre within the world Trotskyist movement. Healy's Socialist Labour League filed lawsuits against Peace News and Socialist Leader for repeating the allegations, threatening them with bankruptcy, prompting the two publications to issue retractions and a public apology. The incident resulted in Isaac Deutscher, who had previously been a contributor to Healy's publications, summoning both Healy and Tate to his home where he "upbraided" Healy for his alleged thuggery and broke off relations with him.