He was the major political figure in the London borough of Hackney's Labour politics from the war right up until the ultra-left in the party foolishly voted him out of office during the 1980s.

Persuaded to move out to rural Essex by his family, he spent another eight years on Braintree council.

Nowadays private is good and public is bad as we grapple with yet another crisis of capitalism.

Yet Kotz demonstrates in the book that faced with the appaling aftermath of the second world war, it was the planned intervention by the Attlee government and the democratic involvement of local government that was able to create a national health service completely free at the point of use.

It secured the nationalisation of key industries so as to create jobs with decent pay and conditions and was able to instigate a huge slum clearance and house building programme to deal with the situation where many had nowhere to live having been bombed out.

The situation then was far worse than we face today but, armed with a massive mandate from the people, the Labour government and its municipal allies were able to put in place a welfare state radically different from the grinding poverty faced before the war.

It is this welfare state that the coalition is seeking to destroy following the template established by Thatcher and endorsed by new Labour.

Kotz is unashamedly "old Labour" and contemptuous of the suits that now dominate the party nationally.

Despite this he remains totally loyal to the party, believing that the members must take control of the inner party democracy and thereby reconnect with the aspirations of ordinary people.

The book is very good at reliving the experiences of a child growing up in a close-knit Jewish community and recounts its solidarity in detail, particularly when the community was threatened by Mosley's fascists at Cable Street.

What little they had was shared with each other.

There is much to learn from a book like this.

To realise that Cameron's Big Society is nothing other than an attempt to return us to the Victorian values of the rich looking after themselves and throwing scraps of care to the lower orders to make themselves feel good.

To realise that there is a real alternative that socialists like John Kotz fought for all of their lives but which was cruelly taken away when the Party was hijacked by people interested in nothing but their own power and personal enrichment.

Read it and strive for socialism.