Nina Temple

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Nina Temple (born 1956) is a former communist political figure in the United Kingdom. During the late 1970s she was general secretary of the Young Communist League (Britain). Later she became the last general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In this role Temple became one of the leading proponents of its dissolution in 1991 and the founding of its legal successor, the now defunct Democratic Left. For five years she worked for the Make Votes Count Coalition, which was founded by the New Politics Network and the remnants of the Democratic Left.

Temple has been suffering from Parkinson's disease for a number of years, but has continued to work in various campaigning roles. In June 2005 she started work as head of Development and Communications at the Social Market Foundation.

The Democratic Left continued through the 1990s, becoming more and more obviously pro-New Labour in its political tone. This is perhaps best symbolised by the promotion of so-called 'syntegrity' as a mode for running political meetings.

To one member - and perhaps many other members - of Democratic Left, this was the straw which broke the camel's back, especially after Nina Temple increasingly stressed an affiliation to the ideas of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in this context. This member, Brian Precious, thought that this amounted to a trivialization and misrepresentation of the ideas of the latter, and so he organised a meeting featuring Laclau and Hilary Wainwright in November 1996, at which the ideas of Ernesto and Chantal were placed in a much better context, without seeming to give any credence to the obviously opportunistic posturing of so many New Labour politicians.

Having resulted from the dissolution of the CPGB in 1991, Democratic Left dissolved itself into the New Politics Network at the end of the 1990s, with new leadership after Temple became ill with Parkinson's disease.