Name John Ross | Role Academic | |
John Ross is a British academic, journalist, blogger, and economic commentator who previously was a left-wing political activist and worked as an economic advisor to Ken Livingstone when he was Mayor of London.
Ross joined the Trotskyist International Marxist Group (IMG) in the late 1960s. He worked with Bob Pennington to form the IMG Opposition Group. Ross was arguably the central figure in the leadership of the IMG in the early 1980s when it became known as Socialist Action, but he gradually lost the support of much of its membership. Ross was leader of one of three groups which emerged from the crisis of this group in the mid-1980s, the one which retained the name Socialist Action. They increasingly ceased to function as a normal left-wing group and became a group of advisors to Livingstone.
He wrote the book Thatcher and Friends - the Anatomy of the Tory Party (1983), and the journal article "Management Philosophy of the Greater London Authority".
He was Ken Livingstone's Policy Director of Economic and Business Policy.
He is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.