JOHN FOSTER was born in 1940, he studied at Cambridge and subsequently lectured at Cambridge, Strathclyde and Paisley/UWS. He published Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution in 1974 followed by a series of monographs, jointly written with Charles Woolfson, on the 1971-2 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders dispute, the occupation of the Scottish Caterpillar plant in 1986 and the oil workers occupations of 1991-92. He has written widely on the national question in Britain and most recently contributed to the six-volume history of the TGWU/Unite. He was on the editorial board of Marxism Today 1967-85, was editor of Our History 1969-1985 and has been on the editorial board of Marx Memorial Library's Theory and Struggle since 2015.