My friend David Ransom, who has died of cancer aged 69, was a talented writer and political activist who for two decades was a co-editor at New Internationalist magazine.
David was born in Harrow, north-west London, to Charles, who worked for MI6, and Eileen, a pianist. At an early age David was sent to New College choir school in Oxford, then to Lancing college in West Sussex, before studying for a degree in history at New College, Oxford.
After university he went to Uruguay and worked at the Bank of London and South America in the capital, Montevideo. This gave him inside knowledge of a global system he was to critique and demythologise in several articles and books. Uruguay provided first-hand experience of a military dictatorship, and ignited in him a lifelong interest in more democratic Latin American alternatives. It was also where he met Anita Sandberg, whom he married in 1970.
Returning to Britain in the early 1970s, David enrolled at the London School of Economics to study the impact of copper mining in Chile. From there he went to teach at the Phoenix school in Tower Hamlets, east London, which caters for pupils with special needs. He became friends with a fellow teacher, Blair Peach, whose death from head injuries at an anti-National Front protest in Southall in 1979 shook David to the core. He became a tireless campaigner for justice in the case, writing the book The Blair Peach Case: Licence to Kill (1980).
During the 80s David went to work at No Fixed Abode, an east London charity for homeless people, and then, in 1989, for the New Internationalist Co-operative in Oxford, where he became co-editor of its magazine. No one was more surprised than David when he landed the job, as he did not have a journalism background. But at the co-operative, we already knew he could turn a phrase and had a passion for justice.
David was an imaginative thinker, a maverick who inspired others. Many of the issues of New Internationalist he edited – on globalisation and fair trade, for example – were ahead of their time. He was at ease with the big economic themes, which he tackled in a way that breathed life into them. His self-deprecating humour often found its way into his writing, too.
David lived his politics and always supported younger activists and colleagues. He retired in 2009, living in a converted Dutch barge on moorings just outside Bristol, where he quickly became pivotal in a successful community battle against eviction.
He is survived by his daughter, Ximena, from his marriage to Anita, which ended in divorce, and by his twin brother, Peter.
