Your editorial (28 May) on Corbyn and McDonnell’s social economics highlighted the debt we owe to Karl Polanyi’s ideas and writings. Keith Flett and others (Letters, 1 June) picked up on Polanyi’s important influence on EP Thompson and others. However, they did not mention Polanyi’s formative influence on Edward Goldsmith (Obituary, 29 August 2009), ecological campaigner and founder of what became the Ecology party, now the Green party. Polanyi and his wife fled Nazi-occupied Austria to live and work (lecturing for the WEA) in Kent. Local historian Joy Saynor records in her book (Shoreham at War, 2006) that during the war Polanyi lived in Holly Place, Shoreham, before emigrating to Canada in 1944, and publishing his great work there (The Great Transformation, 1944).
David Rushton
Shoreham, Kent
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