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Dawn Foster: A brilliant, working-class trailblazer who inspired a generation
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Dawn Foster was the best of us. If there is a generation of left-wing journalists and writers whose careers flourished from the magnificent protests of 2011, she was the funniest, the bluntest and the most consistently right of all of us.

The night after her death was announced last week, I lay in that space between wakefulness and sleep where all you can see is your thoughts, and processed memories. I thought about the times her writing taught me things, times she made me laugh, times she told me off for mansplaining, and that night, not long after we first met, that we got drunk in Michael Crick’s garden (she was his lodger). Times – particularly around Grenfell – that her journalism moved me. Times I was jealous of her.

We weren’t particularly close. It’s a mark of how many people thought she was great that she probably had a few hundred friends and comrades who, like me, were always delighted to sneak away from some left-wing conference or other to grab a quick drink with her, or who enjoyed an occasional silly exchange on Twitter. But it’s her close friends who will be grieving most this week, along with everyone who yearned for a better media, and a better world.

The last time we snuck away from a conference together was to an amazing Chinese restaurant in Liverpool. Dawn was furious. Her Guardian column had been getting more reads and shares than most of the more established names at the paper. But it had just been cut. The paper, she believed, was more interested in ingratiating itself with the courtiers of some Labour centrist king over the mountain than with speaking to the growing audience of not-so-young-anymore readers whose life experiences have made us furious with capitalism, the British state and its jesters.

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