Bill Bonnar

Bill Bonnar
At a Scottish Trades Union Congress rally in October 2014.
Residence	Glasgow, Scotland
Nationality	Scottish
Political party	Scottish Socialist Party

Bill Bonnar is a founding member of the Scottish Socialist Party.

A socialist activist for over forty years in Scotland, London, and Sudan, Bonnar has wide-ranging experience in the trade union movement and community politics. He worked as an aid worker in Sudan before the 1989 coup, and has worked full-time in the field of Community Development and Social and Economic Regeneration for the past 25 years.

He worked for two years as a Community Worker in South Lanarkshire, seven years as Development Officer with housing associations in Glasgow and South Lanarkshire, including Govan Housing Association, and five years as a Social Enterprise Advisor with Glasgow Regeneration Agency.

Bill has a degree in Politics and History from the University of Stirling. He is married to Vivienne and they have two daughters, Katie and Jenny.

Bill became involved in politics as a teenager, joining the UK's Young Communist League in 1974 and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1975. He was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Young Communist League and as Secretary of the Young Communist League in Scotland. At Stirling University, he was Secretary of the Communist Society.

At some point, Bill served on the editorial committee of Marxism Today, a theoretical magazine generally seen as the standard-bearer for the "reformist" wing of the CPGB. Bill remained a Communist Party member until the party's dissolution in 1991.

While in London, Bill worked for left-wing bookshop Central Books, and was chairperson of the Connolly Association's London South branch. He has held various trade union positions in Glasgow and London. During his time as an aid worker in Sudan, he was an active member of the then-legal Sudanese Communist Party in Darfur and Khartoum.