| Nina Temple | |
| Office: | General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain |
| Term Start: | January 1990 |
| Term End: | November 1991 |
| Predecessor: | Gordon McLennan |
| Successor: | Post abolished |
| Office2: | General Secretary of the Young Communist League |
| Term Start2: | 1979 |
| Term End2: | 1983 |
| Predecessor2: | Tom Bell |
| Successor2: | Douglas Chalmers |
| Birth Name: | Nina Claire Temple |
| Birth Date: | 1956 4, df=y |
| Birth Place: | Westminster, London, England |
| Party: | Communist Party of Great Britain |
| Otherparty: | Democratic Left |
| Alma Mater: | Imperial College, London |
Nina Claire Temple (born 21 April 1956)[1] is a British politician who was the last Secretary[2] of the Communist Party of Great Britain and was formerly a think-tank director in the United Kingdom.
Temple was born in Westminster, London, the daughter of Barbara J. (Rainnie) and Landon Roy Temple. Born into a communist family (her father ran Progressive Tours and was a Communist Party of Great Britain member),[2] she joined the Young Communist League when she was 13, later protesting in London against the Vietnam War. She has a degree in materials science from Imperial College, London. She is the sister of film director Julien Temple and the aunt of actress Juno Temple.[3]
During the late 1970s she was general secretary of the Young Communist League and became a prominent member of the Eurocommunist faction within the party. She became a member of the CPGB executive in 1979, and then a member of the Political Committee in January 1982.[4]
She was the Press and Publicity Officer of the CPGB from January 1983 until 1989,[5] when she became the last general secretary of the party in January 1990, aged 33.[6] She pledged to make the party "feminist and green, as well as democratically socialist."[7] In this role Temple became one of the leading proponents of the dissolution of the CPGB in November 1991, and the founding of its legal successor, the Democratic Left,[8] [9] proclaiming that "The internationalism of the 1990s will be as much informed by Greenpeace and Oxfam, as communism once was by Marx and Engels".[10]
The Democratic Left continued through the 1990s, becoming the New Politics Network in 1999. Temple was its first director[8] and worked for five years for the Make Votes Count Coalition.[11]
In June 2005 she started work as head of development and communications at the Social Market Foundation, a role she held until 2008.
Temple has two children with a schoolteacher, a daughter born in 1987 and a son born in 1988.[6]
Temple became ill with Parkinson's disease in 2000.[12] She trained in counselling at the Gestalt Centre in Old Street, and in September 2003 founded Sing For Joy, a choir of people with chronic degenerative diseases.[12] [13] [14]