BARRY WINTER remembers Staff Cottman, life-long socialist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who died last year.
Last September, after a year’s illness, Stafford Cottman died. Staff was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a life-long socialist and trade unionist. What impressed me most about him was his comradely warmth, abundant energy and self-deprecating, [...]

BARRY WINTER went to the Critical Politics conference in November, and found a Left still confused about how to respond to new times.
Organised by the Signs of the Times collective, the intellectual heirs of Marxism Today, this conference was really back to front. It concluded where it might, more usefully, have begun, with an analysis [...]

Labour Watch
David Connolly wonders what happened to one member one vote.
Pushed into enemy hands
Bernard Hughes on how the leadership is turning even some of its closest friends into foes.
Impassable impasse?
Paul Dixon wonders what next for the Northern Ireland peace process.
A task of two halves
Adam Brown reports on an acrimonious end to the Football task force..
Conference:
Critical [...]

Labour Watch
David Connolly ponders the latest example of new Labour style democracy
Republicans and the choreography of peace
Paul Dixon wonders how the Republican leaders have sold the Good Friday Agreement.
For Queen and country … and socialism
Barry Winter meets the working class unionists who tell it like it is.
Zimbabwe in crisis
William Brown looks beyond the headlines at [...]

The idea of a truth process in Northern Ireland is gaining credibility. But it’s not without its problems, as GARY KENT reports.
The Irish republican leader Gerry Adams is the latest politician to raise the possibility of a truth commission in Northern Ireland, after a generation of conflict still known euphemistically as “the Troubles”. At the [...]

Labour Watch
Ann Black describes the underground manoeuvres which damage democracy at the National Policy Forum.
Still time to change trains
Bernard Hughes picks over the origins and entrails of the railway crisis.
Gone but not forgotten
Jean Wood reports on the plight of Kosovan refugees recently sent back to their own country.
dot.com/sustainedgrowth?
William Brown wades through the myths and realities [...]

Developing democracy
Stephen Yeo argues that cooperative politics can help to address the democratic deficit.
The ILP and social change
Barry Winter outlines the ILP’s perspective and explains why it’s had to change.
Collective action and the sustainable renewal of Britain
Sean Creighton calls for a better understanding of mutual organisations, and argues that they should be a vital part [...]

As the Northern Ireland peace process lurches into another crisis, PAUL DIXON asks, what next?
When the IRA announced its ceasefire in September 1994 it was always difficult to see what kind of agreement could be reached between loyalists and republicans. The propaganda war and real (physical) war between unionists and nationalists over the years has created [...]

The challenge of mutuality
The ILP’s Weekend School in Scarborough at the beginning of May 2002 brought ILPers and non-ILPers together to discuss the politics of cooperation, mutuality and social enterprise.
Mutuality and radical politics
Sean Creighton traces the historical association of mutual organisations and the labour movement, and questions what the ‘new mutualism’ can offer to radical [...]

Behind the Stars and Stripes
Gary Kent reports on the fiery arguments that have raged on the US left and right since the attacks last September on New York and Washington.
The left, the war and the obligations of the oppressed
In the wake of September 11th, and opposition to the war on terrorism, Will Brown calls for [...]