The Porta de la Historia co-operative is organising a weekend trip to Catalonia to commemorate the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s wounding outside Huesca.

Throughout the turbulence of the past 120 years, the ILP has been firmly committed to the idea of equality and common humanity of all peoples.

Part four of The ILP: Past & Present featuring the ILP in the 1930s, its role in the Spanish Civil War, and its attitude to the Second World War. It also covers the post-war decline of the ILP as a political force before its re-constitution as Independent Labour Publications in 1975.

This is the latest extract from a 1993 pamphlet written by BARRY WINTER which we are planning to re-write. We are putting the text online in six stages, supplemented by a series of ‘side stories’, and invite you to comment on the contents.

It was on this day, 13th January, 119 years ago that 120 or so young, working class, mainly male delegates gathered at the Labour Institute in Bradford to found the Independent Labour Party.

John Lowe recorded everything that happened to him and his Nottinghamshire NUM comrades during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. His grandson, JONATHAN SYMCOX, who edited the newly published diary, recalls a man transformed by the dispute.

John Lowe of Clipstone in Nottinghamshire was off sick in spring 1984 when the National Coal Board and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government put into motion their long-prepared pit closure programme. The miners’ strike for jobs erupted almost overnight.

PAUL SALVESON traces the life of early ILPer Hannah Mitchell and explains why her kind of politics is still an inspiration today.

When I was getting interested in working class history, back in the early 1970s, I was fascinated by a book called The Hard Way Up. It was written by a Northern working class woman called Hannah Mitchell. She was born in rural North Derbyshire and moved as a young girl to what must have seemed like the thriving metropolis of Bolton, where I was brought up. She became involved in the embryonic socialist movement and read Blatchford’s Clarion newspaper.

The third of six instalments from The ILP: Past & Present covering the rise of the Labour Party, the ILP’s growing disaffection and its eventual disaffiliation.

The ILP had branches across Britain. In some places, it was not only strong but influential.

Part two of the ILP’s interview with Maurice Glasman, the social thinker most closely associated with the ideas around ‘Blue Labour’, and one of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s most influential advisers.

Glasman is a senior lecturer in political theory at London Metropolitan University and a former community organiser with London Citizens. He was made a peer by Miliband in February this year.

Socialism did not begin with the ILP. But the ILP created a unique blend of socialism. Not only did it achieve independent representation for labour and links with the trade unions, it also worked outside the formal political structures.