KATH CONNOLLY delves into the early life of socialist firebrand Jennie Lee, finding a woman steeped in the ILP and the politics she learned at the family fireside in Fife.

Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s I remember Jennie Lee as a small, grey-haired woman, a fiery speaker and chair of Labour Party conference. And as an Open University graduate in 1978 I was aware of her role in establishing the OU. The ILP’s 120th anniversary is an opportunity to look at the roots of her politics and her political life in more detail.

Glenn Greenwald writing in the Guardian earlier this week argued that upon their demise public figures are due a frank, rather than a respectful assessment. The ‘death etiquette’ which means we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, should not apply to public figures. The demand for ‘respectful silence’ is politically irresponsible.

During Margaret Thatcher’s time in office the ILP stood against much of what she said and did, and fought hard against her policies. Now, while Thatcher is gone, Thatcherism continues to exert a huge influence on British politics. We invite you here to post your thoughts, assessments, memories and links to the right kind of critical appraisals of Thatcher’s legacy.

The Co-operative Party is campaigning for a change in education legislation so that more academy and trust schools can be set up on a co-operative model rather than relying on backing from private companies.

GRAHAM TAYLOR celebrates the life and achievements of Alfred Salter, the brilliant doctor, Bermondsey MP and lifelong ILPer who helped transform an impoverished corner of south east London.

His life is chiefly known from Fenner Brockway’s 1949 classic of political biography, Bermondsey Story, which describes in moving terms how the young doctor dedicated his life to a slum area overrun by squalor and disease.

Just like the YTS and the New Deal, the government’s mandatory work programme will cost billions and fail to work, argues ERNIE JACQUES.

DAVID HOWELL remembers DH Lawrence and ‘the Eastwood circle’, a dissenting academy in Nottinghamshire ‘with the ILP at its heart’. Its lost world of Edwardian socialism shows that while ‘vision is essential, it is never enough’.

The Eastwood circle epitomised the ILP’s moral politics at a moment of optimism and diversity – a politics of ethical socialism, feminism, syndicalism and radical sexual thought.

Ethical socialism past and present, and its place in a ‘one nation’ Labour Party, will be the focus of debate at the ILP’s annual weekend gathering of members and friends at Scarborough’s Esplanade Hotel on 4/5 May.

Over 200 people assembled at the Manchester Conference Centre on Saturday 2 March to take part in the annual IBMT (International Brigade Memorial Trust) Len Crome Lecture. The title of the day’s conference was ‘Homage to Catalonia 75 years on’.

ERNIE JACQUES looks at the implications of a recent appeal court ruling on the case of two jobseekers denied benefits for refusing unpaid work.

Meetings about the Labour Party’s ‘one nation’ modernisation process have been coming thick and fast in the last few weeks, the latest batch a series of three at the Houses of Parliament organised by Compass, Progress and the Labour Policy Review.