Unbalanced Britain: Wealth, Power and Poverty
ILP members and friends gathered at the Circle conference centre in Sheffield at the end of June for the first in a series of one-day workshops on ‘Unbalanced Britain’....
Unbalanced Britain: Corporate Power and our Me-Based Culture
Over the past 30 years the New Right, aided and abetted in some respects by New Labour, has introduced changes that have profoundly damaged, not only our economy, but British culture and politics. The result, says BARRY WINTER, is a seriously unbalanced society. We live in an era of what the American philosopher, Michael Sandel,...
Unbalanced Britain – Young People and the Living Wage
The living wage and the future for young people will be the focus of an ILP seminar on Unbalanced Britain in Sheffield next month. The crash of 2008 and its aftermath revealed the self-destructive and self-serving character of neoliberal capitalism. The high and mighty bankers and financiers, and their allies, stood exposed for unleashing an...
Unbalanced Britain: What Can We Do?
Our society has been deranged by neoliberal capitalism, says BARRY WINTER. How can the creative, reflective forces of the progressive left begin to counter the huge imbalances in power and wealth?...
Re-balancing Education: The Democratic Deficit
VICKY SEDDON attended the ILP’s Unbalanced Britain conference on education last month. Here, she argues that any future progressive reforms must include changes to our structures of democracy and control. The ILP hosted a very interesting discussion on 4 March in Sheffield. Melissa Benn was informative, strategic and focussed; Julie Thorpe was interesting and thought-provoking...
Back to the Future: Re-balancing Education
Every government since New Labour has made education its top priority yet inequality still runs through the system from top to bottom. So why have they failed and how can Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party win support for a return to the principles and values of the comprehensive system? That was the question raised by...
The Housing Crisis Analysed
The ILP has launched a new pamphlet based on its Unbalanced Britain seminar on the housing crisis held in Leeds in March this year....
Housing in Crisis: Resisting the Bill & Building Alternatives
“It’s clear the Tories are destroying the welfare state and we have to do whatever we can to stop them,” said ILP chair David Connolly as he drew the organisation’s well-attended Unbalanced Britain seminar on the housing crisis to a close in Leeds last weekend. Connolly’s cry for action came at the end of a...
Housing in Crisis: Still Time to Book
You have one week left to book your place at the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain seminar, Housing in Crisis, to be held in Leeds on Saturday 5 March. The impressive line-up of speakers includes Dr Quintin Bradley, senior lecturer in planning and housing at Leeds Beckett University, Fabian Hamilton, Labour MP for Leeds North East...
The Case for Democratic Devolution
In recent decades our society has become seriously and, indeed, dangerously unbalanced in a series of crucial, yet interlinked, ways. BARRY WINTER argues that regional devolution could play an important part in re-democratising and re-balancing society. Unbalanced Britain is being subjected to growing poverty and widening social inequalities generally; to increasing and irresponsible financial and...
Room for Rent?
The housing market is broken. And those who rely on rental properties are often at the sharp end, as MARY HULL discovered when her son was forced to find a new home. It’s a dispiriting tale of unscrupulous landlords, powerless tenants and squalid, overpriced flats....
Radical Solutions to the Housing Crisis
Housing and planning expert Duncan Bowie has produced a blueprint for Labour Party housing policy in a new publication that argues for an integrated approach on land, taxation, planning and public investment to provide radical solutions to the growing crisis....