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’.

The International Brigades Memorial Trust is holding a special event in Manchester on 2 March to mark the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

JEFF CUTHBERT, Deputy Minister for Skills in the Welsh Government, grew up surrounded by history and principles thanks to his parents, lifelong ILPers Bill and Jennie Cuthbert.

My two brothers and I grew up with busts of James Maxton and Keir Hardie; bookshelves full of Fenner Brockway and George Orwell; regular deliveries of the Socialist Leader; holidays at summer schools (often raining); and aunties and uncles who turned out to be nothing of the kind.

Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s book about his experiences as an ILP volunteer at the Spanish Civil War, has been dramatised on Radio 4 over the last few weeks.

In the second of our anniversary profiles, MICHAEL HERBERT remembers Hannah Mitchell, lifelong socialist and suffragette, an ILPer whose posthumous autobiography is a classic account of a working class woman’s quest for personal and political liberation.

Mitchell was born in 1871 on a remote farm in Alport Dale, Derbyshire. She had just two weeks schooling, but became a local councillor, writer and magistrate.

WILL BROWN reports from the Dronfield Labour Discussion Group where more than 30 activists braved a wintery night to mark the ILP’s 120th birthday on Sunday 13 January.

“He was a great man of a new kind, which the history books have not caught up with yet,” wrote JB Priestley of Fred Jowett. IAN BULLOCK profiles the ILPer who campaigned tirelessly for democratic reform.

FW – or Fred – Jowett (1864-1944), known widely during his lifetime as ‘Jowett of Bradford’, was a prominent member of the ILP from the party’s foundation in Bradford in 1893, through all its trials, tribulations, vicissitudes and disaffiliation from Labour until his death towards the end of the Second World War.

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the ILP, a milestone in British political history that we aim to celebrate over the next 12 months.

The Independent Labour Party was founded on 13 January 1893 when some 120 delegates gathered at the Labour Institute in Bradford to create a national political party to represent working class people and strive towards a socialist society.

Read here about some of the events and activities we have planned for 2013.