What will the election mean for the left? Where will it leave the Labour Party? How should the ILP respond?
Whatever the results we will want to talk about it. If you do too, come to the ILP’s 2010 Round Table Seminar in Scarborough on 5/6 June.
Admission is free and accommodation is available – book by [...]

WILL BROWN reflects on the disappointing outcome to the climate change talks in Copenhagen
The USA can’t commit to meaningful cuts in carbon emissions; China and other developing countries refuse to budge before industrialised countries have addressed their historic legacy of pollution; the small island, least developed and African nations insist on the need to do [...]

Across the continent, the left’s response to the recent economic crisis has been poor, verging on non-existent, just when the situation demanded a credible alternative to the dominant political and economic orthodoxy.
That’s the starting point for a Europe-wide online debate on the future of social democracy hosted by the Soundings and Social Europe websites.
“European social [...]

Words are weapons and can also save lives. It’s possible the wise words of a young Danish sociologist could have saved hundreds of lives in Northern Ireland if they had been heeded. Gary Kent explains why
This slim but weighty pamphlet was published by the Independent Labour Party in 1972 and in that year’s Socialist Register. [...]

Gary Kent argues that the global financial crisis makes the case for a Tobin Tax even more compelling.
Some ideas are nurtured for decades before they shoot to prominence usually to the surprise of those who have long advocated them. This could be the fate of the Tobin Tax, originally devised by the American Nobel Laureate [...]

It is right that there is anger over MPs’ expenses, says Will Brown, but let’s not damn all politics.
The row over MPs’ expenses and the misuse of public funds have rightly been met with pubic anger and criticism. It is indeed indefensible that MPs should be making a fast buck from the public purse at [...]

 
Crunch Times: Politics And The Crisis
 
ILP Round Table Seminar 
Esplanade Hotel, Scarborough 
13th-14th June 2009
Saturday   13th June   2.00 – 5.00pm
Sunday     14th June   9.30am – 12.30pm
 
Session 1: The economic crisis
• What just happened? 
• What does it tell us about capitalism?
Session 2: The mess we’re in
• What kind of world are we left with?
• What are the social, economic, [...]

Judging by the Compass conference in June, the left has yet to develop a coherent political strategy, says WILL BROWN
Lenin is not a figure one immediately associates with the soft left yet there he was on a giant screen at the front of a packed conference hall proclaiming ‘The victory of ideas needs organising!’. And [...]

JONATHAN TIMBERS appreciates a useful contribution to the left’s developing approach to the pensions debate
Anyone who believes that we can continue to exist as we do now with our current pension system is living in a dream world. In 2002, there were 3.35 working people for every person of pensionable age. By 2050 the ratio [...]

The education bill is a wasted opportunity, say its critics. MATTHEW BROWN looks at a comprehensive alternative
It ought to be the thing that unites us. Comprehensive education seems such a straight-forwardly progressive idea that you’d think it’d be the one area of policy the left could agree on. The notion that all children – regardless [...]