Seventy years after the end of the Spanish Civil War the first ever memorial plaque to the anti-fascist British and Irish volunteers who fought alongside George Orwell in the ILP Contingent will be unveiled. Two political veterans will do the honours: Sidney Robinson, an Independent Labour Party activist in the 1930s who chaired the...
Listening to the ‘lickspittle lackeys’
BERNARD HUGHES spends an entertaining evening with a group of ex-Commies-cum-carping columnists The title of the meeting asked, ‘Where do ex-Communists go?’ Well, about 70 of them went to London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts to listen to the opinions of five figures on this question. The composition of the panel, indeed, might also have...
No solutions, much confusion
JONATHAN TIMBERS searches for the soul of social enterprise but finds a rather worrying state of mind This event was billed as ‘social enterprise solutions to 21st century challenges’. It was held in the upmarket Manchester International Convention Centre in late January 2005. I attended the conference in the hope that by the end...
Demos and disillusionment
PHIL DORÉ recounts his personal and painful journey from the Stop the War Coalition to Labour Friends of Iraq In March 2003, as the war began in Iraq, I found myself sitting in the middle of a road in Cardiff alongside hundreds of anti-war protestors. I was one of what the media had dubbed...
This world of ours
ERIC PRESTON introduces the themes of the ILP’s forthcoming weekend of discussion and political review ‘Many of us are, I believe, confused by the world we have created for ourselves in the west. We are confused by the consequences of capitalism, whose contribution to well-being cannot be questioned, but which divides rich from poor,...
Is there a song for solidarity?
SARAH BRACKING unpicks the liberal agenda behind Live8 and the G8 summit. The majority of the people attending Live8, and the demonstrations surrounding the G8, wanted no more nor less than to reduce poverty. But helping poor people in other countries raises problems, particularly when the language of benevolence doesn’t explain the structural issues...
Unite against terror
The following statement was published on the internet after the bombings in London on 7 July 2005 Terrorist attacks against Londoners on 7 July killed at least 54 people. The suicide bombers who struck in Netanya, Israel, on 12 July ended five lives, including two 16 year old girls. And on 13 July, in...
A challenge remaining
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...
Uniform ruling
BEN TURLEY reports on the implications of a House of Lords’ ruling in the school uniform court case In my article, ‘Beggars Belief’, in the last edition of Democratic Socialist, I reported on the Court of Appeal case of Begum v Denbridge High School. The court decided that the school had infringed the right...
The end of Fukuyama
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS explains why the latest pronouncements from Francis Fukuyama miss the mark I have a feeling that it must have been a disappointing week for Francis Fukuyama, whose essay ‘After Neoconservatism’ (adapted from his upcoming book America at the Crossroads) was awarded seven pages in the 19 February 2006 New York Times Magazine. The...
A revolution in contraflow
IVAN BRISCOE listens to the voices of Venezuela’s unemployed, its mobilised, its empowered and its disillusioned to portray the hopes and paradoxes of Hugo Chávez’s ‘Bolivarian revolution’ He has lived on his homestead for only a year since staging a ‘sort of invasion’, but Jovito González is already enjoying the fruits of the Caribbean....
A million on the march
GARY KENT reports on a nine day fact-finding trip to meet trade unionists in Iraq It rarely makes the news here but a million trade unionists are on the march in Iraq. A new network of non-sectarian union federations, professional associations and civil society groups has emerged in Iraq, having been brutally repressed by...