BARRY WINTER reports from two meetings in Leeds addressed by the Labour peer and policy advisor Maurice Glasman earlier this month. Maurice Glasman, who is centrally involved in developing Labour’s new programme, began by addressing the question of where the Labour Party is today. New Labour has left us with a difficult inheritance, he argued....
ILP@120: Storm in the Making
DAVE WALSH profiles Whitby-born novelist Storm Jameson, the socialist, feminist and activist who was an early ILP supporter and lifelong campaigner for a better society....
ILP@120: Isabella Ford – Socialist, Feminist and Peace Campaigner
JUNE HANNAM traces the life of Isabella Ford, the Leeds ILPer whose tireless campaigning for women’s rights, ‘new life’ socialism and peace remains an inspiration today. Isabella Ford was one of a small number of middle-class women who joined the Independent Labour Party in the 1890s; for her, the struggle for socialism was inextricably bound...
ILP@120: Remembering Stan and Ivy
LEON IVESON’s childhood memories include numerous ILP conferences, Socialist Sunday School football matches and events at the ILP’s Clarion House. Here, he remembers growing up with his parents, dedicated ILPers, Stan and Ivy Iveson....
ILP@120: Stafford Cottman – ‘A warm and generous man’
CHRIS HALL recalls the life of a genuine, nice guy, ILPer and Spanish Civil War veteran Stafford Cottman. I feel very honoured to write a brief biography about Staff Cottman – ILP activist, Spanish Civil War veteran, socialist, internationalist, trade unionist, personal friend of George Orwell, Labour Party activist, and a genuine, nice guy....
In Spain with Orwell
BARRY WINTER reviews Chris Hall’s latest book on the ILP and the Spanish Civil War....
ILP@120: Keir Hardie – Labour’s champion
PAUL SIMPSON examines the life and politics of ILP founder Keir Hardie, uncovering staunch principles, distinct traits and personal contradictions. James Keir Hardie was born in Lanarkshire in Scotland in August 1856. At seven he began work as a message boy and by the age of 10 he was working in a mine as a...
ILP@120: Jennie Lee – A Child of the ILP
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....
ILP@120: Alfred Salter & the Bermondsey Revolution
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...
ILP@120: Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
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...
Academies and Lies
The tale of a north London primary school which resisted Michael Gove’s forced academy programme has been captured in a powerful new documentary. MATTHEW BROWN reports. In September 2011, pupils and teachers returned to Downhills Primary in Haringey, north London, for the start of a new school year full of hope and optimism about...
ILP@120: Bread, and Roses Too
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,...