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,...
ILP@120: Fred Jowett – ‘A great man of a new kind’
“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...
Good old George
JON CRUDDAS MP recalls the life of former Labour leader and east London ILPer George Lansbury, arguing that his life, work and principles crystallise the journey of political rediscovery underway in Ed Miliband’s ‘one nation’ Labour Party. George Lansbury is one of the great heroes of the Labour Party. He was to quote the great...
Make the Living Wage Compulsory
The campaign for a living wage is now supported by the TUC and the Labour Party, plus many universities, some local authorities, and some businesses and charitable organisations. It is long overdue, says ERNIE JACQUES, but to have a real impact a living wage must be compulsory....
The Challenge of a Generation
Growing poverty and inequality in Europe prove that the market alone cannot deliver. It’s time to change the narrative, says JUDITH KIRTON-DARLING, Confederal Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). Here, she sets out the terms of a new European social contract. Austerity and poverty in Europe are blighting our continent. Both are having...
Meet the New Boss
The UK government has created a new profit source for security giant G4S and its partners: managing housing for asylum seekers. JOHN GRAYSON reports on a reckless experiment whose result is human misery. On the evening of Tuesday 30 October a new asylum seeker sent from London, 250 miles north to a property in Thornaby,...
A Labour Movement Alternative
As the Scottish independence debate heats up, PAULINE BRYAN argues that the status quo, devo max, devo plus and the SNP version of independence are each built on a neo-liberal model of economics. In their own ways, she says, they prevent even a classical social democratic approach to fiscal policy and the stimulation of economic...
Radical Regionalism or a Retreat to the Heartlands?
DAVID CONNOLLY is unconvinced by the central argument of Paul Salveson’s Socialism with a Northern Accent....
Labour of Love: The Robert Smillie Story
DAVID HOPPER, General Secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, looks back at the remarkable life of Robert ‘Bob’ Smillie as he reviews a new book on the Labour movement pioneer....
A Tale of Two Cities
MAURICE GLASMAN traces the history of the City and asks, 'Whatever happened to London?' For the first 1500 years of its civic life, London conformed to the European pattern of urban development as a self-governing city, free from feudal Lordship and hospitable to the civic virtues of legality, trade, democratic self-government and professional association....
Lessons of the May Day Manifesto
The British New Left had a critical approach towards neoliberal and authoritarian models of modernisation, ideas shared by more recent political trends, says MICHAEL RUSTIN in this his talk to the British New Left and Labour seminar held in London in June 2012....