Meetings about the Labour Party’s ‘one nation’ modernisation process have been coming thick and fast in the last few weeks, the latest batch a series of three at the Houses of Parliament organised by Compass, Progress and the Labour Policy Review....
Handle with Care
The Co-operative Party is increasingly enthusiastic about co-operative councils. But it lacks a coherent philosophy and rationale for its position. We need to be cautious, argues JOHN HALSTEAD. ...
Orwell to be honoured by International Brigades
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....
On ‘The Common Table’
BARRY WINTER argues that a recent article by Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford, two men at the heart of Labour’s policy review, is the most imaginative line of thinking for the left and the party we have seen for more than a generation. ...
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...
Unfair benefit changes causing poverty and anxiety
Britons are living in fear of deepening poverty as a result of the government’s attack on the benefits system, a new poll reveals today (Monday 11 February)....
Abuse is No Solution
I would like to draw your attention to a letter in the Independent on Sunday on 3 February about the Gerald Scarfe cartoon published in the Sunday Times the previous weekend....
Homage to Catalonia on Radio4
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....
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: Lessons from History
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....
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...
ILP@120: The Gift of an Ethical Politics
BARRY WINTER introduces our series of features on ILPers which begins with Fred Jowett, profiled by Ian Bullock, and will continue on the ILP website throughout the year....