MELISSA BENN examines the continuing inequalities in our education system, and the failures of recent governments to close the gaps. What could Labour do to promote an alternative vision? Despite endless policy initiatives, exhaustive reforms and official obeisance to the questionable aim of ‘social mobility’, our education system still has yawning gaps in outcomes between...
Labour and co-operative responses to the crisis in the education system is the subject of the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain meeting in Sheffield on Saturday 4 March. With speakers Melissa Benn and Julie Thorpe, the seminar will examine how changes to the education system have increased inequality and widened the gap between the privileged few...
Education will come under the spotlight at the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain seminar on 4 March when writer and campaigner Melissa Benn will speak about the Labour Party’s response to the last decade of education reforms....
Unbalanced Britain: Housing in Crisis, by Quintin Bradley, Simon Jose, Ellen Robottom and Barry Winter, is a 20-page A5 pamphlet that brings together contributions from three of the main speakers at the ILP’s Unbalanced Britain seminar on the housing crisis held in Leeds in March 2016. A report of that conference is available here...
The Tory Housing Bill and Britain's housing crisis will be the subject of the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain meeting in Leeds on Saturday 5 March with Dr Quintin Bradley, Fabian Hamilton MP and Ellen Robottom from Hands off our Homes....
Unbalanced Britain: Corporate Power and our Me-based Culture, by Barry Winter, is an eight-page A4 pamphlet based on Barry’s introductory talk at the ILP’s first ‘Unbalanced Britain’ workshop at the Circle centre in Sheffield on 28 June 2014. Updated in 2015, it provides useful background reading for the ILP’s series of Unbalanced Britain meetings...
The Rose Bowl at Leeds Beckett University was the venue for the ILP’s second Unbalanced Britain seminar on 14 March, examining the campaign for a living wage and Labour’s response. The recession and its lop-sided recovery have left millions of working people in poverty, claimed Tom Chigbo of Leeds Citizens. Addressing the latest ILP seminar...
The GMB has pointed out that nearly 700,000 workers are on zero-hours contracts despite working on average 25 hours per week, and called on the Labour Party “to deal with exploitation and harassment of workers which it has ignored for too long”. ...
It’s the last chance to book for the ILP’s free Unbalanced Britain seminar on ‘Work, Wages and Labour’ in Leeds this Saturday, 14 March. The second in the ILP’s Unbalanced Britain series, this one-day workshop will explore on-going changes in the labour market and work conditions, their political and social consequences, and what is being...
Since the crash of 2008 the dominance of corporate elites has remained largely unchanged and unchallenged. Instead we have seen ever-increasing pressure on wages and conditions of work, zero hours contracts and cuts to in-work benefits. The ILP’s second seminar in its Unbalanced Britain series on Saturday 14 March will explore the on-going changes in...
BARRY WINTER assesses the work of David Marquand and considers what it can offer a left desperately seeking some answer to society’s massive imbalance in power and wealth....
GREG ROBERTS is an apprentice accountant and youth campaigner in north east Derbyshire. In June he spoke to the ILP’s day school on Unbalanced Britain about life for young people in these austere times. Despite being born and spending half of my early childhood in Sheffield, I have, for the past eight years, lived on...