IAN BULLOCK assesses the record of the ILP between the wars and seeks to draw a few lessons for Labour and the left today. All in all, he says, the influence of the radical and democratic ILP on the Labour Party of the later 20th century was an extremely positive one....
Behind the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst were many lesser-known figures in the Votes for Women campaign in the north of England, some of them members of the ILP. ANTONIA CHARLESWORTH remembers their contribution to the fight for women’s suffrage and profiles one Lancashire ILPer who played her part. Manchester’s place in the history of...
The ILP celebrates its 125th anniversary this week. BARRY WINTER marks the organisation’s brithday with a brief survey of its history and consideration of the lessons it can pass on to today’s left....
Labour is facing an existential crisis, and parallels with the 1980s are painfully obvious. But the roots of the current crisis go much deeper, writes MARTIN WRIGHT. The Labour Party is the child of hope and compromise. Its political DNA was made from two main elements more than a century ago. One was the counter-cultural,...
‘We have a duty to educate future generations about the First World War,’ declared David Cameron, announcing centenary commemorations of the war’s outbreak in 1914. We have a duty to remember the whole story, argues OWEN ADAMS, including those who opposed the conflict. ...
Labour MP JON CRUDDAS recently delivered the inaugural George Lansbury Memorial Lecture at Queen Mary University in Mile End, east London. He called it ‘The Choice before One Nation Labour – to Transact or Transform’. Here is the text. George Lansbury is one of the great figures in the history of the Labour Party, a...
RAE STREET unveils the life and work of Enid Stacy, a young woman from Bristol whose contribution to the spread of early socialist ideas has often been overlooked. To understand how Enid Stacy, a young woman in Victorian society, became an active socialist and anti-war activist against the Boer War, we need to look at...
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....
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,...
“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...
PAUL SALVESON traces the life of early ILPer Hannah Mitchell and explains why her kind of politics is still an inspiration today. When I was getting interested in working class history, back in the early 1970s, I was fascinated by a book called The Hard Way Up. It was written by a Northern working class...
Socialism did not begin with the ILP. But the ILP created a unique blend of socialism. Not only did it achieve independent representation for labour and links with the trade unions, it also worked outside the formal political structures....