World leaders gather in Glasgow this week for the 12-day United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP26. WILL BROWN explains the background and key issues at what’s been called the most important summit in history....
An Author for All Seasons, a Writer for our Times
MARIA GOULDING reflects on Ali Smith’s recently completed series of seasonal novels, an interwoven quartet written and published each year since the Brexit referendum. They are, she says, ‘both enjoyable and serious novels for our times’....
The Wonder of Clare in a Time of Crisis
For MARIA GOULDING, John Clare’s poetry is not only uplifting and restorative, but deeply relevant in our age of environmental uncertainty and social unease....
The Root of the Problem
MARIA GOULDING reviews The Overstory by Richard Powers – probably ‘the best novel ever written about trees’, a tale with a compelling political message for our lockdown times. The characters and narrative are engrossing, and the big themes are of urgent contemporary relevance....
Coronavirus: Dronfield Still Blathering Despite the Lockdown
HARRY BARNES reports from North Derbyshire, where the area’s former Labour MP is doing his bit to remain politically active in the face of Covid-19....
Fragile Times
DAVID CONNOLLY reflects on the fallout from December’s general election and the unnerving sense of a fast changing and precarious world. The core statistics of last month’s general election make grim reading…...
Climate Change: Technology, Politics and Protest
BOB HARRISON reviews the evidence of unprecedented climate change and asks what can be done to slow global warming and mitigate its impact. The Earth’s climate is unstable. It has gone through many phases over geological time, some of which have caused major life extinctions....
A Day for Ada
The Labour left today could do with a few members like Ada Salter, the quietly-spoken, peace-loving ILPer whose pioneering work transformed south-east London in the early decades of the 20th century. MATTHEW BROWN attended the first Ada Salter Day. There have been many reasons in recent weeks to yearn for a different kind of...
COP21: ‘1.5 We Might Survive’
Global Justice Now have greeted the climate change agreement fostered by world leaders in Paris last weekend as one gutted of “any sort of equity” and weakened by a lack of legally binding instruments....
Last Chance to Book for the ILP’s Unbalanced Britain Seminar
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...
Blue Labour Thinkers Gather in Nottingham
Blue Labour thinkers, supporters and activists met at Nottingham University on 5 July to discuss ‘The Strength of Association: in the Family, Community and Workplace’....
ILP@120: Arthur Raistrick – The Dales’ Own Man of Peace
BARRY WINTER remembers Arthur Raistrick, the writer, geologist, pacifist, educator and ILPer who became the ‘Dalesman of the Millennium’. Arthur Raistrick was born in 1896 into a working class family in the model industrial village of Saltaire in Yorkshire. His mother, Minnie, together with other relatives, worked at the famous Salt’s textile Mill. His father,...