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....

The Thorn Tree

An article by ARTHUR RAISTRICK written in September 1947. The most familiar tree on the barer limestone uplands of Yorkshire is the stunted hawthorn, gnome-like in the fantastic attitudes adopted by its trunk and branches. Unconsciously, almost, it forms the inevitable ornament or relief to our remembered picture of clints or limestone scars. It...

Life in the Lead Mines

An extract from an article by ARTHUR RAISTRICK in the 1973 Yorkshire Annual. There is now available, in increasing number, books and journals on lead mining in this country. However, an examination of this literature soon reveals that the bulk of it is concerned either with the history of mining in general, processes, the...

Clarion House celebrates its centenary

Cyclists, ramblers, singers and activists gathered in the foothills around Pendle, Lancashire, to celebrate the centenary of Clarion House on 11th and 12th August. The rural tea room is the last surviving monument to a once thriving part of the Labour movement, the hundreds of Clarion societies that provided community to working people and promoted...

Crisis and a new economy

The present crisis shows that our economic model needs a radical re-design, according to Tim Jenkins of the New Economics Foundation, guest speaker at the latest 'Dialogues in Politics and Culture' event organised by the Leeds Taking Soundings group....