Politicians of all shades trumpet the ideal of social mobility as a mark of a fair society. It’s a claim picked apart by Selina Todd in her rich and compelling new book, Snakes and Ladders. MARIA GOULDING is impressed by a powerful manifesto for change....
A new website has been launched by ILP and Labour movement historian Ian Bullock to highlight his decades of work examining the relationship between socialism and democracy in Britain....
MARIA GOULDING reviews Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other – an interwoven tale of diversity and race that has much to teach us about the need for tolerance in modern Britain. ...
When Eric Preston died on 20 September this year it not only brought to an end his long and active life in the struggle for socialism, but marked the passing of an era for the ILP too. Eric’s writing and thinking over more than 60 years of ILP membership was hugely influential, not only...
JAIME REYNOLDS reveals the remarkable achievements of four unknown ILP women who became important local government leaders between the wars but have since been left out of Labour history....
Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered in the run-up to the US election was a sobering and resonant experience, says MARIA GOULDING. It’s a story centred on a dilapidated old house, a powerful image for an American society struggling to overcome its legacy of lies, injustice and inequality....
WILL BROWN reviews a fascinating and timely examination of the sources of anticolonial opinion in Britain, one that reinforces the importance of new and more honest accounts of Britain’s imperial past....
PAULINE BRYAN reviews a major new biography of Sylvia Pankhurst – suffragette, class warrior and tireless campaigner against racism, fascism and imperialism. ‘Her big life deserves such a big book.’...
Labour’s founder is often presented as old and sad at the state of the world. But, argues PAULINE BRYAN in the Introduction to her latest volume of essays, his main motivation wasn’t sadness, but anger....
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 “extraordinary life and career of Fenner Brockway” is due to be explored in a new blog on the long-time ILPer and anti-war campaigner, set up by Paul Simpson of the ‘Lives on the Left’ podcast and Hazel Kent of Bishop Grosseteste University....
The need for a co-operative response to the 2019 election result and the Covid-19 pandemic, community solutions to the housing crisis and reflections on the Peterloo massacre are just a few of the issues covered in the latest edition of The Sheffield Co-operator, published this month....