The following is a statement – ‘a modest perspective’ – prepared by the ILP’s National Administrative Council for discussion at the 2010 ILP Weekend Seminar, ‘After the Election, What Next for the Left?’, to be held in Scarborough on 5-6 June. We hope it will stimulate comment and debate here on the website, at...
Disaffiliation and its aftermath
For all its fascinating detail and insights, IAN BULLOCK wants more from Gidon Cohen’s The Failure of a Dream This account of the ILP in the 1930s begins with an outline of the party’s history during the seven years between leaving the Labour Party and the outbreak of war. The second chapter looks at...
The Failure of a Dream
A recent book provides a “just about” convincing argument that the ILP’s decline in the 1930s was not an inevitable consequence of disaffiliation. CHRISTOPHER HALL reviews Gidon Cohen’s welcome attempt to fill a gap in ILP history The history of the Independent Labour Party from its foundation until it was disaffiliated from the Labour...
The void in the mind of the left
The Compass lecture given by Jon Cruddas attracted a lot of coverage last week. But there was a familiar hole in the heart of his plan for the left, says Matthew Brown Whatever else you might say about Compass, the Labour left pressure group, those people certainly know which way is north when it...
Crunch Times
“There is a sense of uncertainty and flux, a feeling that we’re coming to the end of an era in politics. It’s one that we’ve never much liked, yet we know what’s coming could be so much worse.” With those unsettling words David Connolly, chair of Independent Labour Publications, opened the ILP’s weekend seminar...
ILP Weekend 2009
—- Crunch Times: Politics And The Crisis “You can only be flabbergasted … at how Labour kowtowed to wealth, glorified the City and put all the nation’s economic eggs into one dangerous basket.” Polly Toynbee, The Guardian ILP Round Table Seminar Esplanade Hotel, Scarborough 13th-14th June 2009 Saturday 13th June 2.00 pm start...
Listening to the ‘lickspittle lackeys’
BERNARD HUGHES spends an entertaining evening with a group of ex-Commies-cum-carping columnists The title of the meeting asked, ‘Where do ex-Communists go?’ Well, about 70 of them went to London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts to listen to the opinions of five figures on this question. The composition of the panel, indeed, might also have...
A challenge remaining
Judging by the Compass conference in June, the left has yet to develop a coherent political strategy, says WILL BROWN Lenin is not a figure one immediately associates with the soft left yet there he was on a giant screen at the front of a packed conference hall proclaiming ‘The victory of ideas needs...
Critical times in a back to front world
BARRY WINTER went to the Critical Politics conference in November, and found a Left still confused about how to respond to new times. Organised by the Signs of the Times collective, the intellectual heirs of Marxism Today, this conference was really back to front. It concluded where it might, more usefully, have begun, with...
Theatres of conflict
JONATHAN TIMBERS rallies to remember the October revolution and spends a day at Millbank and Number 10 – all in one very bizarre week in November. When Harold Wilson said ‘a week is a long time in politics’, perhaps he should have added that sometimes an hour can seem even longer when you’re stuck...
Defective permanent revolutionary
MIKE WADSWORTH reviews the autobiography of SWP founder Tony Cliff. Tony Cliff’s autobiography was published shortly after his death last year. It is written in an almost conversational manner and shows that, as Paul Foot writes in the introduction, “Tony Cliff was not a humble man and his account (which he started only because...
An activist’s life
MIKE WADSWORTH reviews the recent biography of lifetime communist Edmund Frow, written by his wife. Ruth Frow points out that this biography of Eddie Frow is largely anecdotal and is not the detached recital of a life that would have been produced by a biographer less closely involved with the subject. In this regard...