News that the Clarion Cycling Club has dropped its historical association with socialism made national headlines last week as critical voices lamented the demise of one of the left’s oldest institutions. So has the Clarion changed gear? Not quite, explains the club’s former chair, IAN BULLOCK....
How can progressives describe the society they wish to build if they cannot first imagine it? CHRISTOPHER OLEWICZ recalls Fenner Brockway’s forgotten novel and laments the lack of utopian fiction for a post-Covid world....
It’s been a long, hard journey for the Selina Cooper project team in Nelson, from a dusty archive in the local library to a long-delayed public launch at one of the town’s oldest buildings. But with Covid restrictions finally easing, their struggle to commemorate the locality’s proud socialist history is finally coming to fruition....
GARY KENT reflects on the 100th anniversary of partition on 3 May and the distorted thinking that for decades dominated left-wing approaches to the province, the Troubles and the sectarian divide. ...
ROGER SMALLEY recounts the life of a Blackburn ILPer who wanted her work ‘to sting people into rebellion against poverty and fire their hearts with a cause’. Ethel Carnie left an impressive legacy of dissent that continues to have relevance today....
The first ever biography of socialist pioneer and Burnley Labour MP Dan Irving is due to be published by Nelson ILP Land Society....
The Orwell Society has released the latest recording in its online ‘George Talks’ series featuring an interview with Sylvia Topp, author of the highly-regarded biography of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy....
It is a common misconception that trade unions founded the Labour Party in 1900. Not so, says JOHN H GRIGG. It was the ILP that drove the initiative....
Like many working-class socialists, Blackburn ILPer Johnnie Duxbury left only a faint footprint on the historical record. Yet his life of brave activism and everyday kindness ‘enriches our understanding of socialist commitment’, argues ROGER SMALLEY....
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....
To mark International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we are highlighting the lives of nine ILP women who played important roles in the early years of the Labour movement. All of them were tireless campaigners for women’s votes and gender equality, and against war and poverty....
BARBARA HARGREAVES pays tribute to her father, an ILPer from Blackburn who dedicated his life to ‘every progressive cause that arose’. ‘His intelligence and integrity allowed him to transcend his circumstances and help those who could not,’ she says....