BEN SELLERS wrote an angry and articulate open letter to Durham County councillors on his blog last month, following their decision to suspend plans to cut the pay of local teaching assistants. As part of our series on education, we are re-publishing his letter below, prefaced with an explanatory note from ILP chair DAVID...
Unbalanced Britain: Education and Inequality
MELISSA BENN examines the continuing inequalities in our education system, and the failures of recent governments to close the gaps. What could Labour do to promote an alternative vision? Despite endless policy initiatives, exhaustive reforms and official obeisance to the questionable aim of ‘social mobility’, our education system still has yawning gaps in outcomes between...
Re-balancing Education: The Democratic Deficit
VICKY SEDDON attended the ILP’s Unbalanced Britain conference on education last month. Here, she argues that any future progressive reforms must include changes to our structures of democracy and control. The ILP hosted a very interesting discussion on 4 March in Sheffield. Melissa Benn was informative, strategic and focussed; Julie Thorpe was interesting and thought-provoking...
Back to the Future: Re-balancing Education
Every government since New Labour has made education its top priority yet inequality still runs through the system from top to bottom. So why have they failed and how can Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party win support for a return to the principles and values of the comprehensive system? That was the question raised by...
Taking Back Control of our Money Supply
It’s widely assumed that the Bank of England creates money, but only 3% of the money in circulation is physical cash. The other 97 per cent is produced online by the big, commercial banks. And what’s more they make whopping profits from doing so....
Unbalanced Britain: Education, Inequality & Labour’s Response
Labour and co-operative responses to the crisis in the education system is the subject of the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain meeting in Sheffield on Saturday 4 March. With speakers Melissa Benn and Julie Thorpe, the seminar will examine how changes to the education system have increased inequality and widened the gap between the privileged few...
Unbalanced Britain: Benn to put Education in the Spotlight
Education will come under the spotlight at the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain seminar on 4 March when writer and campaigner Melissa Benn will speak about the Labour Party’s response to the last decade of education reforms....
Finding a Progressive Future in Post-Brexit Britain
Leading thinkers and key figures in the Labour movement will come together with grassroots organisers and activists at a conference in London on Saturday 5 November to “take stock, discuss policy solutions and map a progressive path forward for Britain” post-Brexit....
Pigs, PR and Politics
GERRY LAVERY reviews Call Me Dave, the recent very unauthorised biography of the prime minister, and asks what Labour and the left have to learn from his and the Tories’ electoral success....
Rethinking Housing
In November 2015 Labour’s Leeds North East MP Fabian Hamilton launched the Building Homes for Britain report. Here, its researcher and editor SIMON JOSE outlines the report’s core ideas and explains why a complete rethink of housing policy is needed. For decades the housing market has trundled towards the chaotic state it is in today....
The Housing Crisis and the Struggle for Affordable Homes
The government’s housing policies are aimed directly at people with the fewest resources and the lowest resistance, says ELLEN ROBOTTOM – which means community campaigns such as hers are more vital than ever. In his discussion of the Housing and Planning Bill, Dr Quintin Bradley explored an increasingly familiar characteristic of ‘welfare’ policy: namely, that...
The Housing Crisis Weaponised
The government does not intend to solve our housing crisis, says QUINTIN BRADLEY. Instead it is using it as a weapon of policy against the beliefs and attitudes that sustain the welfare state....