Ann Black of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has circulated helpful information about the coming procedures in relation to the Labour Party’s policy formation for the 2015 general election....
Articles
WWI: Remember Those Who Refused to Fight
‘We have a duty to educate future generations about the First World War,’ declared David Cameron, announcing centenary commemorations of the war’s outbreak in 1914. We have a duty to remember the whole story, argues OWEN ADAMS, including those who opposed the conflict. ...
ILP@120: The Life and Times of Clement Attlee
Clement Attlee had a very long and productive political life. DAVID CONNOLLY provides a brief sketch of the prime minister who first learned his politics in the ILP in the early years of the 20th century. Clement Richard Attlee was born on 3 January 1883, the seventh of eight children in a deeply religious, Anglican,...
ILP@120: Mabel Tothill and the Bristol ILP
Mabel Tothill was one of a small number of wealthy women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who took up the cause of socialism and joined Bristol ILP. JUNE HANNAM tells their story. Born in Liverpool in 1869, Tothill was one of a dogged group who worked tirelessly together in socialist and Labour...
Clarion House Calls for Friends
The Nelson ILP Land Society has set up a new organisation to help preserve and maintain Clarion House, the socialist cafe and tea house which has existed on the same spot in Lancashire for more than 100 years....
Ralph Miliband and the Left Today
The enduring legacy of Ralph Miliband and his Marxist and democratic ideals will be the focus of discussion at the first Leeds Taking Soundings event of 2014....
ILP@120: Alf Mattison – Leeds Archivist and Labour Activist
A lifelong ILPer, Alf Mattison is best known as a local historian, and for his Leeds Labour archives, source of material on the movement’s early years. MICHAEL MEADOWCROFT discovers the man behind the footnotes. Socialism has always needed its scribes and archivists. Alf Mattison was both, and without him Labour history in Leeds would be...
ILP@120: Bob Edwards – A Lifetime on the Left
From Liverpool ILP to the House of Commons via Russia, Spain and the USA, Bob Edwards was politically active all his life. CHRIS HALL retraces his long journey. Bob Edwards had a remarkably long political life. He was a member of the ILP ‘Guild of Youth’, then became an ILP member and a Labour Party...
Taking Sides in the Spanish Civil War
The role of artists and writers in the Spanish Civil War will be the focus of next year’s Len Crome Memorial conference in Manchester on 1 March....
Unbalanced Britain: What Can We Do?
Our society has been deranged by neoliberal capitalism, says BARRY WINTER. How can the creative, reflective forces of the progressive left begin to counter the huge imbalances in power and wealth?...
ILP@120: Tom Maguire – A Leeds Pioneer
Tom Maguire died tragically young, but for 10 years he built a formidable reputation as an orator, organiser and poet. JOHN BATTLE tells his tale. Tom Maguire, the Leeds socialist pioneer, fought for a new politics at the end of the 19th century. He saw his struggle primarily as building up a movement to wrest...
Homage to Tom Maguire
The following extracts are from EP Thompson’s ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’, first published in 1960. The spread of socialist ideas socialist ideas was not spontaneous but was the result of the work,over many years, of a group of exceptionally gifted propagandists and trade unionists. This did not begin with street-corner oratory...