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....
Blair, New Labour and the Party’s Crisis
The Blair Supremacy is a timely and important book, says SARAH PERRIGO, which shines a light on the causes of Labour’s current crisis and its election defeat last May....
Blair, Management and Neoliberalism
New Labour’s transformation of party management was part of a much wider social transformation across the West, argues HUGO RADICE....
Assessing the Blair Supremacy
BARRY WINTER considers the culture, impact and legacy of Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party, greatly aided by Lewis Minkin’s The Blair Supremacy, published to great acclaim two years ago. In his dual role as academic and political insider, Lewis Minkin has produced three monumental books on the Labour Party. Each is a substantial...
The Left, the ILP and the Corbyn Leadership
JONATHAN TIMBERS wants to kickstart the left (and the ILP) into discussing the major challenges facing Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. We all have responsibility to come up with some answers....
Ada Salter: Pioneer of Ethical Socialism
Graham Taylor’s fine biography of Ada Salter provides a vivid account of the ILP’s ethical socialism as she lived it, says BARRY WINTER. Ada Salter’s hands-on approach to making the world a better place is told with clarity and passion in Graham Taylor’s new biography of the pioneering ILPer. Moreover, Ada’s busy life is explored...
Why Labour Lost the General Election
Labour’s defeat at last year’s general election wasn’t due to a lack of good policies, says HARRY BARNES. There were plenty, but most of them hardly saw the light of day....
A Bridge Over Troubled Water?
Labour’s disunity has been much in evidence recently. ALEX SOBEL argues that Open Labour can act as a bridge for those in the party who want to build an anti-Tory alliance based on an inclusive and empowering politics. At present, our party doesn’t look like a united party to those looking in from the outside....
Unbalanced Britain: Housing in Crisis
The Tory Housing Bill and Britain's housing crisis will be the subject of the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain meeting in Leeds on Saturday 5 March with Dr Quintin Bradley, Fabian Hamilton MP and Ellen Robottom from Hands off our Homes....
Homage to Tom Maguire
Homage to Tom Maguire by EP Thompson is a 40-page, A5 pamphlet about the Leeds ILPer, poet, propagandist and photographer Tom Maguire, a radical organiser who played a vital role in the Leeds gas strike of 1890 but died in poverty five years later at the tragically young age of 29. Originally published in...
Living for That Better Day
Keir Hardie dedicated himself to ‘constant agitation’ and left a singular political legacy in the form of the Labour Party. David Connolly reviews What Would Keir Hardie Say?, a book of essays published last September to coincide with the centenary of Hardie’s death. Keir Hardie is an iconic figure in the history of the Labour...
John McNair’s Spanish Diary
John McNair’s Spanish Diary is a first-hand account of the Spanish Civil War written by a lifelong ILPer who later became the organisation’s general secretary. This pamphlet contains a brief account of McNair’s life followed by his own contemporary, first-hand reporting of events in Spain in 1936. Almost eight decades later, it remains a compelling...