MATTHEW BROWN reviews two recent books on the early Labour movement – a hefty historical novel focused on the ILP; and a slim pamphlet on the 1924 government. There can’t be many novels that open on the morning of the ILP’s founding conference, let alone a contemporary one. But Bill Broady’s latest opus, The Night-Soil...
How would society change if no-one needed to work to stay alive? That was the question Edward Carpenter set out to answer almost 130 years ago in an essay titled ‘Transitions to Freedom’. Would it hail a new collectivist phase? And would that then lead to full individual and social liberty?...
The ILP: Past & Present, Part 2 by Barry Winter and William Brown brings the ILP’s story right up to date, covering the post-war period when it struggled to survive and retain political relevance; to 1975 when it made a bold and principled decision to return to the Labour Party as Independent Labour Publications....
English Heritage marked International Women’s Day today (8 March) by erecting one their famous blue plaques to honour the life and achievements of ILPer Ada Salter who in 1922 became the first Labour woman in Britain to be elected mayor and the first woman mayor of a London borough....
Before he died, Walter Smith wrote a personal account of growing up in a left-wing household at the start of the 20th century. It is, says MATTHEW BROWN, a poignant reflection on the hopes and failures of the socialist movement....
ILPer Ada Salter is due to be honoured with one of London’s famous blue plaques, the round English Heritage markers that “link the people of the past with the buildings of the present”....
PAUL SALVESON’s latest book is a collection of short railway stories set in northern England featuring unions, strikes, ILPers … and signalbox ghosts....
Enquiries into the nature and purpose of the Labour Party have been coming thick and fast since its calamitous defeat at the 2019 general election. The latest, and perhaps most comprehensive comes from Labour Together… ...
The lives and achievements of ILPers and ethical socialist pioneers Ada and Alfred Salter are to be celebrated with a year-long series of events in south-east London where the Salters led their ‘Bermondsey Revolution’ in the early decades of the 20th century....
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....
Members of the shadow cabinet are holding a series of online policy roundtable discussions to allow party members to feed your ideas and experiences into Labour’s policy programme....
MATTHEW BROWN reports from east London where Labour members have developed a ‘hyper local’ model of mutual aid that could help reconnect the Party with its communities....