It was 119 years ago today

It was on this day, 13th January, 119 years ago that 120 or so young, working class, mainly male delegates gathered at the Labour Institute in Bradford to found the Independent Labour Party. ...

Diary of a striking giant

John Lowe recorded everything that happened to him and his Nottinghamshire NUM comrades during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. His grandson, JONATHAN SYMCOX, who edited the newly published diary, recalls a man transformed by the dispute. John Lowe of Clipstone in Nottinghamshire was off sick in spring 1984 when the National Coal Board and Margaret Thatcher’s...

Hannah Mitchell Inspires the North

PAUL SALVESON traces the life of early ILPer Hannah Mitchell and explains why her kind of politics is still an inspiration today. When I was getting interested in working class history, back in the early 1970s, I was fascinated by a book called The Hard Way Up. It was written by a Northern working class...

A conversation with Maurice Glasman, part 2

Part two of the ILP's interview with Maurice Glasman, the social thinker most closely associated with the ideas around ‘Blue Labour’, and one of Labour leader Ed Miliband's most influential advisers. Glasman is a senior lecturer in political theory at London Metropolitan University and a former community organiser with London Citizens. He was made a...

ILPer honoured by new northern network

A dozen or so experienced politicos from across the north met at Sowerby Bridge Station one Friday earlier this month to set up ‘The Hannah Mitchell Foundation’, a think tank for northern socialists named after an old ILPer....

Leeds Summat

The Leeds Summat Gathering 2011 is a free, all-day event for people from all walks of life across Leeds and the North....

Attlee, the ILP and the Romantic Tradition

Last month JON CRUDDAS delivered the Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture at University College, Oxford. Here, in an edited version of that talk, the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, argues that, far from his cold, taciturn image, Attlee was always at heart an ILP socialist. A host of very readable biographies exist, yet there remains...

‘I have never wavered…’

The Labour Party in Perspective by Clement Attlee was published in 1937. Here are a couple of brief extracts. ‘Some thirty years ago, when I was a young barrister just down from Oxford, I engaged in various forms of social work in East London. The condition of the people in that area as I...