The Socialist Health Association has highlighted five ways the government’s health reforms have failed to improve patient care, the criteria used by former health secretary Andrew Lansley to defend his policies against a damning King’s Fund report last month. The King’s Fund health think tank described Lansley’s reforms as “damaging and distracting” for introducing even...
Resisting Austerity, Edinburgh Style
MIKE CORMACK, of Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty, describes some of the direct action being taken in the Scottish capital to resist the coalition’s attacks on welfare. In Edinburgh claimants and low-paid workers are organising through Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty to support each other and take action to resist workfare, benefit cuts and austerity attacks....
Labour Calls on Members to ‘Keep It Co-op’
The Labour Party has called on its members to support the Co-operative Party’s ‘Keep it Co-op’ campaign, warning that its historic relationship with the co-op movement is under threat due to Co-operative Group proposals to break the political links....
Democracy, Media and the Miners’ Strike
Past and present struggles for pluralism in the media will be under the spotlight at the Red Shed in Wakefield next month when the Wakefield Socialist History Group hold their next pre-election public meeting in conjunction with the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom....
Unbalanced Britain: The Living Wage and Labour’s Future
The Rose Bowl at Leeds Beckett University was the venue for the ILP’s second Unbalanced Britain seminar on 14 March, examining the campaign for a living wage and Labour’s response. The recession and its lop-sided recovery have left millions of working people in poverty, claimed Tom Chigbo of Leeds Citizens. Addressing the latest ILP seminar...
Reasons for Hope?
HARRY BARNES picks apart the Labour Party’s policy process and finds a raft of positive proposals. He just wishes they were being delivered in a less piecemeal way....
Unions at the Heart of the Welfare State
GERRY LAVERY, JOE ROLLIN and CALLUM STANLAND report from ‘Unions at the heart of the welfare state’, a national conference called by the TUC National Consultative Committee for Unemployed Workers’ Centres....
Red Flag Over Bermondsey
A new play about the remarkable London ILPer, Ada Salter, will be performed live in Birmingham for the first time next Saturday, 21 March, before it sets out on a tour of venues across the country over the next few months....
Weekend of Action to Expose the Real UKIP
Anti-extremist organisation Hope not Hate have called a national weekend of action to campaign against the UK Independence Party and expose what it calls ‘the real UKIP’, revealing the truth about its policies and views....
Unbalanced Britain: Nearly 700,000 on Zero-Hours Contracts
The GMB has pointed out that nearly 700,000 workers are on zero-hours contracts despite working on average 25 hours per week, and called on the Labour Party “to deal with exploitation and harassment of workers which it has ignored for too long”. ...
Growing Up in an ILP Household
It is with great sadness that we learned recently of the death of the ILP’s oldest member, Jennie Cuthbert. Jennie died peacefully in her sleep on Monday 9 March. Her lifelong membership of the ILP provided a living link between the modern organisation and the party’s earliest decades. ...
Don’t Let Them Drown
The South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group is calling for people to join them on a demonstration in Sheffield against government policy on refugees and asylum seekers....