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...
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....
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....
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...
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...
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....
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?...
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...
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...
The death of Nelson Mandela in South Africa has rightly led to a flood of tributes from public figures all over the world. But we should remember that change in South Africa was the result of long, hard political struggle....
The Unite union has joined calls for a parliamentary debate into UK hunger as foodbanks brace themselves to feed 60,000 people this Christmas....
‘Change: How?’ was the deliberately open question posed by the recent Compass conference in London. But the event raised another question too – has the organisation changed so much it’s lost its political bearings? MATTHEW BROWN reports. It was nearly three years ago when Compass decided to change. Set up in 2003 to galvanise the...