In an extensive discussion paper, Unite Community member GERRY LAVERY considers how Antonio Gramsci’s ideas could help challenge popular attitudes towards benefit claimants and the fight to end government sanctions. Here, he provides a brief introduction....
Re-balancing Education: Dear Labour Councillor…
BEN SELLERS wrote an angry and articulate open letter to Durham County councillors on his blog last month, following their decision to suspend plans to cut the pay of local teaching assistants. As part of our series on education, we are re-publishing his letter below, prefaced with an explanatory note from ILP chair DAVID...
Unbalanced Britain: Education and Inequality
MELISSA BENN examines the continuing inequalities in our education system, and the failures of recent governments to close the gaps. What could Labour do to promote an alternative vision? Despite endless policy initiatives, exhaustive reforms and official obeisance to the questionable aim of ‘social mobility’, our education system still has yawning gaps in outcomes between...
Re-balancing Education: The Democratic Deficit
VICKY SEDDON attended the ILP’s Unbalanced Britain conference on education last month. Here, she argues that any future progressive reforms must include changes to our structures of democracy and control. The ILP hosted a very interesting discussion on 4 March in Sheffield. Melissa Benn was informative, strategic and focussed; Julie Thorpe was interesting and thought-provoking...
Back to the Future: Re-balancing Education
Every government since New Labour has made education its top priority yet inequality still runs through the system from top to bottom. So why have they failed and how can Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party win support for a return to the principles and values of the comprehensive system? That was the question raised by...
The Road to Brexit: Why We Are So Divided
Our society is deeply divided and full of uncertainty. HUGO RADICE asks how we got here and wonders what it might take to create a more equal and united world....
Taking Back Control of our Money Supply
It’s widely assumed that the Bank of England creates money, but only 3% of the money in circulation is physical cash. The other 97 per cent is produced online by the big, commercial banks. And what’s more they make whopping profits from doing so....
The Strike that Changed the Rules
BARRY WINTER reviews the second edition of Jack Dromey and Graham Taylor’s book about the Grunwick dispute which has been republished by Lawrence & Wishart to mark the strike’s 40th anniversary. Forty years ago an amazing trade-union struggle took place in Brent in north London. Beginning very locally at the Grunwick Photo Processing Plant in...
New Labour and the Roots of Labour’s Crisis, Part 2
HARRY BARNES continues his investigation of the state of Labour, looking at the failures of the Miliband leadership, the basis for Jeremy Corbyn’s triumph and the prospects for party unity. I have never met Ed Miliband and only went to hear one or two of his platform speeches. However, I do feel that he was...
Orgreave: Still Waiting for Justice
The news that there will not be a public inquiry into the events at Orgreave during the 1984-85 miners’ strike was described by Labour’s Andy Burnham as ‘an estabishment stitch-up’. GERRY LAVERY recalls what happened 32 years ago and reports on the campaigners’ fights for justice. The news that there will not be a public...
A Visit to Glen Cottage
STEVE THOMPSON visited a Lancashire youth hostel this summer and found a memorial to one of the ILP’s founders and pioneers that is now fighting to survive. For a long time I have intended to get to know more about Lancashire, so in June this year I looked up a youth hostel in the county...
New Labour and the Roots of Labour’s Crisis, Part 1
In the first of a two-part examination of the state of the Labour Party, HARRY BARNES looks at the roots of Jeremy Corbyn’s rise and the Party’s turmoil. He begins with New Labour’s emergence after the death of John Smith. I start by referring to a period during my own time as an MP when...