GERRY LAVERY reviews Call Me Dave, the recent very unauthorised biography of the prime minister, and asks what Labour and the left have to learn from his and the Tories’ electoral success....
Rethinking Housing
In November 2015 Labour’s Leeds North East MP Fabian Hamilton launched the Building Homes for Britain report. Here, its researcher and editor SIMON JOSE outlines the report’s core ideas and explains why a complete rethink of housing policy is needed. For decades the housing market has trundled towards the chaotic state it is in today....
The Housing Crisis and the Struggle for Affordable Homes
The government’s housing policies are aimed directly at people with the fewest resources and the lowest resistance, says ELLEN ROBOTTOM – which means community campaigns such as hers are more vital than ever. In his discussion of the Housing and Planning Bill, Dr Quintin Bradley explored an increasingly familiar characteristic of ‘welfare’ policy: namely, that...
Halting the Unions’ Decline
Trade unions are in a spot of bother, according to SHEILA BANKS. And Labour is partly to blame. The party needs a new way of connecting to union members that taps directly into their workplace experience. Throughout my working life, I have been an active trade unionist and representative, so I want to look at...
The Housing Crisis Weaponised
The government does not intend to solve our housing crisis, says QUINTIN BRADLEY. Instead it is using it as a weapon of policy against the beliefs and attitudes that sustain the welfare state....
Blair, Management and Neoliberalism
New Labour’s transformation of party management was part of a much wider social transformation across the West, argues HUGO RADICE....
Debating the EU: Sovereignty, Autonomy and Power
The ever louder debate over the European Union is hampered by confusion and misunderstanding about state sovereignty, says WILL BROWN. The left is often befuddled itself which does nothing to help it confront the real issues....
Housing in Crisis: Resisting the Bill & Building Alternatives
“It’s clear the Tories are destroying the welfare state and we have to do whatever we can to stop them,” said ILP chair David Connolly as he drew the organisation’s well-attended Unbalanced Britain seminar on the housing crisis to a close in Leeds last weekend. Connolly’s cry for action came at the end of a...
Ada Salter: Pioneer of Ethical Socialism
Graham Taylor’s fine biography of Ada Salter provides a vivid account of the ILP’s ethical socialism as she lived it, says BARRY WINTER. Ada Salter’s hands-on approach to making the world a better place is told with clarity and passion in Graham Taylor’s new biography of the pioneering ILPer. Moreover, Ada’s busy life is explored...
A Bridge Over Troubled Water?
Labour’s disunity has been much in evidence recently. ALEX SOBEL argues that Open Labour can act as a bridge for those in the party who want to build an anti-Tory alliance based on an inclusive and empowering politics. At present, our party doesn’t look like a united party to those looking in from the outside....
New Pamphlet: Homage to Tom Maguire
The ILP have re-published EP Thompson’s celebrated 1960 pamphlet on Leeds ILPer, poet, propagandist and photographer Tom Maguire with a new introduction by Labour historian David Howell and an additional profile by former Labour MP, John Battle. Maguire was, according to Howell’s introduction, “the personification of the marginalised”, a radical organiser who played a vital...
Living for That Better Day
Keir Hardie dedicated himself to ‘constant agitation’ and left a singular political legacy in the form of the Labour Party. David Connolly reviews What Would Keir Hardie Say?, a book of essays published last September to coincide with the centenary of Hardie’s death. Keir Hardie is an iconic figure in the history of the Labour...