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....
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....
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. ...
One afternoon, 100 Speakers, One Hell-of-an Experience
BARRY WINTER was intrigued, confused and stimulated by the recent Compass carnival in London, the second of its ‘Change: How?’ events....
The Co-op Party Launches its Agenda for Britain
The Co-operative Party launched its election manifesto last week, the culmination of two years work setting out plans for “an economy and society that puts people first, in which the rewards of economic success are shared by all”. ‘A Co-operative Agenda for Britain’ sets out the party’s agenda on a number of areas, including energy,...
Miliband Promises New Rights to Co-op Ownership
Labour leader Ed Miliband committed to “put co-operative values at the heart of Labour’s platform for government” on Friday (6 February), saying that if Labour wins the general election workers will have the right to buy out the firm they work for when it comes up for sale or is threatened with closure. Writing in...
Greece Must Not Stand Alone
Support for the new Greek government is vital and in Labour’s interests, argues MIKE DAVIS. Hope, dignity, bread could summarise the slogans of the newly elected Syriza party in Greece. It has been an historic victory, the first radical left party to be democratically elected in Europe since the Second World war. Expectations of the...
Unbalanced Britain: Work, Wages and Labour
Since the crash of 2008 the dominance of corporate elites has remained largely unchanged and unchallenged. Instead we have seen ever-increasing pressure on wages and conditions of work, zero hours contracts and cuts to in-work benefits. The ILP’s second seminar in its Unbalanced Britain series on Saturday 14 March will explore the on-going changes in...
The Case for Democratic Devolution
In recent decades our society has become seriously and, indeed, dangerously unbalanced in a series of crucial, yet interlinked, ways. BARRY WINTER argues that regional devolution could play an important part in re-democratising and re-balancing society. Unbalanced Britain is being subjected to growing poverty and widening social inequalities generally; to increasing and irresponsible financial and...