Labour and co-operative responses to the crisis in the education system is the subject of the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain meeting in Sheffield on Saturday 4 March. With speakers Melissa Benn and Julie Thorpe, the seminar will examine how changes to the education system have increased inequality and widened the gap between the privileged few...
Brexit: Labour’s Fading Red Lines
Labour is in a mess over Brexit and its strategy for the forthcoming parliamentary votes on triggering Article 50 is a shambles. It did not have to be this way, argues WILL BROWN....
Radical Solutions to the Housing Crisis
Housing and planning expert Duncan Bowie has produced a blueprint for Labour Party housing policy in a new publication that argues for an integrated approach on land, taxation, planning and public investment to provide radical solutions to the growing crisis....
The Lessons of 1917 … And All That!
IAN BULLOCK marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution by arguing that the profoundly anti-political stance that took root among Leninists had dire and lasting consequences for socialism in the west....
Unbalanced Britain: Benn to put Education in the Spotlight
Education will come under the spotlight at the ILP’s next Unbalanced Britain seminar on 4 March when writer and campaigner Melissa Benn will speak about the Labour Party’s response to the last decade of education reforms....
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...
Hall’s Political Writings to be Published in January
A new selection of the late Stuart Hall’s political writings is to be published in January by Lawrence & Wishart, and is available now for pre-order from the publisher’s website....
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...
Salters Play to Open in London
A new play about pioneering ILPers Ada and Alfred Salter is heading to south east London next month after a long battle for funding by its writer and director, Alison Mead....
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...
Refugees, Women and the Grunwick Strike
The co-author of a seminal account of “the strike that changed the rules of the game” will be giving a special one-off talk at Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands on Sunday 27 November to mark the publication of a second edition of his book about the dispute, Grunwick: The Workers’ Story....
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...