A full reading of Alison Mead’s play ‘Politic Man’, about pioneering ILPers Alf and Ada Salter, will be staged in Kent on Monday 24 November....
WWI: Lest We Forget
One hundred years on from the start of World War One, PAUL SIMPSON remembers the tale of a Durham ILPer and conscientious objector who died in prison for his anti-war beliefs. As we approach Remembrance Day on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, I am reminded of an account I read...
ILP in Devon on BBC Four
The ILP’s role in promoting workers’ rights and pacifism in Devon during World War One is currently featuring in a documentary on BBC4, to be shown again this Friday morning and available on iPlayer....
Salters Play to Perform at Cockpit Theatre
A new play about the pioneering ILPers, Alfred and Ada Salter, will get its first hearing at London’s Cockpit Theatre on Monday 13 October....
Constitutional Conundrums
Labour must deliver on the promises made to Scotland argues HARRY BARNES but difficult and complex constitutional puzzles remain. Labour’s response to the result of the Scottish referendum and to the promise of further devolved powers to Scotland must first of all be to press to deliver what has been promised. Yet we also...
WWI: ILP Oppose the War Drive
In September 1914, ILP representatives refused to follow the Labour Party in heeding the government’s call for a national campaign of recruitment to the armed forces, arguing that they would not “stand by militarists and enemies of labour”. Here, we reproduce a report from the Glasgow Herald of 3 September 1914 of the ILP national...
WWI: Harold Croft and the Northampton Anti-War Campaign
JOHN BUCKELL describes the life and times of Northampton ILPer Harold Croft, who faced prison, hardship and abuse for being a conscientious objector and anti-war activist. On 9 November 1920, at statutory meetings all over England, borough councils elected mayors and aldermen. Almost always these were a formality, the results agreed in advance between the...
Unbalanced Britain: What Future for Young People?
GREG ROBERTS is an apprentice accountant and youth campaigner in north east Derbyshire. In June he spoke to the ILP’s day school on Unbalanced Britain about life for young people in these austere times. Despite being born and spending half of my early childhood in Sheffield, I have, for the past eight years, lived on...
New Plaque for Refurbished Clarion House
The country’s oldest surviving Clarion House has been undergoing some much needed renovation work thanks, in part, to the Big Lottery Fund, and the building now has a new plaque to adorn its newly refurbished walls....
WWI: Resisting the War in Hebden Royd & Calder Valley
JONATHAN TIMBERS looks at the activity of ILP branches in the Upper Calder valley in the period before conscription was introduced in 1916, when the British army relied on volunteers to fight the Germans. It was the period before conscientious objection. The story reveals a lot about the troubled relationship developing between the ILP and...
Village Socialism in Theory and Practice
PAUL SALVESON argues that today’s open garden schemes put into practice some early ILPers’ theories of village socialism....
WWI: Down with the War!
On 6 August 1914, just nine days after the start of what came to be known as World War One, the ILP published a front page appeal in its weekly journal, Labour Leader, imploring the “workers of Great Britain” to unite with those across Europe and resist the government’s call to arms....