DAVID HOPPER, General Secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, looks back at the remarkable life of Robert ‘Bob’ Smillie as he reviews a new book on the Labour movement pioneer....
The Battle for Social Housing
The Leeds-based Ford-Maguire Society is hosting a meeting on social housing next month which will look back at early campaigns for public housing and ask what lessons there are for housing policy today. ...
Clarion House celebrates its centenary
Cyclists, ramblers, singers and activists gathered in the foothills around Pendle, Lancashire, to celebrate the centenary of Clarion House on 11th and 12th August. The rural tea room is the last surviving monument to a once thriving part of the Labour movement, the hundreds of Clarion societies that provided community to working people and promoted...
A Monument to a Movement
Organisers from Clarion House in Pendle, Lancashire, have released more details of the building's centenary celebrations on 11 & 12 August. The Nelson ILP Clarion House is the sole survivor of the early socialist Clarion movement that existed to propagate views for a fairer, more humane society....
A digital record of the Spanish Civil War
The Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick has completed its project to digitise more than 13,000 pages of archives relating to the Spanish Civil War....
Edward Carpenter in Leeds
The Ford-Maguire Society in Leeds is to host a talk on Edward Carpenter next month. Researcher and author Paul Marshall will explore Carpenter’s connections with Leeds through the friends he knew here....
Benefit for the Brigade
The International Brigade Memorial Trust are holding a benefit night at Chorlton Irish Club in Chorlton-cum-Hardy on Friday 18 May. The acts include Les Jones and Friends of the Beech, The Madonnnas, and the Bourbon Street Preachers....
Hackney’s Hetty remembers the General Strike
As a 20-year-old member of the Independent Labour party, Hetty Bower from Hackney in East London supported the General Strike, which lasted from 4-13 May 1926. She is now 106 years old, but remembers it vividly....
How to overcome the north-south divide
The secretary and chair of the Hannah Mitchell Foundation will speak at a public meeting in Chesterfield on May Day to discuss how to tackle the growing north-south divide. ...
The ILP: Past & Present (1993)
6: Thatcher & Beyond The Thatcher years Under James Callaghan, the Labour government came to a humiliating end in 1979. Its defeat followed a fierce battle with public service workers in the 1978/79 ‘winter of discontent’. The Labour government, which had won office five years earlier promising a partnership with the unions, came to...
Socialism with a Northern Accent
“There is much in the British socialist tradition that has been forgotten or ignored, and which runs counter to state centralism, in particular a stress on grass-roots solutions, co-operation and an emphasis on local culture. Applied imaginatively, these traditions open up the possibility of creating a popular democratic culture which reflects different but complementary...
The ILP: Past & Present (1993)
The ILP, which returned to the Labour Party in 1975 as Independent Labour Publications, was in many respects a shadow of its former self. But what it lacked in size and organisations it intended to make up for with political clarity, intellectual honesty and a determination to learn from the left’s past failures, including...