A recent book provides a “just about” convincing argument that the ILP’s decline in the 1930s was not an inevitable consequence of disaffiliation. CHRISTOPHER HALL reviews Gidon Cohen’s welcome attempt to fill a gap in ILP history The history of the Independent Labour Party from its foundation until it was disaffiliated from the Labour...
An activist’s life
MIKE WADSWORTH reviews the recent biography of lifetime communist Edmund Frow, written by his wife. Ruth Frow points out that this biography of Eddie Frow is largely anecdotal and is not the detached recital of a life that would have been produced by a biographer less closely involved with the subject. In this regard...
Collective action and the sustainable renewal of Britain
SEAN CREIGHTON calls for a better understanding of the history of mutual organisations, and argues that their renewal should be a vital part of the government’s agenda for regeneration and social inclusion. Labour’s aim of regenerating Britain’s rundown neighbourhoods, cities and rural areas faces some fundamental stumbling blocks. Alongside the increasing apathy and disillusion...
The ILP and social change
The ILP’s Weekend School took place in Scarborough at the beginning of May. BARRY WINTER outlined the ILP’s perspective and explained why it had to change. There are four major points that need to be made about the ILP’s perspective. First, in the early 1990s we came to recognise that we had to remake...