Three months in Spain The British Battalion at Madrigueras and Jarama Saturday 7 August, 2pm People’s History Museum Left Bank Spinningfields Manchester M3 3ER FREE ENTRY Historian Dr. Richard Baxell lectures on the day-to-day experiences of the British and Irish volunteers in The Spanish Civil War, during the early part of 1937. The lecture...
Kurdistan’s message of hope for Iraq
Iraq could work if the steady success of its Kurdistan Region is supported and spreads throughout the country. GARY KENT reports from a fact-finding mission The Kurdistan region of Iraq enjoyed a head start over the rest of the country. Its 1991 uprising ousted Saddam’s genocidal forces which had murdered nearly 200,000 Kurds at...
The Good Society Debate
Across the continent, the left’s response to the recent economic crisis has been poor, verging on non-existent, just when the situation demanded a credible alternative to the dominant political and economic orthodoxy. That’s the starting point for a Europe-wide online debate on the future of social democracy hosted by the Soundings and Social Europe...
Superpower headaches
Will Brown looks at the foreign policy agenda facing the Obama administration. The vitriolic healthcare debate in the US and ongoing economic problems may dominate President Obama’s current agenda but the first nine months of this administration have also put into sharp focus an exceptionally difficult range of US foreign policy problems. The inauguration...
The Forgotten Story
More than 60 people filled the Working Class Movement Library in Salford on 30th May to see former POUM militia man Roma Marquez Santo unveil a plaque to the ILP’s Spanish Civil War volunteers. In a moving speech Roma declared it an honour for people, like himself, who fought fascism in the 1930s to...
Not Just Orwell
Christopher Hall explains what drove him to discover the untold stories of ILP volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War In 2006 many new books were published and many events held to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. As an historian and researcher on the Spanish Civil...
Spanish Civil War Commemoration
Seventy years after the end of the Spanish Civil War the first ever memorial plaque to the anti-fascist British and Irish volunteers who fought alongside George Orwell in the ILP Contingent will be unveiled. Two political veterans will do the honours: Sidney Robinson, an Independent Labour Party activist in the 1930s who chaired the...
This world of ours
ERIC PRESTON introduces the themes of the ILP’s forthcoming weekend of discussion and political review ‘Many of us are, I believe, confused by the world we have created for ourselves in the west. We are confused by the consequences of capitalism, whose contribution to well-being cannot be questioned, but which divides rich from poor,...
Is there a song for solidarity?
SARAH BRACKING unpicks the liberal agenda behind Live8 and the G8 summit. The majority of the people attending Live8, and the demonstrations surrounding the G8, wanted no more nor less than to reduce poverty. But helping poor people in other countries raises problems, particularly when the language of benevolence doesn’t explain the structural issues...
The end of Fukuyama
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS explains why the latest pronouncements from Francis Fukuyama miss the mark I have a feeling that it must have been a disappointing week for Francis Fukuyama, whose essay ‘After Neoconservatism’ (adapted from his upcoming book America at the Crossroads) was awarded seven pages in the 19 February 2006 New York Times Magazine. The...
A revolution in contraflow
IVAN BRISCOE listens to the voices of Venezuela’s unemployed, its mobilised, its empowered and its disillusioned to portray the hopes and paradoxes of Hugo Chávez’s ‘Bolivarian revolution’ He has lived on his homestead for only a year since staging a ‘sort of invasion’, but Jovito González is already enjoying the fruits of the Caribbean....
A million on the march
GARY KENT reports on a nine day fact-finding trip to meet trade unionists in Iraq It rarely makes the news here but a million trade unionists are on the march in Iraq. A new network of non-sectarian union federations, professional associations and civil society groups has emerged in Iraq, having been brutally repressed by...