In trying to change society the ILP has, throughout its history, been challenging the ‘common sense’ ideas of the time....
Vote for the hidden treasure of the working class
The Working Class Movement Library, which houses some of the ILP archives, has been shortlisted in the Arts Council-funded Museums at Night competition to win an artist to appear in an event at the library in May. Museums at Night is an annual after-hours celebration when hundreds of museums, galleries, libraries, archives and heritage...
Hannah Mitchell Inspires the North
PAUL SALVESON traces the life of early ILPer Hannah Mitchell and explains why her kind of politics is still an inspiration today. When I was getting interested in working class history, back in the early 1970s, I was fascinated by a book called The Hard Way Up. It was written by a Northern working class...
The ILP: Past & Present (1993)
Strongholds of the ILP The ILP had branches across Britain. In some places, it was not only strong but influential. Growth depended heavily on local political and economic conditions, and on the qualities and energies of the people drawn to the “rising sun of socialism”. England & Wales The first strongholds of the ILP...
A conversation with Maurice Glasman, part 2
Part two of the ILP's interview with Maurice Glasman, the social thinker most closely associated with the ideas around ‘Blue Labour’, and one of Labour leader Ed Miliband's most influential advisers. Glasman is a senior lecturer in political theory at London Metropolitan University and a former community organiser with London Citizens. He was made a...
The ILP: Past & Present (1993)
Socialism did not begin with the ILP. But the ILP created a unique blend of socialism. Not only did it achieve independent representation for labour and links with the trade unions, it also worked outside the formal political structures....
The ILP: Past & Present (1993)
From the beginning, the ILP accepted women and men as equal members and, as early as 1895, it supported the extension of the vote to both women and men....
ILPer honoured by new northern network
A dozen or so experienced politicos from across the north met at Sowerby Bridge Station one Friday earlier this month to set up ‘The Hannah Mitchell Foundation’, a think tank for northern socialists named after an old ILPer....
The ILP: Past & Present (1993)
The second of six instalments from The ILP: Past & Present covering ethical socialism, the Labour Party, the women's suffrage movement, and the onset of World War One....
A conversation with Maurice Glasman
The first of a two-part interview with Maurice Glasman, the social thinker most closely associated with ideas around ‘Blue Labour’ and one of Labour leader Ed Miliband's most influential advisers. ...
Attlee, the ILP and the Romantic Tradition
Last month JON CRUDDAS delivered the Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture at University College, Oxford. Here, in an edited version of that talk, the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, argues that, far from his cold, taciturn image, Attlee was always at heart an ILP socialist. A host of very readable biographies exist, yet there remains...
‘I have never wavered…’
The Labour Party in Perspective by Clement Attlee was published in 1937. Here are a couple of brief extracts. ‘Some thirty years ago, when I was a young barrister just down from Oxford, I engaged in various forms of social work in East London. The condition of the people in that area as I...