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...

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...

Markets, Movements and Morals

BARRY WINTER reviews Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, and finds the late academic’s fascinating account “both right and wrong” in its lament for social democracy. Born in London in 1948, Tony Judt taught at several British and American Universities. At New York University in 1995, he established an institute for the study of European...

Growing concern over Refounding Labour

Concern is growing over the Labour leadership’s handling of its ‘Refounding Labour’ proposals, as DAVID CONNOLLY explains. It seems that a final Refounding Labour document will go to the party’s Organisation Committee of the NEC on 15 September and then to the NEC itself five days later. If it is accepted the proposals it...

Building the Good Society

Ideas, campaigns and coalitions are needed to build the good society. BARRY WINTER reports on this year’s Compass conference. The recent Compass conference exceeded my expectations. Not least because, following the general election, last year’s event felt rather flat and earlier versions of this year’s programme seemed a little uninspiring. Was the formerly successful...