The Challenge of a Generation

Growing poverty and inequality in Europe prove that the market alone cannot deliver. It’s time to change the narrative, says JUDITH KIRTON-DARLING, Confederal Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). Here, she sets out the terms of a new European social contract. Austerity and poverty in Europe are blighting our continent. Both are having...

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. ...

‘A triumph for activism’

The Working Class Movement Library, which houses some of the ILP archives, has won the national Museums at Night contest to stage an international artist event in May. The Salford-based library beat Quay Arts on the Isle of Wight and the Guernsey Museum in a public vote described as 'a triumph of activism' by its...

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...

It was 119 years ago today

It was on this day, 13th January, 119 years ago that 120 or so young, working class, mainly male delegates gathered at the Labour Institute in Bradford to found the Independent Labour Party. ...

Diary of a striking giant

John Lowe recorded everything that happened to him and his Nottinghamshire NUM comrades during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. His grandson, JONATHAN SYMCOX, who edited the newly published diary, recalls a man transformed by the dispute. John Lowe of Clipstone in Nottinghamshire was off sick in spring 1984 when the National Coal Board and Margaret Thatcher’s...

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....