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Socialist League (UK, 1932)
The Socialist League was an organisation inside the British Labour Party, which sought to push it to the left. It was formed in 1932, through a merger between the National ILP Affiliation Committee (NILP) and the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda (SSIP), and ceased to exist in 1937. Political origins The Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda was created by G. D. H. Cole in June 1931, and principally consisted of guild socialists, including Frank Horrabin and Bill Mellor. Cole hoped to attract trade unionists, but although Ernest Bevin agreed to become honorary chairman, Arthur Pugh was the only prominent trade unionist to become actively involved.Ben Pimlott, ''Labour and the Left in the 1930s'', 1977, pp. 42-58. The National ILP Affiliation Committee was founded by a group of Independent Labour Party (ILP) members who disagreed with their party's decision in 1932 to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. Led by Frank Wise, they entered into negotiations wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party, often referred to as Labour, is a List of political parties in the United Kingdom, political party in the United Kingdom that sits on the Centre-left politics, centre-left of the political spectrum. The party has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. It is one of the Two-party system, two dominant political parties in the United Kingdom; the other being the Conservative Party (UK), Conservative Party. Labour has been led by Keir Starmer since 2020 Labour Party leadership election (UK), 2020, who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom following the 2024 United Kingdom general election, 2024 general election. To date, there have been 12 Labour governments and seven different Labour Prime Ministers – Ramsay MacDonald, MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Attlee, Harold Wilson, Wilson, James Callaghan, Callaghan, Tony Blair, Blair, Gordon Brown, Brown and Starmer. The Labour Party was founded in 1900, having e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United Front
A united front is an alliance of groups against their common enemies, figuratively evoking unification of previously separate geographic fronts or unification of previously separate armies into a front. The name often refers to a political and/or military struggle carried out by volunteers or revolutionaries, including revolutionary socialism, communism, or anarchism, among others. The basic theory of the united front tactic among socialists was first developed by the Communist International, an international communist organization created by communists in the wake of the October Revolution. According to the thesis of the 1922 4th World Congress of the Communist International: The united front tactic is simply an initiative whereby the communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.. History Formulation and ear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Frank Wise
Edward Frank Wise CB (3 July 1885 – 5 November 1933) was a British economist, civil servant and Labour Party politician. He served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1929 to 1931. As a civil servant at the National Insurance Commission, War Office and Ministry of Food and Board of Trade he was instrumental in introducing state control for the requisitioning of raw materials at the War Office and of prices and the meat trade at the Ministry of Food. Following the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, he was a Delegate to the Supreme Economic Council and led the negotiations for the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement 1920–21. He was an adviser to David Lloyd George at the Genoa Conference (1922). He controversially resigned from the UK Civil Service to become the Director of the Soviet Union's Trade Office Centrosoyuz in 1923. Wise was elected as an Independent Labour Party Member of Parliament for Leicester East at the May 1929 general election, but lost his seat at the subsequent g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Loch Mowat
Charles Loch Mowat (4 October 1911 – 23 June 1970) was a British-born American historian. Biography Mowat was educated at Marlborough College and St John's College, Oxford. John Ramsden (ed.), ''The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century British Politics'' (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 446. In 1934 he emigrated to the United States, where he became an American citizen. From 1934 until 1936 he taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1936 he took up a position at the University of California, Los Angeles. His opposition to McCarthyism led to him leaving UCLA and taking a post at the University of Chicago in 1950. In 1958 he returned to Britain to be professor of history at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, a post he held until 1970. His best known book is ''Britain Between the Wars'', which became the standard text on the nation's interwar period In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period, also known as the interbellum (), lasted from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harold Laski
Harold Joseph Laski (30 June 1893 – 24 March 1950) was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman. Laski was one of Britain's most influential intellectual spokesmen for Marxism in the interwar years. In particular, his teaching greatly inspired students, some of whom later became leaders of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Foot
Michael Mackintosh Foot (23 July 19133 March 2010) was a British politician who was Leader of the Labour Party (UK), Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition (United Kingdom), Leader of the Opposition from 1980 to 1983. Foot began his career as a journalist on Tribune (magazine), ''Tribune'' and the ''Evening Standard''. He co-wrote the 1940 polemic against appeasement of Adolf Hitler, ''Guilty Men'', under a pseudonym. Foot was a Member of Parliament (United Kingdom), Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 United Kingdom general election, 1945 to 1955 United Kingdom general election, 1955 and 1960 Ebbw Vale by-election, 1960 to 1992 United Kingdom general election, 1992. A passionate orator, and associated with the left wing of the Labour Party for most of his career, Foot was an ardent supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and of British withdrawal from the European Economic Community (EEC). He was appointed to Harold Wilson's Cabinet (UK), Cabin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barbara Castle
Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, (''née'' Betts; 6 October 1910 – 3 May 2002) was a British Labour Party politician who was a Member of Parliament (United Kingdom), Member of Parliament from 1945 United Kingdom general election, 1945 to 1979 United Kingdom general election, 1979, making her one of the longest-serving female MPs in British history. Regarded as one of the most significant Labour Party politicians, Castle developed a close political partnership with Prime Minister Harold Wilson and held several roles in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, Cabinet. She remains to date the only woman to have held the office of First Secretary of State. A graduate of the University of Oxford, Castle worked as a journalist for both ''Tribune (magazine), Tribune'' and the ''Daily Mirror'', before being elected to Parliament of the United Kingdom, Parliament as MP for Blackburn (UK Parliament constituency), Blackburn at the 1945 United Kingdom general election, 1945 e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Pollitt
Harry Pollitt (22 November 1890 – 27 June 1960) was a British communist who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from July 1929 to September 1939 and again from 1941 until his death in 1960. Pollitt spent most of his life advocating communism. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, Pollitt was an adherent particularly of Joseph Stalin even after Stalin's death and disavowal by Nikita Khrushchev. Pollitt's acts included opposition to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and Polish–Soviet War, support for the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, both support for and opposition to the war against Nazi Germany, defence of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and support for the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. He contested a number of parliamentary elections, but never won, despite coming close in 1945. Throughout his time as leader of CPGB, he was in direct secret radio contact with Moscow as CPGB's "Code Ho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fenner Brockway
Archibald Fenner Brockway, Baron Brockway (1 November 1888 – 28 April 1988) was a British socialist politician, humanist campaigner and anti-war activist. Early life and career Brockway was born to Rev. William George Brockway and Frances Elizabeth Abbey in Calcutta, British India. He developed an interest in politics while attending the School for the Sons of Missionaries, then in Blackheath, London (now Eltham College), from 1897 to 1905. In 1908, Brockway became a vegetarian. Several decades later, during a debate in a House of Lords on animal cruelty, he said: "I am a vegetarian and I have been so for 70 years. On the whole, I think, physically I am a pretty good advertisement for that practice." After leaving school, he worked as a journalist for newspapers and journals including '' The Quiver'', the ''Daily News'' and the ''Christian Commonwealth''. In 1907, Brockway joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and was a regular visitor to the Fabian Society. He was appoint ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Maxton
James Maxton (22 June 1885 – 23 July 1946) was a Scottish left-wing politician, and leader of the Independent Labour Party. He was a pacifist who opposed both world wars. A prominent proponent of Home Rule for Scotland, he is remembered as one of the leading figures of the Red Clydeside era. He broke with Ramsay MacDonald and the second minority Labour government, and became one of its most bitter critics. As the leader of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), he disaffiliated the ILP from the mainstream party in 1932. Afterwards, he became an independent dissident outside front-line politics. Biography Early years Born in then burgh of Pollokshaws (now part of the city of Glasgow) in 1885, James Maxton was the son of two schoolteachers. He would himself later enter that profession after his education at Hutchesons' Boys' Grammar School and the University of Glasgow. Whilst studying at the University of Glasgow, Maxton had described his political loyalties as lying with t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Strauss
George Russell Strauss, Baron Strauss PC (18 July 1901 – 5 June 1993) was a long-serving British Labour Party politician, who was a Member of Parliament (MP) for 46 years and was Father of the House of Commons from 1974 to 1979. Early life Strauss was the son of the Conservative (and previously a Liberal Unionist) MP Arthur Strauss (1847–1920), who later joined the Labour Party. George Strauss was educated at Rugby School, where the hostile treatment experienced by him and other Jewish boys left him as a vehement supporter of racial equality. He became a metal merchant and a leading member of the London County Council, on which his wife Patricia also served. Political career Strauss' first parliamentary contest was in Lambeth North in 1924, when he lost by just 29 votes; however, he gained the seat in 1929. He lost it in Labour's landslide defeat of 1931, but regained it in a 1934 by-election. In 1939 Strauss was expelled from the Labour Party for seven months for su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tribune (magazine)
''Tribune'' is a democratic socialist political magazine founded in 1937 and published in London, initially as a newspaper, then converting to a magazine in 2001. While it is independent, it has usually supported the Labour Party from the left. Previous editors at the magazine have included Aneurin Bevan, the minister of health who spearheaded the establishment of the National Health Service, former Labour leader Michael Foot, and writer George Orwell, who served as literary editor. From 2008 it faced serious financial difficulties until it was purchased by ''Jacobin'' in late 2018, shifting to a quarterly publication model. Since its relaunch the number of paying subscribers has passed 15,000, with columns from high-profile socialist politicians such as former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, former Second Deputy Prime Minister of Spain Pablo Iglesias and former Bolivian President Evo Morales. In January 2020, it was used as the platform on which Rebecca Long-B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
