This article first appeared on the website of Independent Labour Publications (ILP). On the 70th anniversary of his death aged 46, BENEDICT COOPER assesses George Orwell’s relationship with the ILP and its effect on his life, writing and politics. When a sentry reported to John McNair, leader of the Independent Labour Party’s (ILP) Spanish Civil War contingent, that a “great big Englishman is here to see you”, he didn’t think much of it. This was late December 1936; thousands of foreign volunteers were pouring into Catalonia to take up arms for the Republic. McNair still wasn’t impressed even after the new arrival had been shown in. The ungainly figure standing…

Everyone in Shirebrook knew there was something seriously wrong at the Sports Direct factory down the road. How many ambulances had they seen hurtling towards the plant in recent months? It was hard to tell. Sometimes they were called out more than once in a day. When a local BBC Inside Out team looked into it the figures were as stark as the human stories behind them were bleak: 76 emergency callouts to the site in Derbyshire, in less than two years; reports of workers, afraid of the consequences of calling in sick, collapsing at work, suffering convulsions and strokes on the factory floor; heavily-pregnant women still grafting on the…

This feature, on the ways in which Orwell is mistreated and misunderstood by popular culture, appeared in The Telegraph in March 2020. “You’ve read Animal Farm?” So says the female villain of The Hunt, Blumhouse’s slasher-cum-satirical film, to the unlikely heroine, a Mississippi hick she’s nicknamed Snowball. As she learns to her cost, during their showdown, she has a bad case of cognitive bias. Despite Snowball’s lowly identity – in the eyes of her hunter at least – our heroine, real name Crystal, has read a book or two. Briefly, the background, and the premise of the film. Crystal is the last survivor of a human hunt that targets a group…

This profile piece of Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy appeared in The House magazine, the in-house magazine of The Houses of Parliament, and Politics Home in February 2020. After 85 years as a Labour seat, the Nottinghamshire constituency of Bassetlaw witnessed the largest swing from Labour to the Conservatives in the country at the general election. Benedict Cooper joins Lisa Nandy on a trip to the area to hear first hand how she plans to reconnect with the party’s former heartlands   It’s a bright, crisp winter’s day in Worksop, and in the café of The Crossing church and community centre the lunchtime trade is under way. As I cross…

A report from the Labour leadership hustings held by Open Labour in January 2020, originally posted on Byline Times. There was a conspicuous lack of discord and disharmony at the Labour leadership and deputy leadership hustings in Nottingham. For the past four years, gatherings of Labour members have tended towards the truculent wherever debate is involved. Or, when Jeremy Corbyn has been present, they have been love-ins; orthodoxies of uncritical faith and untempered affection. There was, of course, some liveliness. It is hard to bring a number of Labour members together without hearing that accusations of anti-Semitism against the leadership were “illegitimate” spurious “smears” against Jeremy Corbyn – up to…

It will make a lot of Labour members in Birmingham Yardley, and beyond, extremely happy if their MP Jess Phillips is ‘triggered’ in a vote tonight.  Phillips is one of Labour’s most prominent working class female MPs, one of the few MPs whose appeal reaches out to the wider electorate; a member of the Women and Equalities Committee, who came into politics to do more to protect victims of domestic abuse; and in the last fortnight alone has stood out for standing up to Boris Johnson in the fight to keep the Domestic Abuse Bill alive.  But none of that matters in the Labour party today if you’re not a Corbynite.…

‘1936 was the year in which Orwell himself said that “history stopped”; in The Ministry of Truth, Lynskey adds that “history stopped, and Nineteen Eighty-Four began”.’ From my write up on the Orwell Society blog up of ‘The Ministry of Truth’ by Dorian Lynskey, who came to talk at Five Leaves Bookshop last week. George Orwell left London for Catalonia on December 22nd 1936. He fled Barcelona in fear for his and Eileen’s life six months later, hastily across the French border at Perpignan, through France by train, “away from the mountain and the vine, back to the meadow and the elm”, and was back in the family home in…

In the 1980s a Nottingham social worker uncovered a “government-approved programme of betrayal, institutional abuse, colonial callousness, racism and deceit”. Here’s my feature for @LeftLion on Margaret Humphreys and the child migrants scandal https://www.leftlion.co.uk/read/2019/july/margaret-humphreys-home-children-child-migrants-trust/#.XSSJYUsxjv4.twitter Gripped with terror, a young mother races along the crowded platform at Liverpool’s Lime Street station, her eyes wildly scanning for any sight of her son. She hasn’t lost him in a moment of lapsed attention – her little boy has been taken from her. Then suddenly, amidst the tumult and the smoke, there he is. Her only child, helpless and confused, on board a train that in a few seconds is going to grind into…

A fire at the Cattle Market in November wrecked four buildings and damaged several more. But it could have been worse. We went down to see what Notts would be missing if the whole thing had gone up..  www.leftlion.co.uk The blaze at the Cattle Market was so intense, and the flames so high, that looking out of the skylight in my flat on Forest Road, a hazy orange aurora hung behind the city centre, casting Nottingham in a strange, ominous backlight. If it hadn’t been for the direction of the wind, and the rapid response from the emergency services, we might well be ruminating on what we lost the night…

    Take a placard calling for a ‘People’s Vote’, spin it around. You might well find the reverse bears another slogan: ‘Stop Brexit’. Keep spinning: Stop Brexit – People’s Vote – Stop Brexit – People’s Vote – Stop Brexit, until the two phrases blur into the political axiom of the day. Ostensibly – and perhaps practically, if it comes to it – they don’t mean the same thing at all. But assuming, as the post-referendum Remain camp confidently does, that a re-run vote does lead to Brexit being overturned, what then? Addled and vile as they are, the thugs caught on camera abusing Remain MP Anna Soubry outside Parliament…

This article appeared in the Guardian Society section in October 2018. I was left to fight alone for NHS whistleblowing protection Blowing the whistle in the NHS is meant to be easy. Medical bodies such as the Department of Health and Social Care, the General Medical Council (GMC) and individual hospital trusts all encourage the practice – on paper. But when Chris Day, a junior intensive care doctor, raised numerous concerns about understaffing and safety at the intensive care unit of Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich, he found out all too quickly the toll it would take on his career. Day says he made a “protected disclosure” to hospital management…

My piece for LeftLion magazine on the history of Canning Circus, Nottingham SIX ROADS meet at Canning Circus. From the north, three of the major highways into the city form a delta in the urban space between them; converging then splitting off, renamed, they ferry traffic and people down the hill out into the splintering, winding channels and streams of the city. To the south lies the city centre, to the west, the Park Estate and the Castle. To the north, Lenton, the university, Wollaton Park and Radford, and to the east a canopy of green trees shelters thousands of gravestones, sweeping all the way down to Waverley Street and…

This comment piece appeared in the Times online at the end of July By nothing more than my increasingly hollow-feeling membership of a particular Labour Party constituency, I am now officially affiliated with one of the most contentious, offensive groups in left-wing politics. Actually it was very straight forward. An emergency motion was proposed, there was a show of eager upstretched hands, a prolonged round of applause, and that was it. We’re in. Nottingham East is officially affiliated with Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL). There was no mention that JVL has deeply and routinely offended Jewish party members ever since it was set up just under a year ago. When…

There was a day in the summer of 1985 when the two great political movements of the era converged in Nottingham. On the Forest Rec, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) staged a mass rally urging solidarity with striking miners, while over on Victoria Embankment, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) welcomed thousands to the Nottingham Peace Festival. The hardest part for the organisers was driving guest speakers between the two; some of the same speakers, maybe the same speeches. “We saw it as one cause,” says Ross Bradshaw, owner of radical Nottingham bookshop, Five Leaves, who was one of those fighting the traffic between the rallies. “It was all…

When Pete Radford arrived backstage for the closing night of Romeo and Juliet, the first thing the director noticed was the state her actor was in. His lip was split in two from front to back; he had a shiner under his right eye, a graze under his left eye, his cheeks were still swollen and he bore the unmistakable pallor of a man who’s been in a scrap… “She wasn’t too impressed,” admits Pete. “She suggested I use some concealer.” There wasn’t a lot of concealer being handed out the last time I’d seen Pete, backstage at a very different venue on a very different night. The shabby dressing…