Marxist. Trade Unionist. Socialist-feminist. Author. Poet. Speaker. Tutor. RMT ex-Exec. Workers' Liberty. Autie. Bi. PUFC fan.
aka the First World War
Respect for war dead is not proved By the depth of bow you’re showing But by the mountains you have moved To stop their numbers growing. This poem was included in the anthology Poems for Jeremy Corbyn (Shoestring Press, 2016) … Read more
Written on the centenary of the start of the appalling slaughter that was the Gallipoli campaign in World War One: Rank corpses carpeted Gallipoli At Russell’s Top, Lone Pine and Suvla Bay By bullet, bayonet or dysentery Eight months of … Read more
The WSF was the organisation led by Sylvia Pankhurst, which had previously been the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, and before that, the East London Federation of the Suffragettes. It had previously fought militantly, first for votes for women, and then more … Read more
Thanks to the TUC Library for asking me to write this guest blog post, published here. And for existing. Guest post on Minnie Lansbury and the WEA archive collections This guest blog post is written by Janine Booth, who recently visited … Read more
Publikshed in Soildarity 350, 21 January 2015: During the 1914-18 war, well over 2,000 people wrote published poetry in the UK. Most of them were not soldiers writing from the trenches. The “soldier poets” such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried … Read more
My recommended First World War reading – from this selection of recommendations by socialists in Solidarity 347, 10 December 2014. The Home Front by Sylvia Pankhurst We are less than half a year into four years of commemoration of the centenary of … Read more
When an officer was killed in World War One, the British Army told his next of kin by telegram. Lower-ranked men’s deaths were reported on Form B104-82. ‘Calamity’ is a poem by E.H. Visiak. Private Ted was my great uncle. … Read more
Published in Solidarity 345: ‘From the Youth of All Nations’ reads to me as a bitter complaint against the ruling classes on all sides of the First World War playing out their arguments with the sufferings and lives of soldiers. … Read more
Published in Solidarity 335, 10 September 2014 From The Workers’ Dreadnought, 29 June 1918 A poem was found on the dead body of a German soldier. The British authorities reproduced it in facsimile and threw it from aeroplanes into the German … Read more
Published in Solidarity 337, 24 September 2014 The Workers’ Dreadnought published this poem on its front page, heading an article entitled “Soldiers ask what they are fighting for” on 20 October 1917. Britain was over three years into a war which … Read more
Written back in around 1993: Constance Markievicz and the other women who fought in the Easter Rising struggled to be accepted on equal terms by the Irish labour movement and among nationalists. Their experience holds many lessons for today’s socialists … Read more
by Janine Booth (intro) / Eva Gore-Booth (poem) – published in Solidarity 334 Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926) was an Irish poet and dramatist, and a suffragist and labour movement activist. She was the younger sister of Constance Markiewicz, the nationalist, socialist and feminist … Read more
This article is the first section of the Workers’ Liberty pamphlet ‘Comrades and Sisters’, about socialism and women’s liberation. It tells the story of women’s struggle for liberation: from the French Revolution and the birth of feminism, through the fight for … Read more