The latest issue of the London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 75 (spring 2022) is now online on this site - with pieces by Ian Birchall, John Newsinger and Keith Flett among other things - and the final seminar in our Spring programme will be:
Simon Hannah 'Lessons of Lambeth: municipal socialism in the 1980s'
Monday 14th March 5.30pm
This is the last in our series of Spring seminars. Simon Hannah will talk on his latest book on radical Lambeth
It is free on Zoom but you need to register below
https://www.history.ac.uk/events/lessons-lambeth-municipal-socialism-1980z
In the 1980s Lambeth was synonymous with rebel Labour councillors and featured regularly in national newspaper headlines for its protests, its squatting, and its resistance to and defiance of central government. From the Town Hall to the front line of Railton Road it confronted racism in the police, the Poll Tax, the Gulf War, and the nascent Thatcherism of the Conservative government. It was a site of overlapping resistance from trade unionists, black residents, the LGBTQ community, and other local people.
Condemned in the press as a ‘loony left’ borough, Lambeth was at the heart of the struggle against the Conservative agenda in the capital. This was a fight for municipal socialism, for solidarity with causes both at home and abroad, and against the crisis of inner city urban life in a decade dominated by greed is good capitalism at the expense of working people.
Drawing on first-hand accounts from those involved, this book tells the story of Radical Lambeth, an inner London community that fought back.
