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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Inside the Left</span>

Inside the Left
By Fenner Brockway

"Fenner Brockway lived a long life and it was certainly packed with colourful action. Here we are reproducing the first volume of his autobiography, which was written on the eve of the Second World War. Never afraid to court controversy, this book celebrated the Socialist movement's opposition to the First World War, and the activities of an anti-war movement which continued after that conflict.

A pupil of Keir Hardie and Bernard Shaw, the young Brockway found his natural home in the Independent Labour Party, which developed his talents as an editor and public agitator. He became acquainted with many of the key personalities of international socialism, and with all the leading figures on the British Left, including H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and the political spokesmen of the growing Labour movement.

This book contains Brockway's detailed account of the efforts of the British Left to find some kind of political unity during the years of the Labour Party's split, when Ramsay MacDonald formed a National Government. The ILP left the Labour Party, and entered into a variety of negotiations with the Communists and others to attempt to crystallise a Socialist opposition."

Ken Coates
Foreword to the new edition

Review:
Book of the Month: Fenner Brockway's Inside the Left - by John Green in London Progressive Journal

Price: £18.00

352 pages | Indexed

ISBN: 978 085124 7748

Socialist Classic

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Bill Brand
by Trevor Griffiths

This latest volume in the Trevor Griffiths series contains all eleven episodes of the celebrated 1976 Thames TV series Bill Brand, which was the fictional account of a young left-wing Labour MP entering Parliament for the first time and attempting to influence the policies of his largely right-wing Labour government.

The series was conceived on election night in 1974, written and produced over the following two years and transmitted in 1976. This was a time of great political and industrial unrest in Britain; it produced the first minority government (under Harold Wilson) since 1931, and Bill Brand was watched with extreme interest by both the political classes and the wider population. At times it seemed almost uncannily prophetic; and many of the issues it dealt with remain of great contemporary relevance.

The series starred Jack Shepherd as Bill Brand, Arthur Lowe as the Prime Minister, Alan Badel, Peter Howell, Lynne Farleigh, Cherie Lunghi and many other distinguished actors.

Bill Brand has never been shown again, nor is it at present available commercially on dvd. This book is therefore a unique record of a unique television event.

' ... tells us more about Parliament, constituency politics and the Labour Party than the combined writings of most of the Westminster drama critics who masquerade as political commentators.'
New Statesman

'The most remarkable serial ever seen on the box.'
Sunday Times

Reviews
Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand and Political Television Drama - Tony Williams in The November 3rd Club

A representative of the People - Romy Clark in
Red Pepper, Feb 2010

Working Class Hero - John Wyver

Tribune - Keith Richmond

Price: £18.00

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7632

300 pages | Paperback

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Global Auction of Public Assets:</span>

Global Auction of Public Assets:
Public sector alternatives to the infrastructure market and Public Private Partnerships
By Dexter Whitfield

Public infrastructure in the 21st century is confronted with new challenges - adapting to climate change, meeting the economic, energy, water, transportation and social infrastructure needs of megacities in Asia, megaregions in North America and European city regions.

Public infrastructure provides basic human needs - homes, water, energy for light, heat and cooking; the transport of people, raw materials and goods by road, rail, sea and air; hospitals, schools, sports and cultural facilities; communications networks; facilities for the criminal justice system; and civic and governmental buildings for democratic governance, social and political activity.

Public infrastructure supports economic growth, increases productivity, generates employment, creates opportunities for the production and supply chains in construction and services, and improves community well-being.

Wider adoption of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and growth of the global infrastructure market, financed by investment funds and pension funds, could fuel a new era of public asset sales. Already, the refinancing and the sale of equity in PPP projects has led to the buying and selling of public hospitals, schools, prisons and roads, furthering exploitation and profiteering.

PPPs are promoted by the World Bank, IMF, development banks and via bilateral agreements in developing countries and the industrialised north. This is the first critical analysis which explores PPP programmes in the UK, France, Ireland, Germany, the US, Canada, Russia, Australia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

Yet over US$500bn of PPP projects have failed, have little democratic control or transparency, are costly, lack innovation and are approved on narrow value for money or fraudulent public sector comparators. PPPs are ultimately publicly financed, either directly by government or indirectly through user charges, fares and tolls.

Profiteering from public private partnerships
Dexter Whitfield, Guardian, 10 December 2009

Reviews:
Selling off the family silver - Duncan Bowie, Chartist, March/April 2010

Public cost and private benefit - Michael Barratt Brown in Red Pepper, Feb 2010

Socialist Review - Nick Grant, January 2010

Truthout - Friday 15 January 2010, Op-Ed

Price: £18.00

380 pages | Paperback

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7731

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>CIA: The Pike Report</span>

CIA: The Pike Report
Introduced by Philip Agee

" ... the work of the Pike Committee and the other bodies is an exceedingly positive chapter in American history. Who would have dreamed, two years ago, that such a great volume of information on secret American intervention in foreign countries would ever be made public? Who would have dreamed that the vast, illegal domestic operations of the CIA, FBI and NSA would be revealed in great detail? Every bit of this information, together with the general methodology that emerges, can be used by people and organizations to protect themselves now and when the next wave of the same occurs. No doubt wide areas of CIA operations were omitted almost entirely, such as those in the trade union field, but no one can say the world's knowledge of secret intervention hasn't improved thanks to the investigations.

Of equal importance is the continuing strength of the best popular traditions in the United States that the investigations demonstrate: the free flow of information, resistance to oppression by government bureaucracy, resistance to government secrecy and coverups. Through the effective functioning of these traditions Americans have been able to learn how necessary corruption and hypocrisy are to the way the current system operates. Abolition of covert action operations, which corrupt the country's expressed principles, cannot come until fundamental changes are made in other institutions. Meanwhile, the treasure of knowledge gained through the investigations must surely contribute to the understanding that government in a "liberal" society must of necessity function in favour of one class and to the detriment of another.

In July 1976 the chief investigator of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, who had been trying since March to discover how the copies of Parts I and II of the Pike Report were leaked to Daniel Schorr, reported that nearly 50 copies of the report were in different executive and congressional offices when the leak occurred. None of the 207 government officials questioned, including Secretary Kissinger and the members of the Pike Committee, would admit to being the culprit. Thanks to one of them, at least, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation is able to present for the first time in book form Parts I, II and III of the Pike Report, a document of truly historic significance not only for Americans but also for peoples the world over who have suffered from clandestine American intervention."

Introduction by Philip Agee, Cambridge, August, 1976

Price: £18.00

284 pages | Paperback

ISBN: 978 085124 1739

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Shape of Things to Come</span>

The Shape of Things to Come
The EU Future Group
By Tony Bunyan of Statewatch

The Shape of Things to Come examines the European Union's plans for justice and home affairs, and warns that the Union is embarked on several highly controversial paths. These include: using the 'digital tsunami' to create a surveillance society for law enforcement purposes by gathering personal details on the everyday lives of everyone living in the European Union; allowing law enforcement and security agencies, in collaboration with multinational companies, to determine new technologies to be introduced - including recording details of all phone and mobile phone calls and internet usage; removing 'obstacles' (judicial authorisation) to the exchange of intelligence between all European Union agencies; and the outrageous idea that a Euro-Atlantic area of co-operation with the United States should be set up to decide on policies fundamentally affecting the rights and liberties of the people of Europe.

Also questioned is the undemocratic decision-making procedure under which 27 EU governments will agree the 'Stockholm Programme' that will set in stone the measures to be introduced. The book ends with a warning that, unless we have an open and meaningful debate now, we never will, because it will already be too late.

Price: £5.99

80 pages | Paperback

ISBN: 978 085124 7601

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Prehistory of European Society</span>

The Prehistory of European Society
By V. Gordon Childe

'Gordon Childe was the leading prehistorian of the first half of the 20th century. An Australian by origin, who had studied in both Sydney and Oxford and played an active role in left-wing politics in Australia before coming to Britain to stay permanently in the 1920s, he went on to hold senior positions at the University of Edinburgh then the University of London, as Director of the Institute of Archaeology. Throughout his academic career his declared goal was an understanding of the evolution of European society as "a peculiar and individual manifestation of the human spirit". He pursued this goal at two different levels, on the one hand producing detailed accounts of the emerging archaeological evidence for European prehistory on the basis of his own first hand examination of material in European museums, on the other writing higher level syntheses to convey his developing ideas to a more general audience. As a result of widely read works such as Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942) Childe's ideas were very influential far beyond the narrow confines of archaeology, an influence never equalled by later generations of archaeological synthesisers.'

Stephen Shennan
UCL Institute of Archaeology
From his new Foreword

Price: £15.00

200 pages | Paperback

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7564

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Tom Mann's Memoirs</span>

Tom Mann's Memoirs
Introduce by Ken Coates

The first secretary of the Independent Labour Party, the President of the dockers' union, the first General Secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union: a mere roster of the positions he held in the Labour Movement, of which this is a tiny fraction, would establish Tom Mann as a Pioneer. But what he did was always more impressive than the positions from which he did it. He was an initiator, a catalyst, a goad to action. Whenever a real crisis came, his stature found its true proportions, and again and again Tom Mann became a pivot for the actions of downtrodden people. Throughout his lifetime as a militant socialist, whatever the stages of evolution of his thought, he invariably displayed a gift for finding himself at the centre of every major struggle of his time. For this reason it is important that these Memoirs, first published in 1923, should again become available.

Price: £15.00

278 pages | Paperback | Indexed

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7588

Socialist Classic Series

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Studies in Socialism</span>

Studies in Socialism
By Jean Jaurès
Introduced by J. E. Mortimer, Leon Trotsky
& R. Ramsay MacDonald

'Studies in Socialism was first published by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1906. It consists of a number of essays, most of them centred on the method of transition from capitalism to socialism in the economically advance countries.

The special point of these essays is that they reaffirm very vigorously the essential features of the analysis of capitalism made by Marx and Engels. They also illustrate the influence on Jaurès of the traditions of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, the essays challenge the interpretation sometimes made by Marxists about the method of transition from capitalism to socialism. The essays affirm strongly the case for democratic endeavour by socialists seeking to change society.'

Jim Mortimer, Foreword to 2007 Edition

Price: £15.00

210 pages | Paperback

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7496

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth</span>

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
by Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell is concerned with the foundations of knowledge which he approaches first through language. 'Meaning', as applied to words, is shown to be different for words of different kinds: object-words, proper names, logical words and dictionary words. For a sentence we have to consider the way that it expresses something of the nature of an assertion, a denial, an imperative, a desire, or a question. We can understand what it expresses if we know the meaning of its several words and the rules of syntax. From this Russell passes to a discussion of a belief and a sentence in which it is expressed. 'Knowledge' and 'truth' involve the relationship of truth to experience and Russell considers whether we can know that there are unknowable truths.

Price: £18.00

352 pages Indexed | Paperback

ISBN: 978 085124 7373

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Analysis of Mind</span>

The Analysis of Mind
by Bertrand Russell

"This book has grown out of an attempt to harmonize two different tendencies, one in psychology, the other in physics, with both of which I find myself in sympathy, although at first sight they might seem inconsistent. On the one hand, many psychologists, especially those of the behaviourist school, tend to adopt what is essentially a materialistic position, as a matter of method if not of metaphysics. They make psychology increasingly dependent on physiological and external observation, and tend to think of matter as something much more solid and indubitable than mind. Meanwhile the physicists, especially Einstein and other exponents of the theory of relativity, have been making 'matter' less and less material. Their world consists of 'events' from which 'matter' is derived by a logical construction …
I think that what has permanent value in the outlook of the behaviourists is the feeling that physics is the most fundamental science at present in existence. But this position cannot be called materialistic, if, as seems to be the case, physics does not assume the existence of matter." Bertrand Russell

Price: £15.00

310 pages Indexed | Paperback

ISBN: 978 085124 7410

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Political Ideals</span>

Political Ideals
by Bertrand Russell

In this volume Bertrand Russell outlines the basic tenets of his political code.

Political Ideals is a rigorous and important survey of capitalism, socialism and the organisation of society.

Political Ideals was written during the upheaval of World War One, but still significant to every reader interested in the nature of man's responsibilities and privileges as a social being. It is in many ways, a statement, of Bertrand Russell's beliefs, a declaration of the ideas that have influenced his thinking on the major events of the twentieth century.

In this sense, it is essential reading for every student of this great philosopher. For it defines his principle that the only true aim of politics is to give free play to man's natural creativity, and to deaden, whenever they manifest themselves, the forces of acquisition, power and convention that jeopardise individual responsibility and freedom.

Price: £10.00

160 pages | ISBN: 978 085124 7311

Philosophical Writings

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Logic and Knowledge</span>

Logic and Knowledge
by Bertrand Russell

Logic and Knowledge has been acclaimed as the most widely-used university text for teaching Russell's philosophy.

Ten essays, including the landmark On Denoting, which extend through fifty years in the life of one of the great philosophers of our time.

" ... for the most part these are writings which it would be impertinent to praise; they are the best work of one of the most influential minds of our time." The Sunday Times

Many of Bertrand Russell's most important essays in logic and the theory of knowledge were not easily available until Professor Marsh collected them together in 1956. It is now the best source of Russell's views in these areas and is firmly established as a philosophical classic in its own right. The collection presents essays which are both historically important and which have profoundly influenced the course of philosophy.

Price: £15.00

380 pages | ISBN: 978 085124 7432

Philosophical Writings

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Life and Works of Henry Richard</span>

The Life and Works of Henry Richard
Apostle for Peace and MP for Wales
by D. Ben Rees

Henry Richard, the Apostle of Peace, was a Congregational minister, Welsh Member of Parliament 1868-88, and Secretary of the Peace Society (1848-84). He was elected Member of Parliament for the Merthyr boroughs in Wales in 1868 and became an influential Nonconformist in the House of Commons.

'Henry Richard has, through the efforts of Bruce Kent, Simon Thomas, David Morris and others of us, been given his rightful place as a man of inspiration ... I have been given the opportunity of delivering lectures on Henry Richard in the House of Lords in London and in my church in Liverpool, and now we bring together the story in this book and hope it will be widely circulated.'
D. Ben Rees

Price: £3.00

32 pages | Pamphlet

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7465

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>St Ann's</span>

St Ann's
Poverty, Deprivation and Morale in a Nottingham Community

Two thousand and seven marks the fortieth anniversary of the first publication of our report on Poverty, Deprivation and Morale in the Nottingham community of St Ann’s.

St Ann’s is frequently in the headlines of this twenty-first century, but we may well be asked why we think it fitting to republish this report, which concerns the thirty thousand people who lived in the old St Ann’s. Poverty has certainly changed its aspect since the 1960s, but since we were primarily concerned with its moral effects, our report remains depressingly familiar, and points up a whole constellation of attitudes and experiences which are all-too-familiar in modern times.
Ken Coates, Preface to 2007 edition

The survey was conducted under the auspices of the Adult Education Department of the University if Nottingham, and gave rise to a film directed by Stephen Frears.

Read Ken Coates and Richard Silburn's recent article in the Nottingham Evening Post.

Price: £9.00

104 pages - 20 photos

ISBN: 978 085124 7328

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Theatre Plays One</span>

Theatre Plays One
by Trevor Griffiths

1 - The Wages of Thin | Occupations | Sam Sam | Apricots | Thermidor | The Party | Comedians | The Cherry Orchard

Comedians is running at the Lyric Hammersmith, until 14 November 2009.
Director: Sean Holmes
Cast: Keith Allen, Mark Benton, Billy Carter, David Dawson, Michael Dylan, Kulvinder Ghir, Matthew Kelly, Simon Kunz, Paul Rider and Reece Shearsmith.

Reviews of Comedians:
Telegraph
Times
Guardian
What's On Stage
Tribune

Trevor Griffiths was born and educated in Manchester and has been writing for theatre, television and cinema since the late 1960s.

The first volume of his collected theatre plays covers the period 1969 to 1980.

Volume two contains the plays written between 1981 and 2001.

His extensive work for the screen includes three major television series - Bill Brand, Sons and Lovers, and The Last Place on Earth; numerous single plays including All Good Men and Through the Night, and television films Country and Food for Ravens. Many of his stage plays have also been produced on television.

For his film Reds, written with Warren Beatty, he received the Writers Guild of America Best Screenplay award and an Oscar nomination. Other films have included Country, directed by Richard Eyre, and Fatherland, directed by Ken Loach.

From the 1980s onwards he has also directed his own work both in theatre and on film. Food for Ravens, which he wrote and directed for BBC Wales, won both a Royal Television Society award and a Welsh BAFTA.

In 1982 Trevor Griffiths was given the BAFTA Writers Award.

Price: £15.00

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7205

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>These Are The Times</span>

These Are The Times
A Life of Thomas Paine
Screenplay by Trevor Griffiths

Trevor Griffiths' thrilling screenplay follows Tom Paine from persecution in England, to the American War of Independence, to Revolutionary France. It mixes politics, love and war.

It has been adapted for theatre and A New World is currently making its premiere at Shakespeare's Globe (29th August - 9th October).

David Horspool reviews A New World in the TLS - PDF

Putting the World to Rights - An interview with Trevor Griffiths by Robert Chalmers, in the Independent on Sunday 9th August 2009.

'These Are The Times reads like the greatest of novels and is the most thrilling read I’ve had in years!'
Kurt Vonnegut

These Are The Times Episodes from a Life of Thomas Paine featured in Vertigo Magazine Volume 4, Number 3, Summer 2009.

Revolutionising Tom Paine - Whilst recording These Are The Times for radio, Trevor Griffiths discovered the true revolutionary spirit of Tom Paine.

Trevor Griffiths's screenplay broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday 26th July and Saturday 2nd August 2008. Read the discussions about it on their Message Boards.

Ann Talbot's recent review of These Are The Times and interview with Trevor Griffiths can be found on the
World Socialist Web Site:
Review
Interview

Read reviews by:
Phil Turner
Ray Brown
Sheila Rowbotham
Jeremy Pikser
Matthew Robbins
Mike Nichols
Rob Ritchie
Prof. Ted Braun
Terry Eagleton
Tim Robbins
Tom Stoppard
Troy Kennedy Martin
Walter Bernstein
Kurt Vonnegut

Price: £15.00

208 pages | ISBN: 978 0 85124 6956

110mm (w) x 180mm (h) | Paperback

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Spokesman Books | Recent Titles