A NEW all-party parliamentary group for political literacy is “no substitute” for labour-movement political education, socialists warned yesterday.
The new group, co-chaired by Conservative MP Simon Fell and Labour peer Iain McNicol – notorious on the left for apparently working to undermine former leader Jeremy Corbyn while party general secretary, according to an internal report leaked last Easter is pushing for more political education in schools.
It points to low turnouts by young people in elections, with the “youthquake” of 2017, when Labour attracted large numbers of first-time voters, not reflected in the 2019 general election.
Marx Memorial Library education committee chair Professor John Foster said the group was a “welcome development” but noted that the government had recently issued instructions to schools not to use anti-capitalist material.
SOCIALISTS and labour movement activists today launched the Political Education Project, “a new effort in working-class self-education in Britain, Ireland and the US.”
Organisers seek to draw on “traditions of working-class pedagogy from trade unions, the civil rights movement, and community organising” and are kicking off with an online 10-week course that will include classes on socialism, women’s oppression, anti-racism and building working-class power.
“Historically miners’ libraries, mechanics institutes, socialist Sunday schools and more supported and sustained independent working-class education . provided part of the essential ‘infrastructure of dissent’ in which working-class movements, and the unions, were nurtured and flourished. The challenge now is to rebuild similar institutions adequate to the challenges of the 21st century,” the group’s founding statement says.