The Socialist Movement was an independent left-wing grouping in the United Kingdom that grew out of the Socialist Conferences.
The Socialist Conferences were held in Chesterfield, Sheffield, and Manchester in the years following the defeat of Britain’s miners’ strike of 1984–1985. This broadly supported gathering emanated from the Socialist Society (an organisation of left intellectuals including Raymond Williams, Richard Kuper, and Ralph Miliband), the Campaign Group (a hard left grouping within the Labour Party), the Conference of Socialist Economists, and the network generated by the socialist feminist book Beyond the Fragments. The largest conferences were in 1987 and 1988.
The Socialist Movement was open to different left traditions, green as well as red, for exploratory, grassroots debate and research on socialist policy-making.
Famous quotes containing the words socialist and/or movement:
“I pass the test that says a man who isn’t a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a man who is a socialist at 40 has no head.”
—William Casey (1913–1987)
“What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)