About this archive

London Labour Briefing, and then Labour Briefing, was the paper of the Labour left in the 1980s: the left of Ken Livingstone’s GLC, of the councils that fought rate-capping, of support for the miners and the printworkers, and of the fight against the witch-hunts. Local Briefings were produced in Camden, Birmingham, Devon, Brighton and elsewhere.

This archive holds 130 items, 905 pages, from a collection of scans assembled around 2020 and passed to Red Mole in November 2026. It is what that collection holds, not a complete run. In particular, the national paper is thin: 8 of the 29 issues of the National Supplement (October 1983 to July 1986) are here, and of the fortnightly national paper that followed only the pilot issue and the 1987 election special. Nothing of the national paper after June 1987 is held. If you have issues that are missing here, Red Mole would like to hear from you.

The text

Each page was read by machine (Tesseract OCR) from the scan, and the text is published uncorrected so that it can be searched. It is a finding aid: columns run together and words are misread. The scan is the authority. The pieces by Alan Thornett have been transcribed by hand and proofread, on thornett.redmole.org.

A few scans were too large to put online as they are and have been re-encoded at a lower resolution for the web. One item in the collection, a Labour Party letter of 1987 to two members, is not published.