To celebrate International Women’s Day 2026, Bryn Griffiths, Labour Hub’s presenter of the Labour Left Podcast celebrates the outstanding contribution that the socialist feminist guests have made to the show over the last few years.

The title of this article is taken from Professor Lynne Segal’s book of the same name Making Trouble: Life and Politics, a title that definitely captures the contributions of the shows women guests. 

Beyond the Fragments

In addition to making trouble Lynne Segal is best known for her socialist feminist classic Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, co-authored with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright.  

Back in 1980, young socialist feminists instructed me, as a new student at Sussex University, to read this seminal book and it made a huge impression upon me. Lynne and I returned to the book on the podcast. The book has so much to offer today as we grapple with intersectionality and the different forms of socialist organisation we will need if we are going to avoid the many pitfalls of ‘top-down’ Leninism.  I am not a supporter of Your Party but those that have taken the plunge would do well to have a listen to Lynne on the podcast and read Beyond the Fragments.  The challenges socialists face when we are trying to pull the threads of different struggles together are far from new.

The authors of Beyond the Fragments (pictured l-r) Hilary Wainright, Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and conference organiser Rachel Collet at an event to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of the book’s publication.

Class Heroes

Regular listeners to the Labour Left Podcast will know that each show ends by giving the guest the daunting task of identifying the class hero who has most influenced their politics.  To balance up our hall of fame I invited Lynne to nominate four women to rebalance the over generous representation of our male heroes. On International Women’s Day every one of Lynne’s nominations deserves our close attention.

Lynne nominated her Beyond the Fragments co-author Sheila Rowbotham and referred us to her book Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s.  Moving across the Atlantic, Lynne nominated her late friend Barbara Ehrenreich who was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. In 1976 she wrote a must read classic piece for International Women’s Day entitled What is Socialist Feminism? Lynne brought us up to date with Naomi Klein the Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of eco-feminism and organized labour, and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism and capitalism. Finally, Lynne added Francesca Albanese the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. There can be no woman alive today more deserving of our recognition on International Women’s Day 2026 than Francesca Albanese. As an activist within Britain’s Jewish Bloc on all our big pro-Palestinian protests, Lynne holds  Albanese’s work close to her heart.

Palestine

Palestine is of course the issue of our age and Rachel Shabi’s podcast appearance brought a unique perspective to the issue because of her Jewish Iraqi background. Rachel became known to many of us for her work with Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum during Labour’s antisemitism crisis.  In the face of an avalanche of unfair attacks from supporters of the Israeli Government, the left did not always get it right. Rachel’s appearance on the Labour Left Podcast remains invaluable for those that want to understand The Truth Behind Antisemitism and how we can fight it.  Since her podcast appearance, Rachel has been a consistent supporter of the Palestinian people and she has helped us all navigate the complex territory of how we stand with the Palestinian people whilst being clear in our opposition to antisemitism.  Rachel wrote an extremely helpful piece The Mamdani masterclass on antisemitism.

Rachel Shabi ended her appearance on the Labour Left Podcast by nominating Ella Shohat, a fellow Iraqi Jew and supporter of the Palestinian people, as her class hero.

Colonialism

Professor Corinne Fowler appeared on the Labour Left Podcast to discuss her book Our Island Stories: Ten Walks through Rural Britain and its Hidden History of Empire.  Back in 2019, Corinne was seconded to the National Trust to lay the foundations for a new training and interpretation programme about our country houses’ colonial connections. As part of her secondment, she co-authored an academic report for the National Trust which brought together much of the existing academic and peer-appraised writing on the Trust’s  properties’ many links to colonialism.

To say that the populist right weren’t quite ready to embrace the filling of the gaps in our history doesn’t quite capture the moment. The ‘war on woke’ warriors kicked off to defend their history from above and make sure that everybody else’s history remained silent.

Boiling Farage’s Blood

Nigel Farage talked of the “trashing of our nation” and the Daily Telegraph responded to the peer-appraised, academic report by announcing that the National Trust was “at war with the past.”  As if that wasn’t enough, the unfortunately named Tory Common Sense Group declared the ‘Battle of Britain’. Have a listen to Corinne’s appearance on the Labour Left Podcast  and find out for yourself why she boils Nigel Farage’s blood!   

Corinne Fowler ended her appearance on the podcast by adding Bharti Parmar who accompanied Corrine on her walk to discover cotton’s colonial politics.

Corrine Fowler nominates Bharti Parmar to the Labour Left Podcast class heroes hall of fame.

Back in 2023, the first ever guest on the Labour Left Podcast was Liz Davies KC. Liz came to prominence back in the 1980s as a Labour councillor as the Chair of Islington Council’s brand-new Women’s Committee. I’ll leave it to Finola Brophy Liz’s former Head of Women’s Unit to describe Liz’s ground-breaking socialist feminist role:

“Liz Davies was a fantastic Women’s Committee Chair, always strategic, supportive and passionate about women’s equality and all equality issues. Liz was the champion of cutting-edge multi-agency domestic violence work training the police, producing a domestic violence handbook; creating women’s action plans for each service with achievable targets, producing and circulating the Islington Women’s Information Handbook listing hundreds of organizations standing up for the Women’s Equality Unit. A big issue reflected lesbian and gay families and the production of materials for schools. I also remember the wonderful celebration of International Women’s Day that took place every March.”

Blair Goes Ballistic

Listen to Liz’s appearance on the Labour Left Podcast  to find out what she did to make Tony Blair “go ballistic” and why one of her fellow Labour National Executive Committee members saw fit to call her a “cancer”.

Liz Davies, the very first Labour Left Podcast guest, pictured with Jeremy Corbyn MP in happier times when they were both in the Labour Party speaking at a Labour Briefing fringe meeting in the 1990s. Photo: Bryn Griffiths.

Following Liz Davies’s appearance on the Labour Left Podcast,, two of her women successors on Labour’s National Executive Rachel Garnham and Hilary Schan, made their appearances.

Racism

Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP made her Labour Left Podcast  appearance in the immediate aftermath of her short-lived 2025 bid for the post of the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.  She entered Parliament in 2019 as the Corbyn period drew to a close, alongside numerous other new excellent socialists such as Nadia Whittome, Apsana Begum and Kim Johnson.

Before becoming an MP in her own right, she was the Chief of Staff to Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black MP and the Mother of the House. She cut her political teeth as the Black Students Officer of the National Union of Students, fighting racism and seeking to implement the NUS policy of no platform for fascists. Anti-racism is at the centre of Bell’s intersectional feminism.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP

Democracy

I wanted Rachel Garnham to appear on the Labour Left Podcast so we could discuss her role as the Chair of the ever-important Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD). The episode is an education for those who want to understand the decades-long struggle for members’ democratic rights that has occurred in the party since the CLPD’s creation in 1973.

Hilary Schan made her appearance on the Labour Left Podcast while she was still the Chair of Momentum. Hilary explained how Worthing Labour Party had delivered a political earthquake and seized control of the council for Labour. It’s a story which ended with the effective destruction of the local Party as the very architects of the Party’s success were excluded from the possibility of parliamentary selection.

Finally, a big mention to Rachel Godfrey Wood  my socialist sister and the National Organiser of Momentum who appeared on the show in the run-up to Labour’s General Election victory in 2024. The podcast took place in a period when McSweeney’s Labour Together’sfactional brutality was at its zenith. Hilary Schan, our former Chair, had recently left the Labour Party but the podcast was not all doom and gloom: we ended by mapping out a positive socialist case for staying within Labour. The Labour right was behaving more factionally than ever before, so we needed to get organised. Voting Labour to get rid of the Tories was the start but we think you need to do much more than that. I still hope you will be convinced by Rachel’s case for Momentum. The task of influencing the Labour Government’s direction and fighting the highly factional Labour right is a task which is too big to face alone – so click here to join Momentum .

It’s been an honour to interview this stellar list of socialist feminist women. Talking to them has never failed to broaden my political understanding of the tasks that lie ahead for the left in our country.  On International Women’s Day 2026, I urge you to explore the back catalogue, listen to our wonderful socialist sisters and learn!

Postscript

The vicious factional behaviour of people like Morgan McSweeney and his shadowy Labour Together has led many thousands of Labour members to leave the party and a number of my Labour Left Podcast guests have unfortunately been among them.  I have huge respect for all the women guests who have appeared on the show but personally I remain firmly within Labour to contest the political territory which exists in a Party which has twelve trade unions affiliated to it. My job, as I see it, is to save the Labour Party from people like Labour Together and Peter Mandelson so Labour can defeat Nigel Farage’s Reform at the next General Election in 2029.

You can watch the podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts here, Audible here, Substack here and listen to it on Spotify here.  You can even ask Alexa to play the Labour Left Podcast. If your favourite podcast site isn’t listed, just search for the Labour Left Podcast and it should be there. 

Bryn Griffiths is an activist in Colchester Labour Party and North Essex World Transformed. He is the Vice-Chair of Momentum and sits on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive. Bryn hosts Labour Hub’s spin off – the Labour Left Podcast. 

Main image: https://www.goodfon.com/holidays/wallpaper-zhenskiy-den-pozdravlyayu-8.html Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International CC BY-NC 4.0 Deed. All other images are used with kind permission.