Our Making Wales Work plan champions employee buyouts, community-led co-operatives and social enterprises, and reversing managed decline. As 26 years of Labour in power comes to an end, we are the alternative, argues LUKE FLETCHER
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A belt of Starmer’s crozier
VINCE MILLS is unimpressed by Sarwar’s U-turn over calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and the dismal lack of democracy in Labour
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar
Socialist historian KEITH FLETT looks at the pronounced hostility the labour movement has had to giving the state the power to pry and identify dissidents, going back to the era of the ‘Freeborn Englishman’ and Captain Swing
The Renters Reform Bill is a big step in the right direction, but it won’t apply to Wales — we desperately need our own legislation to protect and respect tenants, to give them dignity and security, free from fear of eviction, writes SIAN GWENLLIAN MS, Plaid Cymru’s shadow cabinet secretary for housing and planning
ROBERT GRIFFITHS reports on talks with Raid Jahid Fahmi, general secretary of the Communist Party in Iraq, where sectarian power-sharing makes wielding state apparatus the ‘main domain of conflict’ and the struggling nation’s oil revenues are still held in US banks
One of the major criticisms of China’s breakneck development in recent decades has been the impact on nature — returning after 15 years away, BEN CHACKO assessed whether the government’s recent turn to environmentalism has yielded results
HANK KENNEDY contends that US military attacks in the Caribbean amount to modern piracy driven by Venezuela’s oil wealth
THINK of Keir Starmer for a minute as a bishop. No, not a Church of England deliberative, liberal sort of bishop — more like a dogmatic Irish Catholic bishop in the early part of the 20th century.
During that period a progressive thinking politician in the south of Ireland might venture something that didn’t quite fit with the church’s thinking — like state provision of health, for example. This would almost certainly see the recalcitrant politician hooked into see the bishop who would set the straying soul back on the right path. These encounters were known “as a belt of the bishop’s crozier.” For the ungodly, a crozier is a symbolic shepherd’s staff carried by bishops.
Over the last few weeks, Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour Party, drew a lot of praise from the left and progressive movement in Britain, including this newspaper, for criticising Starmer and calling for a ceasefire, despite Starmer’s insistence that such a call was futile and would allow Hamas to regroup.
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by Vince Mills
Lucy Powell may not exactly be the left’s choice, but her bid for the deputy leadership is certainly not the Labour right’s choice — and if she wins, that could mean the ascendancy of Andy Burnham and the end of Keir Starmer, writes VINCE MILLS
VINCE MILLS charts the disintegration of the Starmer faction’s platform and the gulf between it and Labour members
VINCE MILLS says Scottish Labour has adopted better positions than its Westminster counterpart — but unless it starts to fight for them that will count for nothing
