Our economic system is broken – and unless we break with the government’s obsession with short-termist private profit, things are destined to get worse, warns Mercedes Villalba

THE Labour Party’s history is not something much discussed at Labour conferences. There are occasional nods to Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson and of course Tony Blair.
The Labour Party constitution, written by Sidney Webb in 1918 and amended since, is usually only discussed when the leadership is trying to work out how to gather more power for itself and less for the unions and ordinary members.
A recent exception was the period from 2010 to 2019 under the leadership of Ed Miliband and then Jeremy Corbyn, when more power was given to members and membership numbers boomed. The current leadership of Sir Keir Starmer owes a good deal to the fact that the Labour right was concerned that the left might gain control of the order of service in Labour’s broad church, as Ralph Miliband put it.

Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT

KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past

The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT

KEITH FLETT looks at the long history of coercion in British employment laws