SOLOMON HUGHES reveals how six MPs enjoyed £400-£600 hospitality at Ditchley Park for Google’s ‘AI parliamentary scheme’ — supposedly to develop ‘effective scrutiny’ of artificial intelligence, but actually funded by the increasingly unsavoury tech giant itself
Defend and strengthen the trade union link
The left must be the strongest advocates of the unions’ essential bond with the Labour Party, writes MATT WILLGRESS
Trade union delegates take a vote
Caroline Darian, daughter of Gisele Pelicot, took part in a conversation with Afua Hirsch at London’s Royal Geographical Society. LYNNE WALSH reports
As the regime in Iran continues to face international pressure to reduce its nuclear programme, workers continue to struggle for wages they can live on despite harsh repression of trade unionists, reports JAMSHID AHMADI
JEAN SILVAN EVANS pays tribute to the social campaigner who sang the Welsh national anthem to Khrushchev in Moscow and became Rhondda’s communist mayor in 1979
As summer nears, TOM HARDY explains how unions are organising heat strikes and cool stations while calling for legal maximum workplace temperatures — because employers currently have no duty to protect workers from dangerous heat
European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde sees Trump’s many disruptions as an opportunity to challenge the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ — but greater Euro assertiveness will also mean greater warmongering and militarism, warns NICK WRIGHT
KEITH BARLOW examines the 1975 referendum that saw Britain vote to stay in the EEC, revealing how Tony Benn understood that EU free-market principles and capital movement rules would tie the hands of any government putting people’s interests before corporate profits
IN recent weeks, various media stories have sought to portray a big chasm between individual members of the Labour Party and trade unions.
Yet the votes and debates on the two issues much of the media were whipping up speculation about — the Green New Deal and Brexit — showed that the majority of affiliate and constituency Labour Party delegates were in very similar positions on these matters, and backing those adopted by the current Labour leadership.
Affiliates also proposed to conference 10 vital motions on a range of progressive issues, including on a socialist industrial strategy that can rebuild and transform Britain for the many not the few.
The reason for these attacks aimed at dividing the union and constituency left is that an alliance between constituency members and trade union affiliates secured Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015, and ever since then our enemies have sought to weaken, and ultimately split, this alliance.
These are likely to intensify in the run-up to any general election, when the Tories and the Establishment will be pulling out all the stops to try to stop Corbyn getting into No 10.
Just as we did in the Blair years, when the trade union link came under sustained attack, the left of the party must argue not only for maintaining but strengthening the union link.
As Aslef general secretary Mick Whelan said earlier this week: “Trade union voices must also be central to our party.
“Our party was established to be the voice of organised Labour … Trade unions created the party and comrades, if the collective voices of train drivers, nurses, school support staff, postal workers, firefighters, shopworkers are diminished, this party would no longer be worthy of that name.”
We have the opportunity of a lifetime to put Corbyn into No 10 and transform the lives of millions.
The trade union movement must and will be part of this.
If you have enjoyed this column this week giving a daily update from Labour Conference, check out www.twitter.com/labouroutlook and www.facebook.com/LabourOutlook.
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