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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No clarity on who really runs Scotland — or should
The election did not answer who truly owns and controls the nation on the core questions of its industry, resources and services — and neither will a simple 'in or out' referendum, writes VINCE MILLS
Scottish First Minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon on the steps outside Bute House in Edinburgh after the SNP won a fourth victory in the Scottish Parliament election
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
WRITING in mid noughties Professor David Miller made the point that “Scotland is governed not simply via the institutions of formal governance… Scotland is also run by political and economic decision-makers, only some of whom are based in Scotland.
“Other centres of decision making are obviously London and Brussels, the Headquarters of the World Trade Organisation, IMF and World Bank and the boardrooms of the transnational corporations, including those which have no interest or base in Scotland (even a negative decision not to site a factory or not to launch a product in Scotland is consequential).”
Arguably a Scottish election of the sort we have just had might have provided an opportunity to explore who owns and runs Scotland and what that ownership means for Scottish society and its industry and services and more importantly still, its democracy.
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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
