Andy Burnham’s growing stature has fuelled hopes of a Labour revival – but ALAN SIMPSON warns that Britain’s crisis runs far deeper than just its leadership and traces its roots to decades of financialised capitalism
EVEN Sir Keir Starmer’s supporters accept he is struggling to stand out against Boris Johnson and faces a difficult test at the local elections.
The reason is obvious — so obvious in fact that a lot of pundits have to try very hard not to see it.
Starmer and his team are putting all their effort into defining him against “Corbynism” instead of defining him against Boris Johnson.
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
STEPHEN ARNELL casts a critical eye over the sudden rash of challenges to the two-party system on both sides of the Atlantic, noting that today’s performative populist politics sadly lacks Roosevelt’s progressive ‘Bull Moose’ vision of the early 20th century
From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT


