Labour will find increases in the state pension age are unacceptable, just as cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance, personal independence payments and universal credit are — it needs to change direction immediately, writes PCS general secretary FRAN HEATHCOTE

AN unavoidable consequence of Keir Starmer’s evisceration of the left in the Labour Party, with an authoritarian brutality unprecedented in the party’s history, is the resurrection of ideas of forming a new party of socialists.
That is a well-trodden road. The novelty today lies not only in the undemocratic atrocities of the Starmer regime — the vetoes, proscriptions, purging and blocking — but the background of the great groundswell of support for radical policies of the Corbyn years. That is a movement now looking for a home.
Does this make a new socialist party viable? There is a heavy legacy of failure to overcome.

Rocky start to conference with protests and plummeting polls