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
Latest editorial
Why ScotRail stops short of public ownership
VINCE MILLS exposes the SNP’s agenda of keeping the train service in private hands to comply with EU directives
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
WHO could blame RMT’s general secretary Mick Cash when he said: “We have long campaigned for the Scottish government to utilise its existing powers and take Scotland’s rail passenger services into public ownership and today’s announcement represents a clear victory for this campaign.”
Except that the Scottish government has not taken ScotRail into public ownership. Instead, a publicly owned “operator of last resort” (OLR) will take over the ScotRail franchise in 12 months’ time when the Abellio franchise ends in March next year.
What’s the difference? The difference is that although the SNP is complaining about the current franchising model, it is committed to competition in rail services because it wants an independent Scotland to join the EU, and in the EU it is obligatory for member countries to allow competition for rail services.
More from this author
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
