VIJAY PRASHAD examines why in 2018 Washington started to take an increasingly belligerent stance towards ‘near peer rivals’ – Russa and China – with far-reaching geopolitical effects
Green Finance Institute: much ‘finance,’ little green
SOLOMON HUGHES reveals how one of the organisations shaping Labour’s investment plans was created by Tories and bankers, looking like a slightly green-flecked PFI vehicle instead of a body for proper investment
ROGER McKENZIE looks back 60 years to the assassination of Malcolm X, whose message that black people have worth resonated so strongly with him growing up in Walsall in the 1980s
At least 1.5 million tons of crude oil has been spilt in the Niger Delta since 1958, writes PAVAN KULKANI
ANDREW MURRAY surveys a quaking continent whose leaders have no idea how to respond to an openly contemptuous United States
Based on his experience of Haringey Council Councillor MARK BLAKE believes only a radical policy rethink will reconnect councils with the alienated constituencies they are supposed to serve
Last week the CPUSA launched a new Rapid Response project aimed at mobilising a popular resistance to policies enacted by the new government. CAMERON HARRISON explains
WHAT is the Green Finance Institute, the organisation behind Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s National Wealth Fund plans? Turns out it is an un-transparent, bank-oriented company cooked up between then Tory chancellor Phillip Hammond and the City of London.
Reeves and Ed Miliband say that from April 2024, the Green Finance Institute gave “policy support on the Labour Party’s National Wealth Fund,” running the task force designing the fund, in a donation worth £99,000.
Green Finance Institute chief executive Rhian-Mari Thomas told the Guardian she personally persuaded Reeves to redesign her green investment plans, lobbying the future Chancellor at Davos this January.
Thomas, who spent 19 years as a Barclays banker, says she told Reeves to junk her existing £28 billion public investment plan and let her put Labour “in the room” with the finance industry, resulting in the much smaller £7.3bn fund to work alongside the banks.
An ex-banker persuading the future Chancellor to rewrite her policy, reducing public investment, at the corporate Glastonbury of Davos, sounds like Labour dancing to a City tune.
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