The Labour leadership’s narrow definition of ‘working people’ leads to distorted and unjust Budget calculations, where the unearned income of the super-wealthy doesn’t factor in at all, argues JON TRICKETT MP
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The historical context of Rachel Reeves
Britain’s first woman Chancellor delivers the same old fudge, as Labour’s commitment to economic orthodoxy, seen throughout its history, always betrays working people, writes KEITH FLETT
Brazilian workers are calling for internationalist brigades to defend Venezuela from US attack, reports WT WHITNEY JR
KEITH FLETT recalls ‘the most advanced political programme to appear on the left until the time of the Bolsheviks’
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY ask how an 80-tonne whale that lives 200 years is so resistant to cancer
Sixty years of blockade have not made Cuba collapse, but they have devastated it. While Washington stands isolated at the United Nations, the Cuban people are paying the price, writes KATRIEN DEMUYNCK
As Armistice Day approaches, with the far right hoping to use it to promote their own form of ‘patriotism,’ NICK WRIGHT considers the nature of conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries and the different ways they should be remembered
FOR socialists there is a good deal to be discontented about Rachel Reeves’s policies as Chancellor. The cut in winter fuel payments has rightly caused anger and talk of cuts to spending suggests an austere 2025.
While she has been engaged with socialists who have thought a good deal about the historic roots of Britain’s crisis and what might be done — such as David Edgerton at Kings College, London — it’s difficult to discern much practical influence.
Of course, a certain portion of the attacks on her are firstly because she is the first female Chancellor and the world of finance is still largely that of men in suits. Secondly, she is a Labour Chancellor. Of what stripe is entirely irrelevant to the likes of the Mail, Telegraph and GB News: it’s just Labour of any kind they hate.
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KEITH FLETT traces how the ‘world’s most successful political party’ has imploded since Thatcher’s fall, from nine leaders in 30 years to losing all 16 English councils, with Reform UK symbolically capturing Peel’s birthplace, Tamworth — but the beast is not dead yet
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
Instead of responding to changed circumstances by adjusting policy, Reeves is using fiscal ‘rules’ as an excuse to force government departments to make even deeper cuts than she had already flagged, says CLAUDIA WEBBE