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John McDonnell and Labour’s New Deal
McDonnell’s plan is not about filling in potholes. It is the wholesale transformation of how we live, work and protect, writes ALAN SIMPSON

WHEN former US president Franklyn Roosevelt launched his 1930s New Deal into the United State’s depression-era politics, wealthy elites in the American Liberty League were incandescent. Their denunciations focused on a claim that Roosevelt had “betrayed his own class.”

For fairly obvious reasons, Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell will not face the same denunciations. But be in no doubt, the neoliberal right are already after him.

The Tory Party HQ has unleashed a pack of house-trained journalists and back-bench MPs, hounding the shadow chancellor with “Trivial Pursuit” questions about the annual cost of servicing government borrowing.

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