Labour’s persistent failure to address its electorate’s salient concerns is behind the protest vote, asserts DIANE ABBOTT
THE tributes have for have been pouring for political heavyweight and man of the people, John Prescott (aka Baron Prescott of Kingston upon Hull), who passed away last week aged 84.
His reputation was of a man singularly able to cut through the usual Westminster crap using the unvarnished spade of mangled syntax and the blunt shovel of malapropisms as his tools.
Homeless seamen were forced to live in “hostiles,” industrial disputes could be sorted through “meditation,” and the New Labour mission was to “go back now, forwards, back to full employment.” Absolute gibberish, of course, but we knew what he was on about, at least most of the time.
The Tories’ trouble is rooted in the British capitalist Establishment now being more disoriented and uncertain of its social mission than before, argues ANDREW MURRAY



