Zarah Sultana’s recent brave criticisms of Labour from 2015 to 2020, including Brexit triangulation, IHRA capitulation and insufficient fighting spirit, have ruffled feathers but started an essential discussion, writes ANDREW MURRAY
Rachel Reeves channels Philip Snowden: Labour’s 100-year love affair with austerity
The Chancellor is rehashing discredited Victorian economics, showing the party has learned nothing from a century of failed Gladstonian economics, ignoring Keynes and betraying workers, writes KEITH FLETT
TREASURY MIND: Rachel Reeves
US baseless accusations of drug trafficking and the outrageous putting of a bounty on a president of a sovereign country do not bode well, reports PABLO MERIGUET
Green Party MPs stand alone in Parliament in defending Palestine Action against Labour’s proscription of the group as a terrorist organisation — an outrageous move that the Tories supported and the cowardly Lib Dems abstained on, writes ELLIOT TONG
Mass mobilisations are forcing governments to seriously consider imposing sanctions and severing ties — even in places like Australia and the Netherlands — despite continued arms shipments to Israel’s war machine, writes RAMZY BAROUD
What we are learning today is that fascism can come to power even when the working class of almost every capitalist nation is very far from achieving revolution, argues DAVID LETHBRIDGE
TONY BURKE explains how an internationally significant breakthrough for workers’ organisation and recognition against two notoriously anti-union global mega corporations has been finally achieved in Canada
THE pedigree of Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer’s political outlook — cutting pensioners’ fuel allowances, flagging cuts in public expenditure — reaches much further back in parliamentary history to Labour’s first chancellor Philip Snowden. He introduced his first and only Budget in May 1924 and later issued it as a pamphlet, the Housewives Budget.
Snowden had been a member of the Independent Labour Party, a populariser of socialist ideals and a temperance campaigner. However, he had a distinctly Gladstonian Liberal frame of mind when it came to economics. Churchill noted that Snowden shared the “Treasury mind” with the governor of the Bank of England. Reeves of course is a former bank economist.
Snowden saw the chancellor’s job as managing the economy in a prudent way and certainly not increasing public expenditure.
More from this author
KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
KEITH FLETT looks at the long history of coercion in British employment laws
The government cracking down on something it can’t comprehend and doesn’t want to engage with is a repeating pattern of history, says KEITH FLETT
