From Amazon’s monitored warehouse hell to delivery workers being paid per package, exploitative work destroys collaborative relationships young people need — more screen time and 12 new AI ‘friends’ will only make things worse, writes ALAN SIMPSON

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.

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

While Hardie, MacDonald and Wilson faced down war pressure from their own Establishment, today’s leadership appears to have forgotten that opposing imperial adventures has historically defined Labour’s moral authority, writes KEITH FLETT

10 years ago this month, Corbyn saved Labour from its right-wing problem, and then the party machine turned on him. But all is not lost yet for the left, says KEITH FLETT

Research shows Farage mainly gets rebel voters from the Tory base and Labour loses voters to the Greens and Lib Dems — but this doesn’t mean the danger from the right isn’t real, explains historian KEITH FLETT

