Despite the adoring support from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Javier Milei’s radical-right free-market nightmare is unravelling, and the people are beginning to score major victories against the government in the streets and in elections, reports BEN HAYES

LABOUR’S case for renationalising the railways is strong. But even after this renationalisation, all the actual trains themselves will still be privately owned. Recently published accounts for Angel Trains — one of the three companies that own our trains — show why this is a problem.
Labour’s renationalisation case is this: since Covid, passenger numbers collapsed and are only now beginning to recover. Without passengers, the train firms would have gone bust, so the Department for Transport gave the train operating companies — the firms that you buy a ticket from and run the trains, like Northern, Southern, Thameslink, or Crosscountry — new contracts.
Private train operators still run the railways, but the government collects all train fares, paying rail operators with a mix of those fares and taxpayer subsidies to make up the shortfall. That subsidy is huge, around £30 billion since 2019.

It is rather strange that Labour continues to give prestigious roles to inappropriate, controversy-mired businessmen who are also major Tory donors. What could Labour possibly be hoping to get out of it, asks SOLOMON HUGHES

Keir Starmer’s hiring Tim Allan from Tory-led Strand Partners is another illustration of Labour’s corporate-influence world where party differences matter less than business connections, writes SOLOMON HUGHES

MBDA’s Alabama factory makes components for Boeing’s GBU-39 bombs used to kill civilians in Gaza. Its profits flow through Stevenage to Paris — and it is one of the British government’s favourite firms, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES

SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests