Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO reports from the start of Kunming’s Belt and Road media forum, where 200 journalists from 71 countries celebrated a new openness and optimism, forged by China’s enormous contribution to global development
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
Women opponents of the Trump regime fear his misogynist, racist and anti-immigrant views are taking hold in Britain, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER, as protests against his visit hit London’s streets
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
Politicians who continue to welcome contracts with US companies without considering the risks and consequences of total dependency in the years to come are undermining the raison d’etre of the NHS, argues Dr JOHN PUNTIS
MISH RAHMAN introduces the platform of a new organisation within Your Party, which will campaign for the highest level of democracy, accountability and participation, having learned from the mistakes of Labour in the 2015-19 era
ANDREW MURRAY wonders what the great communist foe of Oswald Mosley would make of today’s far-right surge, warning that while the triumph of Farage and ‘Robinson’ is far from inevitable, placing any faith in Starmer in an anti-fascist front is a fool’s errand
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.
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