Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died 50 years ago today November 20. JIM JUMP looks back at his blood-soaked rule and toxic legacy on Spain today
NO prime minister has entered Downing Street with a more compromised mandate, with scarcely a breeze to lift his sails.
The joy at the end of Tory rule, symbolised by the loss of the constituencies once represented by David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, cannot disguise the less than ringing endorsement of Keir Starmer’s Labour.
Nor can the iniquities of the first-past-the-post system, which gifted Labour a Commons landslide over a divided right, mask the fact that Starmer takes office with his electoral coalition already crumbling.
As the PM and his chief of staff’s blunders have mounted up, ANDREW MURRAY wonders who among Labour’s diminished ‘soft left’ might make a bid for the leadership
Sixty Red-Green seats in a hung parliament could force Labour to choose between the death of centrism or accommodation with the left — but only if enough of us join the Greens by July 31 and support Zack Polanski’s leadership, writes JAMES MEADWAY
From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT
With Reform UK surging and Labour determined not to offer anything different from the status quo, a clear opportunity opens for the left, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE



