The campaign against the Bank of England’s ongoing theft of Venezuelan gold is gaining support across the labour movement and beyond, writes MATT WILLGRESS
Latest editorial
Teaching the watchdog not to bark
SOLOMON HUGHES reveals why Labour is attempting to build its own spending review body: the existing one might not like its love affair with the outsourcing giants who provide terrible value for public money
The new Prime Minister must abandon decades of automatic support for US foreign policy, which makes us all less safe, argues DIANE ABBOTT MP
Claims that Nicaragua has abolished elections followed a headline that stripped Daniel Ortega’s remarks of their historical and political context. The full speech tells a different story, says BECCA RENK FOSTER
Media Lens at 25: David Cromwell and David Edwards reflect on a quarter-century of media criticism, explaining why independent journalism is more important than ever
MAT COWARD introduces some of the electoral oddballs of the political fringe who remain one of the liveliest features of British democracy, despite efforts to abolish them
by Weyman Bennett and Maz’s family
THIS march, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a new key policy, an “office for value for money” (OVM) — what she called an “independent hit squad, with real powers to hold the government to account.”
But Labour has failed to highlight some key recent reports by the National Audit Office (NAO). The NAO is the nearest thing to Reeves’s proposed OVM, but I suspect Labour has not been grabbing some of their reports, because they independently come up with the wrong answer by showing the failure of outsourced public services.
Highlighting what she called billions of pounds of “wasteful government spending,” Reeves said her new OVM would “conduct spot checks,” “investigate value for money in procurement” and “publish findings, providing a powerful public check” on waste.
Reeves sold her plan as an improvement on the NAO, the government’s main spending watchdog. Reeves told Channel 4 News:
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Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
