RAMZY BAROUD on how Israel’s narrative collides with military failure
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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
ROGER McKENZIE explains how Ibrahim Traore has sparked the flames of hope across Africa, while the Western powers seek to extinguish all attempts to build true sovereignty in the long-exploited continent
DANIEL GOVER considers the procedural complexities awaiting a Private Member’s Bill in its passage through Commons and Lords
JAMIE TUCKNUTT reports on an initiative that brings together two epochs of the city’s anti-fascist struggles
Just as German Social Democrats joined the Nazis in singing Deutschland Uber Alles, ANDREW MURRAY observes how Starmer tries to out-Farage Farage with anti-migrant policies — but evidence shows Reform voters come from Tories, not Labour, making this ploy morally bankrupt and politically pointless
KEITH FLETT traces how the ‘world’s most successful political party’ has imploded since Thatcher’s fall, from nine leaders in 30 years to losing all 16 English councils, with Reform UK symbolically capturing Peel’s birthplace, Tamworth — but the beast is not dead yet
With turnout plummeting and faith in Parliament collapsing, BERT SCHOUWENBURG explains how radical local government reform — including devolved taxation and removal of party politics from town halls — could restore power to communities currently ignored by profit-obsessed MPs
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:
More from this author
Labour’s pop-loving front bench have snaffled up even more music tickets worth thousands apiece, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
Secret consultation documents finally released after the Morning Star’s two-year freedom of information battle show the Home Office misrepresented public opinion, claiming support for policies that most respondents actually strongly criticised as dangerous and unfair, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
Despite Labour’s promises to bring things ‘in-house,’ the Justice Secretary has awarded notorious outsourcing outfit Mitie a £329 million contract to run a new prison — despite its track record of abuse and neglect in its migrant facilities, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
