As tens of thousands return to the streets for the first national Palestine march of 2026, this movement refuses to be sidelined or silenced, says PETER LEARY
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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
If the government really wanted to address public finances, improve living standards and begin economic recovery, it would increase its borrowing for investment, argues MICHAEL BURKE
MATT KERR takes a winter journey through poetry, labour and memory, from Glasgow to Newcastle, arguing that our radical past isn’t something to revere from a distance, but a tool still meant to be used
One of Canada’s most revered politicians is a native of Falkirk but is relatively unknown in his original homeland. KENNY MacASKILL tells his story
Labour prospects in May elections may be irrevocably damaged by Birmingham Council’s costly refusal to settle the year-long dispute, warns STEVE WRIGHT
HENRY FOWLER and ROB POOLE explain the significance of today’s Megapicket
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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