SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
LABOUR are — rightly — doing well out of the growing “second jobs” scandal in Parliament: the MPs with big-bucks-second-jobs and the ones who have tried to influence the government for their paymasters are overwhelmingly Tory.
Boris Johnson’s ham-fisted attempt to get Owen Paterson off for breaking the rules has led to anger about how far MPs are allowed to moonlight for corporations within those rules and calls to tighten the rules.
Keir Starmer’s team have pressed on how Conservative MPs are helping their corporate friends and themselves, not the voters. They’ve done it with more vigour than we are used to, which is good.
SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests
Ben Chacko talks to ALAN MARDGHUM of the Durham Miners Association about Reform UK‘s dangerous inroads into Durham’s long-standing Labour county council; why he cancelled his party membership; and the political class’s disconnect from working people
Reform’s rise speaks to a deep crisis in Establishment parties – but relies on appealing to social and economic grievances the left should make its own, argues NICK WRIGHT
JOE GILL looks at research on the reasons people voted as they did last week and concludes Labour is finished unless it ditches Starmer and changes course



