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
THE Labour Party was born from the 1900 Labour Representation Committee: rail and dock workers’ delegates persuaded the TUC to try increase representation of “Labour” — meaning the organised working people — in the House of Commons.
The unions put in money and worked with leading socialists to find good potential MPs. By 1906 this union-backed group of socialists had enough parliamentary seats to rename themselves the Labour Party.
So what does it mean when corporate lobbyists fund the election of Labour MPs, and many of those MPs come from corporate backgrounds? Does this mean a Lobbyists Representation Committee has formed? Do they want Labour to represent their clients — in short , do they want the Labour Party to represent capital?
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
SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests
SOLOMON HUGHES details how the firm has quickly moved on to buttering-up Labour MPs after the fall of the Tories so it can continue to ‘win both ways’ collecting public and private cash by undermining the NHS



