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
FORMER Labour health secretary Alan Milburn and his immediate family got a £2,141,000 payout from his corporate consultancy business this year, according to the latest accounts.
That’s up on their payout last year of £1.338m. Milburn himself gets the lion’s share of the money — by my rough calculation he will have taken about £1.5m of the dividend.
Milburn was the New Labour secretary of state for health from 1999-03 and he promoted NHS outsourcing, including buying NHS operations from private hospitals and PFI outsourcing, while in post.
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
When privatisation is already so deeply embedded in the NHS, we can’t just blindly argue for ‘more funding’ to solve its problems, explain ESTHER GILES, NICO CSERGO, BRIAN GIBBONS and RATHI GUHADASAN



