HENRY FOWLER, assistant general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), reports on Day 2 from the GFTU’s residential Summer School at the Workers’ Retreat, Quorn Grange Hotel
ONE of the few innovations of Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership is allowing multimillionaires to bypass the Labour Party and directly choose who gets ahead in the party and who doesn’t.
The latest example of this appears in the Register of MPs’ Interests: Josh Simons, Labour MP for Makerfield, says hedge fund boss Martin Taylor has given him £47,000 “to support my work as a member of Parliament.”
That’s a lot of money which will help Simons build his profile and get more noticed in the party. Taylor, who is a multimillionaire, is just bypassing all those annoying Labour Party meetings and conferences and throwing a load of money to build up one of his favourite centrist MPs.
Labour’s toxic centrists have wealthy backers but there’s little to suggest they can win over MPs or party members in an open fight, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
Our political sphere, stripped of its popular component by decades of neoliberalism, sits apart from the public, writes COLL MCCAIL citing a telling parallel with the writings of French revolutionary Abbe Sieyes
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


