The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
WELL that’s the first week of the election over and what a week it’s been. The election started well for Labour with soon-to-be-impeached President Donald Trump attacking Jeremy Corbyn whilst giving his support to Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson — what a stroke of genius, Labour couldn’t buy such positive PR.
Trump’s “searing” denunciation of Corbyn was Shakespearean in its eloquence — judge the quality for yourself: “Corbyn would be so bad for your country. He’d be so bad, he’d take you in such a bad way. He’d take you into such bad places,” Trump said. Now as political rhetoric goes it’s not quite up there with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech but it was still one of Trump’s more coherent ones.
We then had Jacob Rees “Mogadon” telling the world that the victims of the Grenfell disaster should have “ignored fire service advice” and used “common sense” to get out the blazing inferno that took so many lives. In effect saying people died because they were too stupid to save themselves.
TUC general secretary PAUL NOWAK tells Ben Chacko that Labour can win back disillusioned voters by delivering workplace reforms, rebuilding trust and challenging the far right’s growing influence
Once derided by Farage as a ‘fraud,’ Jenrick has defected to Reform, bringing experience and political ruthlessness to the populist right — and raising the unsettling prospect of a Farage-led movement with a seasoned operative pulling the strings, says ANDREW MURRAY
As the PM and his chief of staff’s blunders have mounted up, ANDREW MURRAY wonders who among Labour’s diminished ‘soft left’ might make a bid for the leadership


