Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
JACOB ZUMA, having been forced to stand down as South Africa’s president, now faces the resumption of a prosecution for taking bribes in a £2.5 billion arms deal in 1999.
Zuma was deputy president when South Africa entered into this massive arms deal to modernise South Africa’s armed forces.
The huge 1999 deal involved new fighter planes, warships and other weapons. The charges, which he denies, are that Zuma and his associates took big bribes to favour particular arms firms.
ROGER MCKENZIE recalls the one-in-a-generation communist leader murdered at the dawn of a new South Africa 33 years ago last April 10
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
It is rather strange that Labour continues to give prestigious roles to inappropriate, controversy-mired businessmen who are also major Tory donors. What could Labour possibly be hoping to get out of it, asks SOLOMON HUGHES
SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests


