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
BORIS JOHNSON resigned as prime minister on July 7 after only narrowly winning a confidence vote of Tory MPs. At that point he could have left office, appointed a caretaker deputy, and gone on holiday.
Instead while Johnson has certainly gone on holiday — several of them — he has remained in post, drawing his prime ministerial salary and using the PM’s country house, Chequers.
About the cost-of-living crisis he has done precisely nothing. He did, however, find time to make yet another visit to Kiev and promise further taxpayers’ money to continue the war there.
It’s not just the Starmer regime: the workers of Britain have always faced legal affronts on their right to assemble and dissent, and the Labour Party especially has meddled with our freedoms from its earliest days, writes KEITH FLETT
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
ANDREW MURRAY recommends a volume of essays that nail the visionless, racist and neoliberal character of policy under Starmer’s Labour Party
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT


