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
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Who’s impressed by Iain McNicol’s resumé?
The Labour lord had an underwhelming Commons career as an anti-Corbyn plotter – but with a potential right-wing Labour government in the wings, some lobbying firms see money to be made by buying connections, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
Iain McNicol, then Labour Party general secretary, delivers a speech onstage at the beginning of the Labour Party annual conference in September 2015
In the wake of Ann Widdecombe’s murder, JOHN GREEN wonders whether the government will really get to grips with the root cause of these attacks on our MPs
The new PM’s opening addresses offered hope, council homes and reform — but little detail on how any of it will be delivered, warns CLAUDIA WEBBE
Despite the screeching from the right-wing media, Burnham’s speech chimed with the public mood - and socialists should take advantage, says Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO
Scotland's Labour leader cannot continue to evade responsibility for the party's decline, argues LAUREN HARPER
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
WHAT happens to former Labour general secretaries when they retire? It turns out they join up with former Tory ministers to work for lobbying companies that regularly represent corporations and foreign authoritarian regimes.
At least that is what happened to Iain McNicol. He was general secretary of the Labour Party from 2011 to 2018.
Last December he got a new job as an “adviser” to what he calls a “strategy consultancy” called Actum. It is a relatively new US-controlled lobbying firm. McNicol was hired alongside former Tory minister Ed Vaizey.
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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
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
SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests