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
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Rules? What rules? The revolving door between government and business
The recent attempt to pretend that restrictions are really being placed on industry hiring government insiders as lobbyists and fixers is singularly unconvincing, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
THE latest Business Appointment Rules show the continued circulation of people from the Cabinet Office — the heart of government — to corporate lobbying.
The “Rules” are a half-hearted attempt to stop corporations getting influence when they hire government insiders.
When government staff — on what are called senior Civil Service grades 1 and 2 or SCS1 and SCS2 — leave departments, their new jobs have to be looked at under the Business Appointment Rules and agreed by the permanent secretary, the top official in the department.
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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
SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests