Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
PRIVATISER Serco held private talks with Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and other shadow cabinet members before the election about getting more work from a Labour government, according to comments made by its chief executive at this month’s Labour conference.
Reeves previously publicly condemned Serco and promised to reverse public-sector outsourcing, but it looks like Labour has now abandoned these positions.
Serco chief executive Anthony Kirby was addressing a Labour conference fringe meeting that his firm paid think tank Demos to organise. Thanks to funding the meeting, discussing Labour’s “missions” and “public services,” Kirby was on the panel for the event. He told the meeting, held in a 40-seater room in Liverpool’s Hilton hotel, that “before the election we were really excited by some of the conversations we had with Sir Keir and Rachel and some of the shadow cabinet.” By Rachel, he meant Rachel Reeves, so it looks like Serco’s boss is on first-name terms with the Chancellor.
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
If we can tackle the big issues, like delivering decent public services and affordable state-built and owned housing by making the richest pay a fair amount of tax, Labour can win back the trust and support of the electorate, argues ANDY McDONALD MP
SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests
Our two-tear Chancellor’s woes at PMQs caused a multimillion-pound sinking feeling on the bond market, writes ANDREW MURRAY


