The first half of John Healey’s first Labour conference speech as Chancellor reminded me of old men in a bowls club reminiscing about the Korean war.

For more than 15 minutes Healey set out his credentials as a Labour veteran. He’d gone from his constituency Labour party to the trade union movement and then to No. 11 (note, no mention of private business experience). He’s been around the block so long that Labour is ‘literally’ his family, he said, paying tribute to his wife. Once the thanks to the Mrs were out of the way, things moved to his true love: Gordon Brown. It felt, at times, like the Liverpool Convention Centre had been given over for a Brown memorial rather than the governing party’s conference.

The trouble is, without addressing the reasons British industry currently is totally unviable, any hope of reindustrialisation is for the birds

The trouble is, without addressing the reasons British industry currently........

© The Spectator