Port Talbot residents asked to stay inside as 'apocalyptic' fire rages at Tata Steel plant bbc.in/49DRzUK

An Honest Day and Manchesterism have been cast as two competing political and economic visions for the country. @DantonsHead and I have written in the @NewStatesman saying the future will be shaped by both. The old tribal loyalties and arguments were made for a world that has gone, and not coming back. We're interested in what comes next.

Tony Blair's essay is a serious contribution. The party is drifting. Just Labour ends in the comfort zone, a place the country is sick of, and that ends in defeat. There is some common ground on policy reform: on welfare, on the North Sea, on illegal immigration, on growth before redistribution, on the planning system. But he stops short of the project he says he is looking for. The age he describes, China rising, supply chains weaponised, a more dangerous world, demands an active state. It demands an industrial strategy with the muscle to build, make and defend. Not incentives and partnership. Direction. And it demands a politics rooted in the country as it actually is. Family. Work. Place. Nation. That project has a name. It is Blue Labour. It is radical in the way he claims to want, and it answers the legitimacy problem his Radical Centre cannot. Efficacy is not legitimacy. His essay names three actors. The state, the private sector, the voluntary sector. The citizen is missing. Treated as a recipient of services, a unit of human capital, a problem on a welfare roll. Never as someone with a contribution to make. That is why his politics will always feel like something done to people, not something done with them. Homes for Ukraine was one of the best designed policies of recent years. The state set the frame, the councils did the checks, the contracts were in place. But the policy only worked because the British people did the work. Ordinary households opened their doors to strangers on a scale this country has not seen in generations. No essay about Britain's future can be written without what the British people give to it. A smaller welfare state is the right goal. But you get there by asking more of citizens and more of the state in return. Work, training, a stake in your community on one side. Decent jobs, real opportunity, services that function on the other. Not sanctions on people the system has already failed. Dependency is not dignity. Contribution is. This is where apprenticeships matter. They were once a relationship. A trade, a master, a young person, a place. The apprenticeship levy turned them into a tax credit for big companies and a way to rebadge graduate training. And we never gave them a home. University students have campuses like palaces. The young person learning a trade would be lucky to get a portakabin. It tells you what this country values. A young person learning a trade from someone who knows it is worth more than anything the corporatised version delivers. Across economic and social policy, the challenge is to rebuild the relationship and place, so that dignity can be restored. There is a challenge here for the progressive class as well. People have come second to their causes. The working class were told their concerns could wait or that they were wrong, and when they refused to wait any longer they were called the problem. A party that puts its causes before its people will keep losing them. Causes do not rebuild politics. People do. Naming the drift is not the same as ending it. A list of policies is not a story about the country and its people, and what we owe each other. That is what the country is waiting so desperately for.

4/ As we face the second fossil fuel crisis of this decade, we must learn the right lessons. The way to get bills down for good and avoid these price spikes is to go further and faster with our drive for clean homegrown power that we control.

The necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The most controversial element of Marxism.

Football should bring people together, not shut them out. For the first time since the competition began, fans won’t be able to watch the Champions League final for free. That’s not right. This is bigger than wanting to watch Arsenal in this historic final. It’s bigger than one club. Hardworking people shouldn’t have to fork out for a subscription to watch this match. I urge TNT Sports to reconsider and make the final next Saturday free to watch.

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Green by-election candidate Chris Kennedy shared posts on social media describing an attack on Jewish ambulances in north London as a “false flag” When approached by The Times, he apologised for the posts and quit today citing "personal reasons" 1/