Labour clarifies PFI pledge as experts warn it could cost more than £50bn – Politics live

Rolling coverage of events at the Labour conference in Brighton, including John McDonnell’s speech as shadow chancellor

The CBI did not like John McDonnell’s speech. This is from its director general, Carolyn Fairbairn.

The shadow chancellor’s vision of massive state intervention is the wrong plan at the wrong time. It raises a warning flag over the British economy at a critical time for our country’s future.

Business and politicians share a determination to create a fairer society in which everyone benefits. But the trickle of stalled investments caused by Brexit uncertainty could become a flood if these plans were to become reality. This would threaten the living standards of the very people that need help, from pensioners to students.

One of the most popular and occasionally unusual events in Brighton has just taken place. Part of Momentum side-festival The World Transformed it saw shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth chatting to Russell Brand, the comedian and actor, who was likely to have been largely responsible for the queues around the block.

The pair were discussing addiction and the responses to it, a subject both have a personal stake in. Brand has talked and written publicly and often about his addictions, while Ashworth talked late last year about growing up with a father who struggled with alcoholism.

That drinking was always there, and coloured my life. It was not unusual for me to go home, open the fridge, and find nothing but bottles of wine, cans of lager. It was not unusual to be picked up from school as.a ten-year-old and my dad was drunk.

In a way, addiction is just amplified consumerism, that’s what it is – the idea you can make yourself feel better by buying something, that you can make yourself feel better by putting something inside of yourself.

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