rather than send out complex signals about the need to bring the current account into balance.

McDonnell was told at a Parliamentary Labour party meeting by Labour MPs that his approach had been a shambles and there had not been the remotest attempt to consult Labour MPs about the change.

The Guardian view on Labour’s fiscal policy: mayhem, muddle, but the right call in the end | Editorial Read more

Labour MPs left the meeting describing the policy U-turn as a shambles, and Corbyn’s spokesman confirmed the major change in economic policy had been agreed without a collective meeting of the shadow cabinet, but instead McDonnell ringing individual shadow cabinet members.

In his letter, McDonnell said he had initially regarded Osborne’s charter, and the votes in the Commons approving its wording, asof Nations gave control of Palestine and Syria to Britain and France. Steeped in imagined medieval precedents, Europeans could scarcely have avoided seeing this as the final chapter in the long history of the crusades. The popular London magazine Punch ran a drawing of Richard the Lionheart staring at the British entry into Jerusalem with the caption, "At last, my dream come true." After taking command in Syria, the French General Henri Gouraud remarked, "Behold, Saladin, we have returned."1

Western attitudes toward the crusades were, however, about to change dramatically. The Russian Revolution boosted Marxism to the world stage, inviting more intellectuals to reconsider the crusades from that theoretical perspective. For Marxists economic factors drove history. Marxist historians accepted that the crusades were imperialistic, but they rejected the idea