There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Social mobility is no substitute for social change
Opportunity, as an ideology, can never replace equality as a lived experience, writes STEPHEN LOW
A cleaner outside 10 Downing Street
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
SOCIAL mobility in Britain has, in the words of the government’s own commission on the matter, been “stagnant” in recent years. The question the left should be asking about this isn’t so much “how is this to be tackled?” so much as “why do we need social mobility?”
Social mobility is all about saying we should have an equal chance in the rat race. Well we all know who rat races are for. Better that we look toward social equality and a better life for everyone.
Social mobility has its advocates everywhere.
Take sometime education secretary Justine Greening declaring “improving social mobility is a defining challenge for us as a nation.” Yet when it comes to tackling the most serious issues facing us talk is, at best, misplaced. At its worst it is a smokescreen designed to obscure a determination to preserve inequality and unfairness.
More from this author
STEPHEN LOW details how the Scottish Greens’ retreat from full opposition to the Bill gives the SNP the opportunity to revive this toxic legislation and push through privatisation under the cover of popular reforms
They have done it again, laments STEPHEN LOW, as the Scottish government passes another intrusive Act, this time on ‘hate crimes,’ that seems so unworkable even those announcing it could not describe it accurately
What the SNP-Green administration is asking politicians to do by voting on the new care service legislation, without being clear on what it even is, totally undermines Holyrood, writes STEPHEN LOW
What could have been easily explained away and apologised for has instead ballooned into an embarrassing cover-up scandal for the Scottish political scene, reports STEPHEN LOW
