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
Black British activism after WWI
In the second in a four-part serialisation of his new book, African Uhuru, ROGER McKENZIE outlines the organised resistance to a surge of racism against black workers in law and in the unions as they returned from the war
LOWER RANKS: Black workers were often recruited to work on the railway in jobs that white workers did not want to do
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
THE summer of 1919 was as red in Britain as it was on the other side of the Atlantic in the US. It was a year of international unrest and fear at the same time as being a time of excitement, hope and radicalism, springing from the new world that had been ushered in by the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Much of Britain’s 1919 black population was made up of seafarers, dock workers and colonial troops returning from doing their duty in World War I.
This should not be taken to conclude that black workers only arrived in Britain after World War I. Far from it. There has been a sizeable black population in Britain since Roman times when soldiers of African descent were sent to guard Hadrian’s Wall. But 1919 witnessed a new phenomenon — organised attacks on a community in Britain based on race.
Prior to World War I trade unions in Britain took the principled position of resisting moves by employers to pay black workers, African or Asian, less than their white counterparts. But this principled position disappeared after the war even though unions in the colonies sought to forge an alliance with them against these racist employer practices.
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