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
Devolution reloaded
After Scottish Labour’s success in the polls, VINCE MILLS calls for bold devolution of immigration and borrowing powers to tackle Scotland’s economic challenges — and outflank the SNP
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar with some of the newly elected Labour MPs at Four Winds Pavilion in Glasgow, following the landslide General Election victory for the Labour Party, July 5, 2024
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
CONGRATULATIONS to the Scottish Labour Party (SLP) for its part in the victory over the despicable Tories on July 4. It won 37 seats (65 per cent) on a 35.3 per cent share of the vote, higher than Labour’s Britain-wide share of 33.7 per cent.
Although, as in England and Wales, it was a victory gained in the face of a spectacular collapse of its main rival, in Scotland’s case, the Scottish National Party (SNP) which lost 39 seats on a 30 per cent share of the vote, leaving them only 9 MPs in Westminster (16 per cent).
The victory was also won on a reduction in turnout of 8.4 per cent from the 2019 election to only 59.2 per cent and in a few constituencies the turnout was down by as much as 10 per cent. That was a bigger reduction than the UK turnout which fell by 7.6 per cent to 60 per cent.
More from this author
VINCE MILLS cautions over the perils and pitfalls of ‘a new left party’
VINCE MILLS says politicians of various parties are interpreting the result in self-serving ways, but it contains little comfort for the left
VINCE MILLS gathers some sobering facts that would inevitably be major obstacles to any such initiative
That Scotland was an active participant and beneficiary of colonialism and slavery is not a question of blame games and guilt peddling, but a crucial fact assessing the class nature of the questions of devolution and independence, writes VINCE MILLS
