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
Don’t mention the councils
The SNP's council election pitch had almost nothing to do with councils, saying little about education, housing or better pay for council workers — instead they are pushing ahead with the privatisation of social care, writes STEPHEN LOW
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
UNUSUALLY for me, unusually for almost anyone really, but when the party political broadcast came on I didn’t immediately change channels. Instead I watched the SNP’s pitch. It was, I have to say, highly informative, but not perhaps in the way its producers intended.
A man walks through a rural landscape intoning a long list of Tory failings and misdeeds, almost all of which are well known to everyone who hasn’t been in a coma. The bearded protagonist points to an elderly woman, Betty, further up the hill he is climbing.
She, a trifle incongruously, is sitting in an armchair knitting. A waxwork with a blue rosette is brought into frame. Betty attempts and fails to throw the waxwork. Cut to “Vote SNP.” Remaining viewers are then told that was a party election broadcast for the Scottish council elections on May 5.
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
