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 Britons have fought multiple ‘hostile environments’
ROGER McKENZIE explains how the Windrush scandal is rooted in a long history of legal and social opposition to black people living in Britain, but each time, political organisation has beaten racism
HISTORY REPEATING: Deputy Tory leader William Whitelaw’s plans for ‘tighter’ immigration controls are protested in Brixton, 1978
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
ANYONE would be forgiven for thinking that the “hostile environment” that is at the heart of the Windrush scandal began with the utterances of Theresa May when she was home secretary in May 2012.
Some may even believe that the hostile environment goes back to the racist “rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell in Birmingham in April 1968. Others may point to the slew of racist attacks that became a fact of everyday life for the black community after the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks on June 21 1948.
All of these share common themes, which I touch on below, but I want to go back to the year 1919 to talk about a strangely under-told period of a hugely hostile environment created for the significant black communities in Britain as well as the US.
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