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
Britain’s benefit sanctions are beyond cruel
Punishing those in need doesn’t work from any perspective — that is why the Tory government is refusing to allow access to its own data. It is clear that we need a total overhaul of the system, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
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
IT’S almost five years since the Economic and Social Research Council, a government-funded public body, told the UN’s human rights body that the British government’s drive to extend and intensify benefit sanctions “systematically undermines the very idea of economic and social rights as a core component of national citizenship status and/or justifications for such rights on the basis of universal human needs,” making many benefit claimants unable to meet those basic needs for food, warmth and shelter.
The UN agreed, concluding that despite its denialism, the government was breaching the human rights of benefit claimants at every turn. The UN repeated its call as recently as November 2022.
Despite the clarity of the warnings, the government did nothing to improve its treatment of the most marginalised — in fact, since then the situation has only gone downhill. The number of people suffering sanctions hit record levels in 2022.
More from this author
The New York mayoral candidate has electrified the US public with policies of social justice and his refusal to be cowed. We can follow his example here, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
Israel’s monopolisation of ‘aid’ to slaughter Palestinians means there is no other option: direct international intervention now, says CLAUDIA WEBBE
With missiles penetrating the air defences to strike Haifa and Tel Aviv, Netanyahu’s transparent appeal to Trump demonstrates the Israeli underestimation of Iranian retaliation, and they are desperate to drag their allies in, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
Starmer should not need to wait for the High Court’s decision on F-35 parts in order to do the right thing, warns CLAUDIA WEBBE
