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
Cuts or ‘white privilege?’ The government’s education culture war
The Tories are hell-bent on injecting racial tension into the debate on educational attainment to mask the obvious fact that it is their programme of cuts over the last decade that is responsible for growing inequality, 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
AT A TIME when much of the world is finally facing up to the reality of structural discrimination, the government has cynically been preoccupied with creating a new narrative in which working-class communities are pitted against each other and blamed for the systemic disadvantages they face.
By denying the existence of institutional racism, the government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was already a slap in the face for African, Asian and minority ethnic communities and all those affected by racism. Its claim that Britain is a world-leading bastion of racial progress was nothing short of state-sanctioned gaslighting.
Yet now this damaging study has an ugly sibling, with the publication of a report published by the Conservative-dominated Commons education committee entitled The Forgotten: How White Working-Class Pupils Have Been Let Down and How to Change It.
The report uses cherry-picked data to claim that “an industry” has emerged to support non-white pupils and that the same is not available to white pupils on free school meals. The report also, farcically, claims that terms such as “white privilege” have contributed towards systemic neglect and underachievement of poor white pupils.
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
