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
Italy after Berlusconi
NICK WRIGHT surveys the damage done by the brazenly nefarious kingpin who fatally undermined Italy's post-war consensus and rehabilitated the far right
The 2022 coalition of (from left) Matteo Salvini, Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni, brought the direct descendant of Mussolini’s original Fascist Party to power for the first time since WWII
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
THE old joke, that Italian film directors, irrespective of their politics, are members of the Communist Party, oddly enough never applied to Nanni Moretti whose films are irresistibly amusing, rich, complex in their construction and self-referential in a way that opens his unfailingly Marxist critique of Italian society and Italian capitalism to endless analysis.
Even when seemingly simple entertainment, Morretti’s films always cast a sharply critical eye over the complexities and contradictions of Italian life and politics. An early critic of the corrupting influence of the privately owned mass media, he is committed to a didactic and pedagogical purpose, to change people’s minds.
The opening scenes of his We Have A Pope (2011) take us around a cardinal’s conclave in the Vatican as each priest silently utters a prayer to their God: “Not me lord, not me.”
More from this author
Holding office in local government is a poisoned chalice for a party that bases its electoral appeal around issues where it has no power whatsoever, argues NICK WRIGHT
From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT
There is no doubt that Trump’s regime is a right-wing one, but the clash between the state apparatus and the national and local government is a good example of what any future left-wing formation will face here in Britain, writes NICK WRIGHT
European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde sees Trump’s many disruptions as an opportunity to challenge the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ — but greater Euro assertiveness will also mean greater warmongering and militarism, warns NICK WRIGHT
