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
Labour conference 2023: promises and prospects
NICK WRIGHT looks at the context behind Labour’s current position, what could do in power, what it is likely to do — and how the labour movement itself should react
Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is joined by his wife Victoria after delivering his keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Picture date: Tuesday October 10, 2023.
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
LABOUR’S Liverpool conference basked in the expectation that the victory over the Scottish nationalists at Rutherglen heralds a return to the days when the party could rely on a substantial, even inflated, block of Scottish seats.
The rough parity that First Past the Post (FPTP) voting provided in the post-war period has eroded — remember the Conservatives were the biggest Scottish party in 1968 — and the post-independence referendum wipeout of Labour's Scottish contingent, only temporarily mitigated by the return of a handful of extra MPs generated by the 2017 Corbyn surge, looks like ending.
Naturally, Labour has spun the Rutherglen by-election figures as signalling a massive increase in Labour's Scottish presence at Westminster. The victory margin was substantial but the peculiarities of the seat — it alternates between the SNP and Labour — and the general crisis of the SNP and independence movement as a whole, helped Labour.
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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
