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
The times they are a-changin'
DAVE BANGS sees all socialist notions long gone from farming communities overridden by mega farms and agricultural monopolies
TIMES GONE BY: Ponnies fro sale, Isaac and Chris Evans at the New Barn farm in USK, 1988
[Dave Bangs] 
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
ISAAC EVANS has gone now. He died in 2006.
Yet when I visit my mate Chris, his son, who now runs the farm alone, his dad is alive in my mind. How could he not be? He was such a big presence, with his beard and his cap, and at one stage a dowsing stick, talking the hind leg off a donkey, as he always did. And how often do you meet a socialist farmer?
When I recently visited Chris I asked him to tell me how many socialist farmers he knew in this rolling Welsh border country east of Pontypool.
More from this author
From John Clare country to ancient fenland, Ed Miliband’s solar farm approvals risk industrialising precious rural spaces — we must find greener solutions that don’t sacrifice our countryside’s beauty, writes DAVE BANGS
Decades of right to buy have eroded the social balance of our countryside — and now holiday lets and second home owners from the cities are compounding the crisis, writes DAVE BANGS
Spring has sprung in all its glory — but DAVE BANGS is disturbed by the absence of a crucial sound
