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 two kinds of social democracy
NICK WRIGHT looks at the problems Labour governments face
Former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey
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 chancellor of the exchequer Denis Healey is rightly regarded as a heavyweight among post-war politicians. An ardent communist at Oxford before the second world war, Healey was among the brightest of his generation — schooled in Marxist dialectics and the anti-fascist political culture of that era, trained by the Communist Party in a period when intellectuals were drawn to a party whose main cadres were factory workers and miners and whose heroes fought in the International Brigades.
His communism did not survive the war which saw him promoted through the ranks. He was demobbed as a major and, still in uniform, told delegates to the 1945 Labour Party conference: “the upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent.”
The Cold War saw him as top functionary of the Labour Party’s international department at a time when this body marched in lockstep with British and US intelligence services as these organisations collaborated with the operatives of the Gehlen nazi intelligence apparatus in a futile effort to stem the advance of socialism in the countries that had been liberated by the Red Army. A not subsidiary function was to advise on the management of Britain’s colonies.
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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
