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 alternatives to austerity are obvious
You face austerity because banks are being feather-bedded, not because the state is 'running out of money.' It doesn’t have to be this way, writes DIANE ABBOTT 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
HAROLD WILSON said that a week is a long time in politics. No doubt that is true. But the Autumn Statement delivered by Jeremy Hunt is likely to dominate politics and the economy for the next two years — and possibly well beyond — unless there is a radical alternative proposed.
This is because the scale and structure of the austerity imposed are quite beyond what we have seen before. Economists tell us that in sheer size, this set of measures was much larger than the austerity imposed by David Cameron and George Osborne.
At the same time, it is also planned to be much longer, with many of the measures postponed outright until after the next election and only beginning in 2025. Any claim that this is not a deepening of austerity is sheer nonsense.
More from this author
Our Foreign Secretary now condemns Israel in the Commons, yet Britain still supplies weapons and intelligence for its bombing campaigns — as the horror reaches perhaps the final stage, action must finally replace words, writes DIANE ABBOTT MP
The BBC and OBR claim that failing to cut disability benefits could ‘destabilise the economy’ while ignoring the spendthrift approach to tens of billions on military spending that really spirals out of control, argues DIANE ABBOTT MP
Europe is acquiescing in Trump’s manoeuvrings — where Europe takes over the US forever war in Ukraine while Washington gets ready for a future fight with China. And it’s working people who will be left paying the price, says DIANE ABBOTT MP
DIANE ABBOTT MP argues that Labour’s proposals contained in the recent white paper won’t actually bring down immigration numbers or win support from Reform voters — but they will succeed in making politics more nasty and poisonous
