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 runaway success of the Black Lives Matter movement has shaken up politics and thrown up new — and not so new — practical and theoretical problems.
Inspired by a tragic event across the ocean, a whole new group of people has found that taking the knee for eight minutes and 46 seconds — the time it took for the life to be squeezed out of George Floyd by a Minnesota cop — is the catalyst for a whole new way of thinking about racism and politics in general.
For some people to adopt a posture like taking a knee — one now so deeply embedded in US sporting and political culture — seems to strike a false note in the specifically British context.

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