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
Out of apathy – where next for Labour and the left?
Building alliances inside and outside the Labour Party and going on the offensive in committing to party democracy are key to moving beyond the current impasse, argues VINCE MILLS
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
IT IS a difficult time for the left in the Labour Party, in Scotland as everywhere else. There is no need, for the readers of this paper, to list the examples of back sliding mendacity from Keir Starmer and acolytes, nor the Labour leadership’s collusion in distorting or abandoning democratic practice in order to ensure absolute loyalty to our dear leader from prospective parliamentary candidates. Scotland has not been exempted from this.
We can neither ignore it, nor adopt the approach of the ultra-left which seems to have come straight out of Blackadder Goes Forth — a mad assault on enemy positions over open ground in the certainty of mass slaughter.
Perhaps those advocating such an approach do so on the assumption that a new workers’ party is about to bring salvation to abandoned socialists, so that expelled Campaign Group members could represent “a real socialist party” for a year before losing their seats in the 2024 election.
More from this author
VINCE MILLS cautions over the perils and pitfalls of ‘a new left party’
VINCE MILLS says politicians of various parties are interpreting the result in self-serving ways, but it contains little comfort for the left
VINCE MILLS gathers some sobering facts that would inevitably be major obstacles to any such initiative
That Scotland was an active participant and beneficiary of colonialism and slavery is not a question of blame games and guilt peddling, but a crucial fact assessing the class nature of the questions of devolution and independence, writes VINCE MILLS
