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 shop floor stories British fiction ignores
Our homegrown literary scene seems stuck in a bit of a middle-class bubble with a key sector deeply unrepresented in the stories it tells: retail workers. Ireland and the US do much better, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
RETAIL TALES: Nearly a tenth of the British workers work in retail — but don’t star in our books and novels
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
THE British fiction scene just doesn’t support enough novels about working in shops. This thought popped into my head while reading two recent novels, which both build on retail experience.
Both are, rightly, I think, highly recommended. Neither are British. The absent shopworker is another sign of how the current British fiction scene doesn’t really reflect the Britain we live in. Some 2.7 million Brits — nearly a tenth of the workforce — work in retail. But like a lot of other working people, their lives are not well reflected in British novels.
The first book is Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, which appeared in paperback this year. It’s a funny, bittersweet comedy about being a young adult, about those first steps when you make your best friends and worst choices.
More from this author
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
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
US General Stanley McChrystal has been invited to advise on creating a ‘team of teams’ for healthcare transformation. His credentials? He previously ran interrogation bases where Iraqis were stripped naked and beaten, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
