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
Socialism’s increasingly popular — but Labour is not
With faith in social mobility dropping, support for left policies is high. Starmer’s mission is not to harness this, but head it off, explains NICK WRIGHT
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is greeted by supporters before making a stump speech on a general election campaign visit to Beaumont Park in Huddersfield in May 2017
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
HOW is Labour to get out of the doldrums? There is high anxiety as the party’s cash reserves are down to one month’s payroll and a quarter of the staff face redundancy. The loss of well over 50,000 members is a mortal blow to the party’s finances but it is symptomatic of a wider malaise.
The latest poll of polls has Labour on 33 per cent, well below the Tories on 42 per cent. The persistence of this lag is creating a crisis of confidence in the Starmer leadership which the squeaky by-election win in Batley and Spen has barely suppressed.
The last time the two parties were on a level pegging was autumn 2020 and the last time Labour led in the polls was during the 2017 general election campaign.
More from this author
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
