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 Starmer-Savile smear is indeed a smear
You don't need to be a Labour loyalist to say Starmer wasn't soft on sex crimes — but neither is it a rumour of murky, far-right origins: it's from the mainstream media, despite their current contrived outrage, explains SOLOMON HUGHES
Starmer was not directly involved in the decision not to prosecute Savile and led the DPP in a more or less conventional way — all the establishment organisations, including the DPP and the BBC, found it hard to pursue Savile, because they are biased towards the rich and powerful and against women, especially those with less money or social standing
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
FRENCH NOVELIST George Perec wrote the novel A Void which doesn’t have a single letter “e” on any of its 290 pages. Gilbert Adair managed the fiendish task of translating it into English in 1995. Perec was a member of Oulipo, a loose collective of tricksters and the joke is a kind of extended prank, a deliberate piece of absurdity.
I raise A Void now because the extended absurdity of writing a novel without the letter “e” reminds me of a bizarre void inside British journalism. A Void is quite impressive and funny to read, but it is also sort of annoying, because all the characters keep saying things like “a thing I cannot pinpoint is missing from our linguistics” — and your mind keeps saying, “Yes! The letter E is missing! Will you just stop messing about and notice it!”
When it comes to journalism, what is missing is something equally basic: any description or acknowledgement of journalism itself. The media can look at politics going rotten but can never see the media’s role in it.
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
