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
Step up the fight against the Tories' racist Borders and Policing Bills
The new legislation currently being put forward by the government will have a particularly devastating impact on black and brown people, writes ZITA HOLBOURNE
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 POLICE BILL seeks to infringe on our civil liberties, giving increased powers to police to impose conditions on protests and cultural events — and while the Bill has an impact on many groups, black and brown people already face racial profiling and disproportionate stop and search — as well as police brutality which has led to far too many deaths at the hands of the state.
These deaths devastate families who have to become campaigners in their quest for justice, like the case of Mohamud Hassan in Wales who died after being kept in custody in a police cell overnight a year ago — and like the family of Jay Abatan who was killed by racists in Brighton and who 23 years later are still fighting for justice: the killers are known but were arrested and released and there have been collective failures by Sussex police as there were in the case of Stephen Lawrence.
So being targeted by police if you are black or brown becomes far more dangerous, because you don’t know if your life will be taken — and even if you survive an arrest, the criminal justice system hands out harsher sentences. Policing and the criminal justice system are institutionally racist.
More from this author
Artists are frequently first in line when it comes to cuts, but society as a whole is left all the poorer – it’s time they were properly valued, says ZITA HOLBOURNE of Artists Union England
Joint national chair of the Artists Union England ZITA HOLBOURNE argues that artists are systematically neglected when it comes to paying them for their labour
As well as paying tribute to those who arrived in Britain from the Caribbean, African and Asian regions to work and to build a better future for themselves, we must recall the ongoing injustices they and their families still face, says ZITA HOLBOURNE
ZITA HOLBOURNE introduces some of the practical, political and legal challenges to racism that black and brown-led movements are making in Britain and globally
