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 US emerges from the 2020 presidential election more polarised than before with a key animator of the US imperialist war machine now elected as commander-in-chief.
Behind Joe Biden’s folksy manner is a machine man for US capital’s drive for global dominance and a consummate Washington insider with decades of experience in the service of corporate power. He was for years the senior senator for the state of Delaware which is the highly deregulated centre of dodgy consumer credit firms.
It was none other than our departed deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, while still courting British voters rather than Facebook’s shareholders, who reported on a Biden conversation over trade deals. “He said to me very unsentimentally — in that folksy way he does — ‘We are not going to sign anything that the chicken farmers of Delaware don’t like!’”

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