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
Subsidy bonanza: the great train robbery continues
‘Our’ train companies — mostly partly owned from abroad — are trousering millions of taxpayer cash, as usual, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
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 latest accounts from the three train firms running the South Western Trains, Avanti West Coast, Thameslink, Great Northern, Southern and Gatwick Express rail franchises show these companies paid their owners a combined £69.5 million of dividends in 2022-23, despite depending on hundreds of millions in government subsidy.
The subsidy that kept these firms going was both much bigger than their profits and their dividends, so really they paid out this money to their shareholders directly from government aid.
When Covid slashed passenger numbers in 2020, the government tore up all the existing rail contracts and moved to huge subsidies to keep rail moving: the rail companies kept their privately run, publicly granted transport monopolies, but the Department for Transport pumped in extra cash to keep the trains running.
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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
