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

A NEW deification of Margaret Thatcher is well under way.
Following on from Keir Starmer’s adoration of the woman who he claims renewed Britain’s entrepreneurial spirit, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has now compared Italy’s “post-fascist” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to the Iron Lady.
Sunak chose the annual Atreju festival of Azioni Giovani, the youth organisation of Meloni’s governing Fratelli d’Italia party to laud Thatcher’s “radicalism on illegal immigration.”
It is often difficult to discern the core beliefs of the very rich when they take to electoral politics, if only because they have much to lose if the layers of mystification which obscure the connections between wealth and power — necessary adjuncts to bourgeois rule — are revealed.

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