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
Tears and fears and left illusions
A decade on from the anniversary of the referendum on Scottish independence, the Scottish left has gone backwards, argues VINCE MILLS
The Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood in Edinburgh, April 29, 2021
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
WE COULD spend some time in this column debating the question saturating the mainstream media in Scotland: is Nicola Sturgeon capable of crocodile tears? This is the accusation levelled at her by the Tory Secretary of State for Scotland, Alister Jack, after a teared-up performance by the former first minister at the UK Covid inquiry in Scotland.
Instead, I want to raise some strategic concerns for the Scottish left. For this year we mark the 10th anniversary of the referendum on Scottish independence. In the 10 years that have followed that defining event, the Scottish left has gone backwards — the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) wound itself up in 2021, by which time the left advance under Jeremy Corbyn had dissipated in the Scottish Labour Party.
Both the left that argued for independence as a way of advancing socialist objectives and the left that I am and was part of in 2014, that argued independence would impede not enhance the prospects of radical change, has suffered serious reverses.
More from this author
VINCE MILLS cautions over the perils and pitfalls of ‘a new left party’
VINCE MILLS says politicians of various parties are interpreting the result in self-serving ways, but it contains little comfort for the left
VINCE MILLS gathers some sobering facts that would inevitably be major obstacles to any such initiative
That Scotland was an active participant and beneficiary of colonialism and slavery is not a question of blame games and guilt peddling, but a crucial fact assessing the class nature of the questions of devolution and independence, writes VINCE MILLS
