State of Steel
If you want to build anything, homes, transport, wind turbines, you need steel, and no serious industrial strategy can survive while leaving its production to the whims of absentee capital.
The rest of the blog
If you want to build anything, homes, transport, wind turbines, you need steel, and no serious industrial strategy can survive while leaving its production to the whims of absentee capital.
Harry Mulisch’s The Assault is not about what happened in 1945, but about the slow, bitter process by which a man and a society, learns what it meant.
Starmer’s blast furnace moment isn’t a rebirth of industry but a reckoning with decades of privatisation, managed decline and the quiet collapse of economic sovereignty.
A brutal, brilliant novel that exposes the violence of care, the politics of desire, and the limits of our empathy.
Nicolas Padamsee’s autofictional state-of-the-nation novel confronts the vacuum left behind by liberalism’s collapse. David Peace gave us the ghosts; Padamsee gives us the afterparty, the silence, the scroll.
On Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance and Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy
The idea that work is a moral duty rather than a means of survival is so deeply ingrained we rarely question it. But as technology advances and work becomes more precarious, exhausting, and intrusive, it is worth asking why productivity remains the measure of a person’s worth.
Peterborough lies on the edge of the Fens, a city without hills, shaped by wind that moves unhindered across the flatlands. It is a place that resists definition, constantly reshaped, rebuilt, and erased, where history lingers in fragments and memory holds more permanence than the streets themselves.
A whip smart and urgent examination of videogames as both a cultural force and a political battleground, Everything to Play For interrogates the industry’s contradictions: its creative potential, its exploitative labour practices, and its uncertain future in the age of AI.