
Rachel Reeves and the 2p Trap
The chancellor’s proposed income tax shuffle is clever accountancy but toxic politics — a pledge-break disguised as fiscal discipline, and proof that Labour has trapped itself in rules it cannot escape.
The rest of the blog
The chancellor’s proposed income tax shuffle is clever accountancy but toxic politics — a pledge-break disguised as fiscal discipline, and proof that Labour has trapped itself in rules it cannot escape.
More than 200,000 young men aren’t “signed off for life”—they are the reserve army of labour, conscripted into the Telegraph’s morality tale to prepare the ground for austerity.
David Frost calls it a new “Red Terror.” The truth is plainer: it’s the Right’s wars, coups and crackdowns that have spilt the deepest blood in politics.
Trump’s latest “kinetic strike” killed three unknown Venezuelans he labelled “narco-terrorists.” The phrase is not law but incantation, a word that strips away humanity and legitimises killing. From Vietnam body counts to Obama’s “signature strikes,” America has always named its enemies into existence, and into death.
To call Robinson’s rally “populist” or “right-wing” is to miss the point. Fascism doesn’t require every marcher to be a coherent ideologue; it requires a mass, a scapegoat, and leaders prepared to turn grievance into violence. That is what we saw in London.
The events of Saturday (13/09) prove that Britain can go fascist. Musk calls for violence, the Telegraph and Times launder his words, and Starmer clings to the flag. We must name the danger or watch it grow.
Camilla Tominey’s sainthood act for Charlie Kirk trades politics for piety. The Right already owns the machinery (press, finance, courts, police) and Kirk was part of the drive shaft. A death certificate doesn’t wash clean a career built on making violence respectable.
The ONS reports zero growth in July. The papers call it “grim news” for Rachel Reeves. In reality, it is the latest entry in a long obituary for British capitalism — a system now sustained only by euphemism, stagnation, and decline.
The presidency was already a sideshow in Trump’s first term, but his second has stripped it of any remaining dignity, turning the White House into just another stage for his brand of gaudy, transactional spectacle.
What if the greatest threat to your freedom wasn’t a government decree, a criminal act, or even a political ideology, but an algorithm? The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami’s chilling new novel, imagines a world in which surveillance capitalism governs not only what we do, but who we are allowed to be.
A masterful dissection of power, corruption, and the making of modern America, The Apprentice deserved to sweep the Oscars, but the Academy, as always, chose safety over truth.
Histories of 1914 and the start of the First World War continue to proliferate, yet few reflect on how those histories themselves have been shaped. Perry Anderson’s Disputing Disaster is a forensic examination of how the war’s origins have been written, but what does it omit?