The rest of the blog
This isn’t a defence strategy—it’s a subsidy for the arms industry, a performance of deterrence, and a reaffirmation of Britain’s role as obedient junior partner in the global machinery of capital.
On Larry Alan Busk’s Democracy in Spite of the Demos
Lee Anderson doesn’t want a solution—he wants a stage, and the small boats crisis is just the latest prop in Britain’s long-running theatre of cruelty
Starmer’s weapons pipeline is less about deterring war and more about embedding militarism into the heart of Britain’s economic model.
Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
Geoff Dyer’s Homework shows childhood not as innocence, but as class training—plastic toys, unwritten rules, and a welfare state already fraying at the edges.
I knew the late Neil Faulkner, and I have always meant to review his last book; he was a storyteller, a fighter, and one of the great Marxist historians, someone who could hold a room and remind you that history is not past but struggle.
Alienation is the defining condition of modern politics. The gap between power and the people has never felt wider; work is increasingly precarious and meaningless; and the sense of community that once bound societies together has frayed. In this vacuum, neo-fascism has flourished, not by resolving alienation, but by weaponising it. Trumpism, Reform UK, and their European counterparts do not seek to challenge the economic structures that produce this disaffection; they thrive on it, repackaging frustration as grievance and grievance as political identity.
The Tory right, desperate to claw back support after their election defeat, are abandoning reality and embracing climate denial, setting the stage for a dangerous future where net zero commitments are scrapped to appease Reform UK supporters.