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Close-up of a British two pence coin, copper-coloured, showing a heraldic lion in a crosshatched frame with fleur-de-lis corners and the words “TWO PENCE” at the top.
Labour Government

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.

An illustration of a red fish (Herring) in profile against a pale background, with the words “RED TERROR” in bold black capitals beneath it.
Charlie Kirk

Red Herring, Not Red Terror

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.

Donald J Trump

The Invention of the Narco-Terrorist

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.

Britain

Beyond Creeping Fascism

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.

Screenshot of a Telegraph article by Camilla Tominey titled “The killing of Charlie Kirk shows just how poisonous Left-wing politics now is,” with the subheading “Speech has consequences – we have once more learnt that lesson from the horrifying events in Utah.” Below the headline is a photo showing two people in jeans holding a poster with a portrait of Charlie Kirk.
Camilla Tominey

Tominey’s doublethink

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.

Front cover of Abundance By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

All This and Star Pills Too

Klein and Thompson promise a post-scarcity future powered by clean energy, AI, and vertical farms, but their liberal techno-optimism leaves untouched the class relations and ownership structures that produce crisis in the first place.

A police sniper with a sniper system provides overwatch at the Ferguson protest regarding the shooting of Michael Brown.

The Operating System of Repression

Drawing on the work of William I. Robinson, this essay traces how Trump’s America—already operating under the logic of the global police state—and Starmer’s Britain are converging on a model of technocratic repression, outsourced violence and algorithmic control, where the state no longer seeks consent but governs through code.

Front cover of the hardback book Who is Government?

The Last Bureaucrats

Michael Lewis has always been at his best when writing about finance, exposing the absurdities and myths of capital. Who Is Government? is a departure, an obituary for the administrative state, told through a series of essays by various writers.

Managed Decline

All UK families will be worse off by 2030, according to the latest data. Starmer’s Labour doesn’t plan to change that, only to manage the fallout.

Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Translated by David Broder

The People’s Tribune and the Sixth Republic

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Now, the People! Revolution in the 21st Century, published by Verso books, is a sweeping and urgent call for a citizens’ revolution, rooted in French republicanism but alive to the crises shaping political struggle across Europe and beyond.

London stop the war march 2003

22 Years On: Iraq and the Limits of Protest

Twenty-two years ago, millions marched against the invasion of Iraq. I was one of them. We were right; the war was wrong. And yet it happened anyway. That was the moment I realised: marching doesn’t cut through when empire’s at stake.

Adam Scott as Mark Scout in Severed

We’re all already severed

Watching Severance, I couldn’t help wondering if we’re already living it, split between the person we are at work and who we are the rest of the time, with capitalism quietly stealing the best parts of us.

Neil Faulkner: The Historian as Revolutionary

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.