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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.

Adolescence – The New Lost Boys

Full of unflinching realism, Adolescence is a harrowing exploration of justice, masculinity, and radicalisation, told in relentless real time. This review contains spoilers.

Front cover of Munichs snipped to fit.

David Peace’s Munichs

David Peace’s Munichs is not just a novel about the Munich air disaster, it is a novel about how tragedy lingers, how history is shaped in grief and uncertainty, and how disaster, in the absence of instant news, once unfolded in echoes and silence.

Roadworks in London caused by a Thames Water repair.

Drowning in Debt: The Final Failure of Water Privatisation

The £3bn bailout of Thames Water is not a rescue but a reckoning, three decades after privatisation, Britain’s largest water company has collapsed under the weight of debt, greed, and regulatory failure, leaving the public to clean up the mess.

The Games We Play

For one long summer, our local rec was filled with the sound of kids playing kabaddi, breath held, bodies darting between the swings and the seesaw, a game that arrived without fanfare and disappeared just as suddenly. Now, as the Kabaddi World Cup lands in the West Midlands, and football bends to the will of capital, the games Britain plays, and who controls them, tell us more than ever about the country we have become.

Logo for the Department for Work & Pensions

Labour’s War on the Poor

Labour’s plan to cut £5 billion from disability benefits isn’t just a betrayal of its supposed principles, it’s a grim rerun of austerity, dressed up in the language of tough but fair reform.

Front cover snip of Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck showing the twi towers appearing from a cloud, looks menacing

Spectacle and Surveillance

This review explores how Richard Beck’s Homeland and Lewis Lapham’s Age of Folly reveal the profound domestic and global consequences of America’s response to 9/11, from creeping authoritarianism at home to declining influence abroad.

Vance speaking at the 2024 People's Convention

The Most Dangerous Man in America

J.D. Vance isn’t merely Trump’s Vice President, he’s the intellectual architect of a disciplined, reactionary project intent on dismantling democracy at home and abroad.

Front cover of the book "Careless People"

Careless People

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People exposes Facebook’s internal reckoning with its role in political manipulation, revealing a company that prioritised engagement over ethics and profit over truth.

Inventing Guilt

The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is not just an attack on one activist, it is a chilling demonstration of how the state can manufacture criminality in real time, silencing dissent without justification or consequence.