Book Review
Deadlier Than Lies: Empire, Credibility, and the Road to Baghdad
On Dennis Fritz’s Deadly Betrayal
The rest of the blog
On Dennis Fritz’s Deadly Betrayal
On Daniel Finkelstein’s Defence of Police Violence and the Thatcherite Rewriting of Class Struggle
Tommy Robinson doesn’t live the life he claims to defend. He parachutes into protest scenes when there’s chaos to film, then jets off to sun himself abroad. He’s not the voice of the working class, he’s a voyeur of decline, turning grievance into spectacle for clicks and cash. What he sells isn’t solidarity. It’s resentment dressed up as nostalgia.
A man, his car, and his gun. This is pure Americana, not the myth of reinvention, but the fantasy that remains when everything else is lost. Sovereign begins with poverty. The ideology comes later.
John Rentoul has never understood the left. A Blairite to his core, he sees politics as something to be managed, not transformed. His call for Starmer to copy Macron isn’t about defeating Farage, it’s about using him. The aim isn’t to inspire, but to frighten voters back into line. Like Macron, Starmer doesn’t oppose the far right. He needs it.
Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.
Live Aid was forty years ago. Today, we are haunted once again by the images of starving children (and now, starving adults) in Gaza. But this time, it doesn’t seem to register. No concerts. No campaigns. No national reckoning. Why? Because the system can only process suffering when it’s stripped of politics. Ethiopia’s famine was framed as fate. Gaza’s is a siege, and Britain is complicit. That’s the difference.
Britain doesn’t have a problem with ambition—it has a problem with delivery, honesty, and class. HS2 is just the latest national fiasco sold as progress, then gutted behind the scenes to serve consultants, cronies and headlines.
As Trump ramps up pressure on Iran—economically, militarily, and rhetorically—he discards intelligence briefings in favour of bombast, demands a surrender he can’t define, and courts catastrophe under the banner of strategic clarity. But Iran is not Iraq, and the fantasy of collapse may end in flames, not order.
Adam Curtis’s latest series attempts to diagnose the collapse of public trust in Britain—but without his voice, a clear argument, or fresh material, Shifty drifts through the ruins of the neoliberal age, recycling fragments and offering atmosphere where once there was clarity.
Regime Collapse, Revolution—or Something Worse?
Europeana is what happens when history loses faith in its own narrative. Part bureaucratic fever dream, part Adam Curtis montage, it recites the atrocities and absurdities of the twentieth century in a tone so flat it becomes damning.
There are no responsible nuclear powers—only powers with the bomb and those without—and by explaining the science while ignoring the politics, Frank Close turns history’s most destructive weapon into a tale of tragic inevitability rather than state terror.
Israel’s assault on Iran wasn’t an act of self-defence or solidarity with the oppressed—it was a theatre of imperial dominance, applauded by the West, sold as morality, and carried out with the full force of a nuclear-backed settler state.
Israel’s strike on Iran is not self-defence—it is the brutal enforcement of a global hierarchy, where some states may possess the bomb and others must die for trying.
The mob lit the match, but it was the right-wing press that soaked the ground and stood back to watch it burn.
Trump’s second term marries ICE raids at home with a war machine primed abroad, and Iran, once again, plays the designated enemy.
