Football
When Is a Contract Not a Contract?
When star forwards can down tools before the season starts and still win the move, a “contract” is just a polite fiction. Isak and Igamane are the canaries in the coal mine.
The rest of the blog
When star forwards can down tools before the season starts and still win the move, a “contract” is just a polite fiction. Isak and Igamane are the canaries in the coal mine.
Planes will never take off, but every promise of mass deportation erodes rights, normalises cruelty, and casts the mob as the voice of the nation.
The English “revolution” under the St George’s Cross is no revolution at all, but a counter-revolution, a politics of scapegoating that shields the dominant class from blame.
Scapegoating migrants is just the start. When politics legitimises fear and blame, the mob never stops, and neither does the cycle of persecution.
Keir Starmer’s law-and-order theatrics have handed the far right its new saint: a self-styled free speech Joan of Arc—except this saint didn’t want to be burned, she wanted others to be.
Paul Bristow cites the Epping Forest ruling to demand hotel closures for asylum seekers, but offers no plan for what follows. The Conservatives built the hotel system; Labour inherits it; local politicians weaponise planning law while migrants disappear from view.
The arrest of a part-time cleaner for sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action shows how Britain’s response to Gaza has drifted from foreign policy into domestic repression.
Farage brings the noise, Starmer brings the law. The country falls apart to the sound of flags snapping and doors slamming while capital quietly clears the till.
The manosphere doesn’t challenge male alienation, it monetises it. These men aren’t resisting power. They are its casualties, desperate to be reinstated as its enforcers.
On James Pogue’s Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West
They came for Glastonbury, the BBC, and a punk band. Then they came for students, civil servants, and anyone else who dared speak clearly about Palestine. What we’re watching is not a debate—it’s a crackdown. Armed with legal threats, media outrage, and the ever-flexible label of antisemitism, Britain’s pro-Israel lobby doesn’t just influence politics. It polices speech. And when even a chant against a military force under ICC investigation is treated as hate speech, the message is clear: the violence can continue, but naming it is forbidden.
The ICE raid at Home Depot isn’t law enforcement. This is performance of sovereignty. Armed agents posing in camo and Kevlar to detain migrant day labourers is not about public safety, but about staging dominance. It’s capitalism enforcing its border through spectacle: a theatre of control, broadcast from a retail car park, where labour is criminalised and militarism is aestheticised. This isn’t about stopping migration. It’s about punishing poverty and reassuring power.
Eight years on, Grenfell remains a wound that hasn’t healed. Netflix’s documentary gives voice to the survivors, while Peter Apps’s account lays bare the systemic failures that made the fire inevitable, and the justice that still hasn’t come.
Trump hasn’t changed, he’s doing what strongmen do: cutting deals, starting wars, appeasing generals. It’s Dugin who’s panicking. The fantasy’s collapsing, so he calls it a globalist takeover. The world isn’t ending. Just his script.
This is what it comes down to: the Labour government wants to put a group of activists who threw red paint at arms factories in the same legal category as ISIS.
As Labour signs off on bombers and benefit cuts, Britain is being reshaped—not by necessity, but by choice. Welfare is being gutted while defence sails on untouched. This isn’t fiscal realism. It’s a war budget in peacetime.
Journalism doesn’t need saving by those who made it toxic. Wright names the rot—Murdoch, the lobby, the Oxbridge cartel—and shows how the presses keeps running.
Trump didn’t just return to NATO; he returned as “Daddy”—a role not earned through diplomacy, but conjured through spectacle. Baudrillard warned that when image overtakes reality, politics becomes performance. The bombs may have hit Iran, but the real strike was rhetorical. What mattered wasn’t destruction, it was the appearance of obliteration, the meme of authority, the myth of restored order. In the empire of simulation, the sovereign returns not with treaties, but with merch.