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.
By the time Hollywood started scripting Iran as its newest bogeyman, the Cold War playbook had already been written. The turbans replaced fur hats, the chants swapped in for Russian-accented threats, but the role remained the same: the unknowable enemy, forever at the gates. From Argo to Homeland, Iran is less a country than a plot device—violent, duplicitous, irredeemably foreign. Yet in the shadow of this narrative, exiled Iranian filmmakers are doing something far more dangerous than propaganda: they’re telling the truth.
Trump’s bunker busters, Netanyahu’s theological realism, and Starmer’s threat to criminalise Palestine Action reveal a world in which violence is moralised, empire is rationalised, and dissent is once again labelled terrorism.
Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert should never have turned deadly—but as Netflix’s Trainwreck series shows, the machinery of profit, fandom and spectacle made it almost inevitable. When capital kills, no one at corporate is ever to blame.
Mike Tyson was never just a boxer—he was a system made flesh. Mark Kriegel’s Baddest Man understands this: it’s not a redemption tale but an anatomy of spectacle, where a traumatised boy from Brownsville is forged into a global icon of violence, repackaged as entertainment, and finally rebranded for profit
Alexander Dugin’s Trump Revolution is less a political treatise than a fascist gospel for the post-liberal order—mythic, dangerous, and perfectly in tune with the mood of the new authoritarian right.
As Trump edges closer to war with Iran, the MAGA movement confronts its deepest contradiction: you can’t bomb your way to peace and still call it America First.
The far right has no intention of meeting the climate crisis—they’re not even pretending anymore. As scientists warn we have just two years left to stay within the carbon budget for 1.5C, reactionary forces double down on fossil fuels, culture war, and delay. Their politics is not about preventing collapse, but exploiting it. Climate denial has become climate opportunism—and the cost will be counted in lives.
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.