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Grenfell Tower covered in white sheeting with large green heart symbols and the words "GRENFELL FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS" displayed at the top. A red construction lift runs vertically up the centre, with trees and lampposts in the foreground under a clear blue sky.
Britain

The Fire That Deregulation Built

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.

A bold graphic emblem features a red silhouette of Donald Trump’s profile against a black background. His head merges into a stylised red and orange mushroom cloud, symbolising nuclear explosion. The composition is symmetrical and stark, evoking propaganda poster aesthetics.
Alexander Dugin

False Gods and Fallout: When Your Caesar Goes Globalist

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.

A cylindrical metal tin filled with bright red paint, sitting on a neutral grey surface. The paint is smooth and glossy, with the tin slightly scuffed, giving a utilitarian appearance.
direct action

Red Paint Is Not Terrorism

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.

Government Spending

Welfare Over Warfare

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.

A close-up image of tightly rolled newspapers stacked vertically, with dim, moody lighting and a grainy texture that gives the scene a vintage, noir atmosphere. Some headlines and columns are partially visible, adding to the sense of layered, obscured information.
Book Review

Who Gets to Tell the Story?

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.

A dark, oil-painted 1950s-style illustration titled “Daddy’s Home” shows a stern, scowling man resembling Donald Trump standing in a doorway, holding a briefcase. He wears a black suit with a red tie and looms under dramatic lighting. To his left, a woman looks frightened, covering her mouth with her hand. In the foreground, a young boy with a furrowed brow glares angrily. The mood is tense and ominous, evoking themes of authoritarian return and domestic dread.
Donald J Trump

Daddy’s Home: Trump, NATO, and the Spectacle of Power

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.

Hand-painted protest signs displayed against a neutral background. One sign on brown cardboard reads “THEY SAY CUT BACK WE SAY FIGHT BACK” in bold black letters. Another, on black card, reads “NO CUTS TO PIP!” in large white letters. A third sign, painted blue and white, says “WELFARE NOT WARFARE,” with the word “NOT” inside a red prohibition circle. The style is bold, rough-edged, and defiant, evoking a DIY protest aesthetic.
Britain

Under Siege: Labour’s Crisis of Vision

Labour won power by promising stability, but what it offers now is paralysis. It has no strategy to counter Farage, no defence against a Tory right fightback, and no imagination to confront the ecological and economic shocks coming fast over the horizon. While Reform sets the agenda and the left reorganises, Starmer retreats into technocratic caution. The government is not leading Britain—it’s managing decline, and doing it badly. Unless Labour finds the courage to confront the forces tearing the country apart, it risks becoming the caretaker of its own collapse.

Front cover of the hardback version of The World After Gaza
Book Review

The World After Gaza – a short review*

Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza is a searing indictment of Western complicity in Israeli aggression, exposing the ideological, economic, and political forces that have enabled the destruction of Palestine.

The image is divided into three main sections: on the left, dark green conifer trees form a dense forest; on the right, large, jagged orange and yellow flames dominate the frame, licking upwards; above, thick grey smoke billows into a pale blue sky with sharp, graphic cloud shapes. The colours are bold and flat, with a textured, screen-printed effect, evoking urgency and destruction.

The Far Right Would Rather Burn the World Than Change It

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.

A retro, screen-printed style illustration of a large construction site at twilight. Multiple cranes dominate the scene, with one lifting a massive circular structure. In the foreground, a solitary figure in a yellow hi-vis jacket stands facing the site. The sky is a textured teal, and the buildings and machinery are rendered in bold shades of orange and black.

Half Finshed Futures

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.

A grainy, vintage-style photograph shows a massive fire engulfing a facility at night on the outskirts of a city. Thick black smoke billows into the sky, illuminated by the intense orange and yellow flames below. In the background, the cityscape glows with scattered lights, contrasting with the dark sky and the ominous blaze in the foreground. Several utility poles line the edge of the compound, silhouetted against the fire.

Trump, Tehran, and the Spectacle of Pressure

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.

A distorted television broadcast screenshot from the 1980s showing Margaret Thatcher speaking. The image is heavily glitched with horizontal multicoloured static lines disrupting her face and suit. She wears a dark blazer, a pearl necklace, and has her characteristic hairstyle. The glitch effect creates a retro, unsettling atmosphere.

Shifty and the Curtis Method in Decline

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.

A square graphic split vertically into two halves. On the left, a Barbie doll is depicted wearing a striped concentration camp uniform with a yellow Star of David and an identification number. On the right, a grey microwave oven is illustrated. The background uses muted beige, purple, and grey tones, with thick black outlines and a retro graphic style. The image critiques the commodification of trauma and modern consumer culture.

The Century of Soap and Barbie

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.

A vivid red and orange photograph of a nuclear explosion during Operation Upshot-Knothole. A massive fireball and mushroom cloud dominate the image, illuminating the night sky. A steel test tower is visible in front of the blast, and silhouetted Joshua trees and human figures can be seen in the foreground, emphasising the scale and intensity of the detonation.

Destroy Everything, Explain Nothing

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.

Shock and Awe, but for Who?

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.