The rest of the blog
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Club World Cup is not a celebration of football, but a monument to its financial capture—driven by Saudi money, Trump’s authoritarian theatre, and a FIFA leadership that serves capital before fans.
Rachel Reeves’s Spending Review and the Political Economy of Placation
Trump doesn’t lie to persuade—he lies to dominate, using contradiction as a weapon to break truth itself.
Caroline Fraser’s Murderland dismantles the voyeurism of true crime by tracing serial murder not to aberrant monsters but to the poisoned infrastructures, institutional apathy, and cultural amnesia that made their violence possible.
A bureaucratic blueprint for empire cloaked in civilisational jargon, Russia 2050 lays out a revanchist plan for domination—one now legitimised by Western contrarians too busy opposing the West to see they’re cheering on its mirror image.
The LA deployment is not a policing measure. It is a political theatre of domination designed to send a message: the state belongs to Trump, the military answers to Trump, and those who oppose him—activists, migrants, dissenters—will be met with force.
California is not a client state—if Texas can defy Washington to punish the poor, then California can defy Washington to protect them.