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It depicts five heavily armed and masked Border Patrol agents in tactical gear standing in and around the open sliding door of a white van. The central figure’s vest prominently displays a yellow badge with the words “BORDER PATROL.” The image has a rough, stencilled texture and a distressed background, evoking a dystopian, authoritarian atmosphere.
Guy Debord

Spectacle at the Tool Aisle

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.

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.

The Room for Best

Geoff Dyer’s Homework shows childhood not as innocence, but as class training—plastic toys, unwritten rules, and a welfare state already fraying at the edges.

Pencil drawing inside prison

No More Cells

They say prisons are overcrowded, as if the cages are too small. As if the problem is spatial. As if all we need is a few more acres of razor wire and reinforced concrete and the crisis will vanish. But prisons aren’t full because we lack space. They’re full because we lack imagination.

Original Sin front cover

The Delusion Presidency

They knew he was unfit—and backed him anyway; Original Sin is the story of how denial, deference, and decay brought Trump back.

They Meant It

Read side by side, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI and Keach Hagey’s The Optimist show that what Silicon Valley sells as salvation—artificial general intelligence, safety, abundance—is in fact a system of extraction and control, built on scraped data, outsourced labour, and centralised power, with Sam Altman not merely as its architect, but as its most convincing prophet.

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