The rest of the blog
Tommy Robinson doesn’t live the life he claims to defend. He parachutes into protest scenes when there’s chaos to film, then jets off to sun himself abroad. He’s not the voice of the working class, he’s a voyeur of decline, turning grievance into spectacle for clicks and cash. What he sells isn’t solidarity. It’s resentment dressed up as nostalgia.
A man, his car, and his gun. This is pure Americana, not the myth of reinvention, but the fantasy that remains when everything else is lost. Sovereign begins with poverty. The ideology comes later.
John Rentoul has never understood the left. A Blairite to his core, he sees politics as something to be managed, not transformed. His call for Starmer to copy Macron isn’t about defeating Farage, it’s about using him. The aim isn’t to inspire, but to frighten voters back into line. Like Macron, Starmer doesn’t oppose the far right. He needs it.
Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.
Live Aid was forty years ago. Today, we are haunted once again by the images of starving children (and now, starving adults) in Gaza. But this time, it doesn’t seem to register. No concerts. No campaigns. No national reckoning. Why? Because the system can only process suffering when it’s stripped of politics. Ethiopia’s famine was framed as fate. Gaza’s is a siege, and Britain is complicit. That’s the difference.
Alexander Dugin has declared the Istanbul peace talks “meaningless theatre” and announced the arrival of “total war.” He wants Russia (not just its army, but its soul) put on a permanent war footing.
Frank Furedi claims the public has been silenced, while shouting from the pages of the Daily Mail. What he’s really mourning is the loss of uncontested dominance: the fantasy of a Britain where dissent means agreeing with him. This isn’t analysis, it’s a staged panic, designed to justify repression and launder far-right talking points as common sense. Britain isn’t a tinderbox. But pieces like this are trying hard to make it one.
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.
The work isn’t fake because it’s imaginary—it’s fake because it pretends to matter. We clock in, log on, file the forms, and call it a life.
Matt Goodwin’s claim that “London is over” isn’t analysis, it’s a panic attack in column form. Behind the talk of pints and train delays lies the same tired script the Mail rehashes every few weeks, just in time for its readers to rage over their cornflakes. Crime becomes a cipher for immigration, anecdote stands in for data, and the city’s diversity is framed as an existential threat. But what really offends Goodwin isn’t decline—it’s that London no longer looks or sounds like him.
Alexander Dugin’s latest polemic is not political analysis but fascist sermon—an apocalyptic blueprint in which nuclear war is both inevitable and desirable. Cloaked in the language of sovereignty and tradition, it is a call to arms for a new ideology of holy Russian power. What begins with Fordow ends with the end of humanity. And for that reason alone, it demands scrutiny—not celebration. You listening, tech bros?
The next state to cross the nuclear threshold won’t be doing anything new. It’ll be following the path Israel already took—building the bomb in secret, shielded by silence and strategic utility. The real precedent was set decades ago in the Negev. That’s the hypocrisy at the heart of the so-called international order: one bomb is a threat to civilisation, the other a pillar of it. This isn’t about non-proliferation. It’s about who gets to own the apocalypse.
What looks like autobiography is really a sermon: suffer, obey, reproduce, and vote accordingly.
At The Hague summit, NATO committed to spending 5% of GDP on defence and security by 2035—a figure with no strategic rationale and every sign of submission to Donald Trump. Only Spain said no. Pedro Sánchez broke ranks, arguing that gutting public services to fund rearmament was neither economically justifiable nor politically defensible. In doing so, he exposed what the rest of Europe won’t admit: this isn’t about defence. It’s about deference. And someone had to refuse.
To Jeff Bezos, Venice is just a stage set: a curated backdrop for the brand—and a wedding venue on the side.
