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.
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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.
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.
On Larry Alan Busk’s Democracy in Spite of the Demos
Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
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.
On Jane Borden’s Cults Like Us
They knew he was unfit—and backed him anyway; Original Sin is the story of how denial, deference, and decay brought Trump back.
A chilling portrayal of how cruelty embeds itself in routine, and how history is domesticated.
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.
On Laura Bates’s The New Age of Sexism.
Malcolm X was not just a man but an ongoing process. A revolutionary for us all—even children—his journey from rage to clarity shows how radical truth is learned, lived, and handed down.
On Detained: A Boy’s Journal of Survival and Resilience by D. Esperanza and Gerardo Iván Morales (Simon & Schuster, 2024)