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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.
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)
The Second World War, as Scorched Earth recounts it, was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its prosecution, and imperial in its aftermath.
Tupac Shakur’s life cannot be understood without understanding the United States as a racial-capitalist empire.
Diana became a mirror for a country no longer sure of itself, her image absorbing the griefs of a declining empire and turning them into daytime TV.
May Day is not a memory to be preserved but a future to be fought for, a collective insurrection against every border, boss, and boot
On Natasha Brown’s Universality
In Notes to John, Joan Didion records the slow failure of the defences she spent a lifetime building — and in doing so, leaves behind a final, unflinching act of courage
