The rest of the blog
Russia is at war with Britain. The US can no longer be trusted. And our government’s response? First aid classes and cadet training. If this is what cohesion looks like, we are in real trouble.
Let’s not pretend there’s a serious policy debate here. The call to ban the burqa wasn’t a contribution to some Enlightenment café of ideas; it was a dog whistle blasted at full volume, a panic-button press designed to provoke.
Trans people are not confused. They are not misled. They have not been lied to. They are responding, with dignity and resistance, to a sustained campaign of dehumanisation, spearheaded by a cross-section of legal hardliners, culture warriors, so called feminists, and opportunists.
Amazon’s humanoid delivery bots aren’t just replacing drivers—they’re accelerating the creation of what William I. Robinson calls surplus humanity: billions rendered useless to capital.
This isn’t a defence strategy—it’s a subsidy for the arms industry, a performance of deterrence, and a reaffirmation of Britain’s role as obedient junior partner in the global machinery of capital.
On Larry Alan Busk’s Democracy in Spite of the Demos
A brutal, brilliant novel that exposes the violence of care, the politics of desire, and the limits of our empathy.
On Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance and Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy
Tony Benn was not a relic of a lost left but a constitutional insurrectionist whose writings—on the Crown, industry, war, and tradition—still offer a blueprint for democratic rebellion in a Britain built to resist it.
In Solidarity Betrayed, Ana Avendaño takes aim at the labour institutions she once helped lead. Drawing on personal experience and survivor testimony, she reveals how trade unions, far from shielding their members, have too often shielded abusers instead
Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults isn’t journalism, it’s propaganda, where settler colonialism is recast as civilisation and Palestinian resistance is pathologised as a death cult. He doesn’t analyse October 7; he sanctifies it.
In Reem Gaafar’s first novel, the Nile doesn’t just carry the dead, it carries the weight of history, abandonment and everything the state refuses to name.
In Capital’s Grave, Jodi Dean argues that capitalism isn’t simply in crisis, it’s decomposing into a new neofeudal order of rent, servitude and fragmented power.
Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation is a novel about the end of things: not apocalypse, not collapse, but the quieter, lonelier ruin of meaning in a technocratic capitalism that no longer pretends to offer hope.
In The Revolutionary Self, Lynn Hunt traces the emergence of the modern individual through civility, sentiment and social change, but beneath the porcelain surface lies the machinery of capital, empire and class discipline.
On Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy