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
In Mythocracy, Yves Citton argues that the left must learn to fight not just with facts or programmes, but with stories that shape the atmosphere of power itself.
Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter asks what it means to inherit a story that was never meant to be read.
Under the right conditions, a hoax like the Report from Iron Mountain doesn’t just fool people, it becomes truer than the truth, offering the emotional clarity that politics no longer provides.
Hallie Rubenhold and the Masculinity of Murder
A short, unsentimental novel about fast-food labour and family life, On the Clock shows how work seeps into everything, even the holidays meant to offer escape.
Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn (Verso, 2024)
A former insider’s quiet confession becomes an indictment of an economic experiment that reshaped Britain and still guides the hand of government, from Thatcher to Reeves.
Ash Sarkar’s Minority Rule and Michael Chessum’s This Is Only the Beginning chart the rise and fall of Britain’s radical left, exposing a movement that was too principled to win and too polite to fight.
Andrew Hindmoor’s Haywire offers a quietly devastating account of Britain’s long crisis, from Blair’s stage-managed optimism to Truss’s market-induced implosion, tracing how New Labour’s betrayals laid the foundations for a state that can no longer govern itself.
A shimmering portrait of an age when the rational order cracked, and something strange and holy slipped through.