The rest of the blog
Trump hasn’t changed, he’s doing what strongmen do: cutting deals, starting wars, appeasing generals. It’s Dugin who’s panicking. The fantasy’s collapsing, so he calls it a globalist takeover. The world isn’t ending. Just his script.
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.
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.