Britain
The Fire That Started at the Hotels Will Spread
Scapegoating migrants is just the start. When politics legitimises fear and blame, the mob never stops, and neither does the cycle of persecution.
The rest of the blog
Scapegoating migrants is just the start. When politics legitimises fear and blame, the mob never stops, and neither does the cycle of persecution.
Keir Starmer’s law-and-order theatrics have handed the far right its new saint: a self-styled free speech Joan of Arc—except this saint didn’t want to be burned, she wanted others to be.
Paul Bristow cites the Epping Forest ruling to demand hotel closures for asylum seekers, but offers no plan for what follows. The Conservatives built the hotel system; Labour inherits it; local politicians weaponise planning law while migrants disappear from view.
The arrest of a part-time cleaner for sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action shows how Britain’s response to Gaza has drifted from foreign policy into domestic repression.
Farage brings the noise, Starmer brings the law. The country falls apart to the sound of flags snapping and doors slamming while capital quietly clears the till.
Robert Jenrick’s Union Jack pantomime isn’t patriotism; it’s a confession of weakness. A dying political class turns to flags and ladders because it has nothing left to offer but theatre.
By sanctioning International Criminal Court judges and prosecutors, Trump’s America has openly declared that empire stands above the law. Europe and Britain now face a stark choice: defend the court’s independence, or accept a world where justice stops at Washington’s door.
The Alaska talks were not a breakthrough but a trap. A “peace deal” that rewards Russian aggression is appeasement by another name. Ukraine’s fight is for survival, and any settlement must be on its terms—not Moscow’s.
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
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.