The rest of the blog
The chancellor’s proposed income tax shuffle is clever accountancy but toxic politics — a pledge-break disguised as fiscal discipline, and proof that Labour has trapped itself in rules it cannot escape.
More than 200,000 young men aren’t “signed off for life”—they are the reserve army of labour, conscripted into the Telegraph’s morality tale to prepare the ground for austerity.
David Frost calls it a new “Red Terror.” The truth is plainer: it’s the Right’s wars, coups and crackdowns that have spilt the deepest blood in politics.
Trump’s latest “kinetic strike” killed three unknown Venezuelans he labelled “narco-terrorists.” The phrase is not law but incantation, a word that strips away humanity and legitimises killing. From Vietnam body counts to Obama’s “signature strikes,” America has always named its enemies into existence, and into death.
To call Robinson’s rally “populist” or “right-wing” is to miss the point. Fascism doesn’t require every marcher to be a coherent ideologue; it requires a mass, a scapegoat, and leaders prepared to turn grievance into violence. That is what we saw in London.
The events of Saturday (13/09) prove that Britain can go fascist. Musk calls for violence, the Telegraph and Times launder his words, and Starmer clings to the flag. We must name the danger or watch it grow.
Camilla Tominey’s sainthood act for Charlie Kirk trades politics for piety. The Right already owns the machinery (press, finance, courts, police) and Kirk was part of the drive shaft. A death certificate doesn’t wash clean a career built on making violence respectable.
The ONS reports zero growth in July. The papers call it “grim news” for Rachel Reeves. In reality, it is the latest entry in a long obituary for British capitalism — a system now sustained only by euphemism, stagnation, and decline.
Jon Lee Anderson’s To Lose a War is a correspondent’s chronicle of America’s twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan: vivid, textured, and damning in its account of how an empire mistook firepower for authority and was undone by an enemy that understood time better than it did.
Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is not a plea for sympathy. It is a political weapon. Written in the midst of genocide, it strips away the euphemisms, the diplomatic theatre, and the moral fog. This war, he argues, is a settler-colonial project. Accelerated to its most brutal form, with the full backing of the Western powers who claim to uphold human rights. Achcar names the system, maps its historical scaffolding, and indicts not only Israel but the global order that enables it. This is not a book of mourning. It is a call to act.
Do We Really Need Another Autopsy of 2024?
Water isn’t just drying up, it’s being sold back to us in bottles, summits, and charity hashtags. Filippo Menga’s Thirst shows how crisis becomes currency, how scarcity is manufactured, managed, and monetised. This isn’t about saving water, it’s about saving meaning.
“Palestine is not a digression from the climate movement. It is its centre.” That’s the force of Andreas Malm’s pamphlet, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. It doesn’t ask for reflection. It demands action. This isn’t a balanced account of Gaza or a theory of climate collapse. Instead it’s a weaponised intervention against the politics of impunity. What Malm offers is a raw and necessary link: between the bombs that fall on Jabaliya and the storms that drown Derna, between settler colonialism and fossil capital, between the rubble of Akka in 1840 and the rubble of Gaza in 2024. The pamphlet is furious, and entirely justified. It should be read, and used.
Angel Down opens in shriek and filth and never lets up. Kraus has written what feels like the literary equivalent of a migraine, long, unpunctuated, looping sentences, bodily fluids everywhere, voices caked in mud and irony. This isn’t Birdsong, and thank god for that. It’s closer to Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting rewritten by a trench-rat high on ether.
Caroline Lane wasn’t looked for because the system didn’t need to see her. The system still got paid. That’s the quiet scandal at the heart of Saltwater Mansions. It begins as a mystery, a vanished woman, a locked flat, a pile of unopened post, but becomes something stranger and sadder: an inquiry into how a person can disappear while everything around them keeps functioning. David Whitehouse isn’t writing true crime. He’s writing about the grief we ignore, the relationships we don’t ask about, the neighbours we forget to see. What remains is not just absence, it’s a mirror.
On Dennis Fritz’s Deadly Betrayal
Butler isn’t really about politics. It’s about belief. The bullet didn’t just graze him; it made him sacred. The messy contradictions of 2016 are gone. What’s left is atmosphere, myth, and the story of a man who bled on stage and got up again. The faithful took it as a sign. This isn’t reporting. It’s scripture. A gospel for a leader who survives everything, and so, must rule.
What separates Hedges’s account from the usual war reporting is his refusal to speak in the language of balance. There are no “both sides” here. Gaza is not a tragedy. It is a crime. And history, in his telling, is not analogy but repetition. The Nakba never ended. The airstrikes are new; the logic is old. “We progress backwards,” someone has scrawled on a UN school wall. That line could be the book’s thesis.