
Frack, Baby, Frack: Reform UK’s Energy Delusion
Richard Tice and Reform UK want to lift the fracking ban, promising “billions in energy treasure” but their real ambition is corporate profit at the expense of communities and the climate.
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Richard Tice and Reform UK want to lift the fracking ban, promising “billions in energy treasure” but their real ambition is corporate profit at the expense of communities and the climate.
Red Crosses, Not Unity: How St George Flags Are Being Weaponised as Symbols of Exclusion
Nigel Farage’s “Operation Restoring Justice” is nothing new. Strip away the slick staging and media amplification, and it’s the same nativist bile the BNP peddled in the 1990s, only now treated as respectable politics.
When star forwards can down tools before the season starts and still win the move, a “contract” is just a polite fiction. Isak and Igamane are the canaries in the coal mine.
Planes will never take off, but every promise of mass deportation erodes rights, normalises cruelty, and casts the mob as the voice of the nation.
The English “revolution” under the St George’s Cross is no revolution at all, but a counter-revolution, a politics of scapegoating that shields the dominant class from blame.
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.
Simon Hannah’s Reclaiming the Future: A Beginner’s Guide to Planning the Economy is a searing indictment of capitalism’s failures and a powerful call for a democratically planned socialist future. In an era of crisis, this book is essential reading for anyone who refuses to accept that the chaos of the market is the best we can hope for. As capitalist crisis deepens, bringing with it ecological catastrophe, resurgent reactionary politics, and growing inequality, Simon lays out an uncompromising case for a planned economy as the only viable alternative. This is not a work of dry economism or abstract theory; it is a call to arms, a rallying cry against capitalist realism and its false sense of inevitability.
The end of the year wouldn’t be complete without a list.
In V13: Chronicle of a Trial, Emmanuel Carrère immerses readers in the unprecedented legal aftermath of the 2015 Paris terror attacks, illuminating the harrowing testimonies of survivors, the moral quandaries of justice, and the uneasy search for meaning amid almost unfathomable violence.
In this review of Annie Jacobsen’s book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” I reflect on the ever-present threat of nuclear war, drawing from my personal childhood experiences, the sobering realities of the Cold War era, and the chilling minute-by-minute account presented in Jacobsen’s work.
As 2023 draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on the most compelling and insightful reads of the year. In this roundup, I recommend five books spanning climate disaster, digital privacy, the Trump era’s threat to democracy, Marxist theory, and life under Israeli occupation, describing how each illuminates the complex issues defining this moment.
In a world reminiscent of Kafka’s nightmares, the arrest of a French publishing executive has cast a long, ominous shadow over the fragile nature of free expression. Ernest, the foreign rights manager for Éditions la Fabrique, found himself entangled in the suffocating coils of the state’s overreach as he was arrested. This ensnarement occurred at the behest of the French government, employing British anti-terror legislation as their instrument of control.
Exploring the enduring relevance of class in modern society, this post delves into the works of Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, and Richard Sennett to shed light on the complexities of class-based inequalities and the importance of confronting them.