The rest of the blog
Live Aid was forty years ago. Today, we are haunted once again by the images of starving children (and now, starving adults) in Gaza. But this time, it doesn’t seem to register. No concerts. No campaigns. No national reckoning. Why? Because the system can only process suffering when it’s stripped of politics. Ethiopia’s famine was framed as fate. Gaza’s is a siege, and Britain is complicit. That’s the difference.
Alexander Dugin has declared the Istanbul peace talks “meaningless theatre” and announced the arrival of “total war.” He wants Russia (not just its army, but its soul) put on a permanent war footing.
Frank Furedi claims the public has been silenced, while shouting from the pages of the Daily Mail. What he’s really mourning is the loss of uncontested dominance: the fantasy of a Britain where dissent means agreeing with him. This isn’t analysis, it’s a staged panic, designed to justify repression and launder far-right talking points as common sense. Britain isn’t a tinderbox. But pieces like this are trying hard to make it one.
Kemi Badenoch wants to be Britain’s Javier Milei. Let that sink in.
The protests outside migrant hotels aren’t spontaneous. They are engineered. Stoked by far-right groups, amplified by the right-wing press, and legitimised by political cowardice, what we’re witnessing is a strategic campaign to turn fear into power. When the police protect anti-racists, it’s called provocation. When the far right throws bottles, it’s “community concern.” The hotels are just the excuse. The real target is the idea that Britain could ever belong to all of us.
They tell us the crisis is caused by desperate people in dinghies, not decades of housing policy that turned homes into investment vehicles. But the truth is, Britain is not short of houses, its just full of landlords, speculators, and empty properties waiting to make someone rich.
While far right mobs are framed as “concerned locals”, anti-fascists are treated as the threat. The police escort becomes the scandal, not the fact that far-right demonstrators are being allowed to dominate England’s streets with near impunity. When the media sides with the mob, resistance is rebranded as provocation.
When Reform UK’s justice spokesperson declared she would “much rather see a great big strapping male police officer with a female,” she wasn’t just airing a preference. Pochin was laying out a worldview. One where women are too vulnerable to patrol alone, too soft for frontline work, and too inconvenient to be equal. As under Trump, so under Farage: the creeping politics of patriarchy, where power is always male, and women are tolerated only if they stay in their place.
Europeana is what happens when history loses faith in its own narrative. Part bureaucratic fever dream, part Adam Curtis montage, it recites the atrocities and absurdities of the twentieth century in a tone so flat it becomes damning.
There are no responsible nuclear powers—only powers with the bomb and those without—and by explaining the science while ignoring the politics, Frank Close turns history’s most destructive weapon into a tale of tragic inevitability rather than state terror.
Caroline Fraser’s Murderland dismantles the voyeurism of true crime by tracing serial murder not to aberrant monsters but to the poisoned infrastructures, institutional apathy, and cultural amnesia that made their violence possible.
The British housing crisis is not a matter of scarcity but of structure—a system that treats homes as investment vehicles, tenants as revenue streams, and housing itself as a battlefield between capital and collective life.
On Larry Alan Busk’s Democracy in Spite of the Demos
Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
Geoff Dyer’s Homework shows childhood not as innocence, but as class training—plastic toys, unwritten rules, and a welfare state already fraying at the edges.
On Jane Borden’s Cults Like Us
They knew he was unfit—and backed him anyway; Original Sin is the story of how denial, deference, and decay brought Trump back.
A chilling portrayal of how cruelty embeds itself in routine, and how history is domesticated.