direct action
Red Paint Is Not Terrorism
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.
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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.
Matt Goodwin’s claim that “London is over” isn’t analysis, it’s a panic attack in column form. Behind the talk of pints and train delays lies the same tired script the Mail rehashes every few weeks, just in time for its readers to rage over their cornflakes. Crime becomes a cipher for immigration, anecdote stands in for data, and the city’s diversity is framed as an existential threat. But what really offends Goodwin isn’t decline—it’s that London no longer looks or sounds like him.
The Second World War, as Scorched Earth recounts it, was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its prosecution, and imperial in its aftermath.
Tupac Shakur’s life cannot be understood without understanding the United States as a racial-capitalist empire.
Diana became a mirror for a country no longer sure of itself, her image absorbing the griefs of a declining empire and turning them into daytime TV.
May Day is not a memory to be preserved but a future to be fought for, a collective insurrection against every border, boss, and boot
On Natasha Brown’s Universality
In Notes to John, Joan Didion records the slow failure of the defences she spent a lifetime building — and in doing so, leaves behind a final, unflinching act of courage
Name is a ruthless political act disguised as literature, dismantling the family, class inheritance, and even the very idea of a coherent self in service of a more radical form of freedom
This review of Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards shows how neoliberalism didn’t die. It has mutated into caste, borders, and IQ charts.
A short, urgent book that arrives too late, David A. Graham’s The Project lays out the authoritarian blueprint of Project 2025 in chilling detail.
On Faiz Siddiqui’s Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk