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.
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.