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John Rentoul has never understood the left. A Blairite to his core, he sees politics as something to be managed, not transformed. His call for Starmer to copy Macron isn’t about defeating Farage, it’s about using him. The aim isn’t to inspire, but to frighten voters back into line. Like Macron, Starmer doesn’t oppose the far right. He needs it.
Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.
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.
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People exposes Facebook’s internal reckoning with its role in political manipulation, revealing a company that prioritised engagement over ethics and profit over truth.
The ruins Owen Hatherley documented over a decade ago, of modernist ambition, of public housing, of a Britain that once believed in itself, have only deepened, and with a new New Labour government poised to repeat the same failed housing policies, the cycle of speculation, privatisation, and social cleansing shows no sign of ending.
Hal Draper’s ‘America as Overlord’ is a study of imperial necessity, how the United States became the regulator of global capitalism, why its dominance persisted, and what happens when the system it upholds begins to fracture.
In 2024, as the old narratives collapse and the sense of waiting tightens into dread, Joan Didion’s work feels less like a record of the past than a map of the present.
Algorithmic management does not simply discipline workers; it renders the very logic of their exploitation opaque, and in Cyberboss, Craig Gent dissects this transformation with forensic precision.
What if the greatest threat to your freedom wasn’t a government decree, a criminal act, or even a political ideology, but an algorithm? The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami’s chilling new novel, imagines a world in which surveillance capitalism governs not only what we do, but who we are allowed to be.
Histories of 1914 and the start of the First World War continue to proliferate, yet few reflect on how those histories themselves have been shaped. Perry Anderson’s Disputing Disaster is a forensic examination of how the war’s origins have been written, but what does it omit?
A whip smart and urgent examination of videogames as both a cultural force and a political battleground, Everything to Play For interrogates the industry’s contradictions: its creative potential, its exploitative labour practices, and its uncertain future in the age of AI.
The consolidation of reactionary power in the United States is not accidental or chaotic but the result of a long-term, well-funded strategy to entrench minority rule, an argument laid bare in Owned by Eoin Higgins and Money, Lies, and God Behind the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart.
Few books have shaped the conspiratorial mind like Behold a Pale Horse, and in Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America, Mark Jacobson unpacks the strange, sprawling legacy of its author, William Cooper, a man who saw the deep state before it had a name, predicted 9/11, and died in a shootout with police. But was he a prophet, a fraud, or just another victim of his own paranoia?