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Eight years on, Grenfell remains a wound that hasn’t healed. Netflix’s documentary gives voice to the survivors, while Peter Apps’s account lays bare the systemic failures that made the fire inevitable, and the justice that still hasn’t come.
Trump hasn’t changed, he’s doing what strongmen do: cutting deals, starting wars, appeasing generals. It’s Dugin who’s panicking. The fantasy’s collapsing, so he calls it a globalist takeover. The world isn’t ending. Just his script.
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.
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.